Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

On Radio Vision 2000, the journalist on the spot estimated the size of the crowd on the Champs de Mars at about five thousand. Radio Metropole told us that the crowd fully filled the immense square. Signal FM said that women had begun to pass out, either from dehydration or from overexcitement. Radio Kiskeya reported that a fistfight had broken out but was quickly calmed.

Now the announcers began to speak more quickly as the crowd descended the rue des Miracles, marching from the front gates of the Presidential Palace to the headquarters of the CEH. The marchandes who lined the streets around the Iron Market packed their wares and fled.

The journalists were now agitated. The marchers found the rue des Miracles barred by the PNH and a squadron of Nigerian riot police, several hundred helmeted men carrying shields and waving batons. Behind them were water cannons. In the middle of the block was CEP headquarters, a modest concrete bungalow surrounded by a high fence. Soon the marchers were throwing rocks in the direction of the police, who responded by lofting back bombs of tear gas. “C’est la guerre! C’est la guerre! C’est la guerre!” cried the voice on the radio. The marchers remained resolute, drifting back until the gas was taken up into the southern-swirling wind, then moving forward again to assault the CEH’s protectors.

Terry would later claim that what happened next was his idea. He had scouted CEH headquarters a week earlier and noticed that while security was tight out front, there was almost no one protecting the rear flank of the building. Another part of the crowd disbursed onto the street running parallel to the rue des Miracles, where they found the back entrance to the CEH guarded only by a single unarmed security guard, who, seeing this immense crowd pullulating with testosterone, armed with machetes, and advancing on him, fled his post. The mob surged. Now the crowd was sweeping over the iron fence and swarming up the very sides of the building, Spider-Man style, pulling themselves up the drainpipes and into the open second-story windows.

CEH headquarters had been empty that day, owing to the menace of the protest. Before long, the building was overrun. The marchers now had the high ground and began to rain down anything they could find on the PNH and Nigerian soldiers below, from tea bags to boxes of printer toner. Out through the window and down onto the narrow street went reams of paper and three-ring binders that contained the numerous reports of well-paid electoral consultants; from the office of the director general came photographs of his three boys and his diploma from the Université d’Etat d’Haïti, class of 1971.

Soon the PNH and the Nigerians gave ground. The crowd, cheering, could hardly believe that the battle was over so quickly. CEH headquarters was now in Johel Célestin’s hands.

* * *

(Just where did those immense crowds in Port-au-Prince come from? I would wonder about this also, until, from Radio Toussaint Legrand, I heard the following story.

(Arriving by air in Port-au-Prince, whether setting out from Miami or Jérémie, you fly low over the vast slum of Cité Soleil. In the midst of the squalor and the garbage, the pigs rutting in mud and the tin shacks, there is — your eyes will hardly believe it — a walled compound with an azure pool. The house figures on no deed or bill of sale, but it was every bit the property of a man named Ti Jean Roosevelt.

(Ti Jean, under indictment in the Southern District of Florida and seeking the safe harbor of parliamentary immunity, wished to be the deputé representing Cité Soleil in Parliament — and he surely would have been, given the ironfisted control he had over the bidonville, if the CEH hadn’t eliminated his name also from the ballot. Not a property owner, they said.

(In the weeks leading up to the CEP’s announcement of the electoral roster, Toussaint told me, Ti Jean and the judge, both men anticipating their elimination from the ballot, had talked long hours in Ti Jean’s compound in Cité Soleil. There, Toussaint told me, the two politicians agreed to unite Ti Jean’s soldiers with the judge’s voice.

(That’s the crowd on the Champs des Mars listening to the judge.)

* * *

The sacking of CEH headquarters was, even by Haitian standards, dramatic news. Even as the protesters were settling themselves into CEH headquarters, the airwaves were straightaway abuzz. Commentators on the national Right lamented the lack of an army to shoot the protesters, and commentators on the Left denounced the commentators on the Right, calling them Tontons Macoutes and fascists. Being so denounced infuriated the commentators on the Right, who wondered in what real nation demonstrators could seize a national treasure like CEH headquarters with impunity. A popular radio comedian joked that the demonstrators hadn’t meant to loot headquarters, they’d just been wandering around downtown Port-au-Prince looking for a lost goat. The phrase “Lost Goat” soon became synonymous with all manner of electoral malfeasance.

The special representative of the secretary-general of the United Nations issued his usual statement in times of crisis, calling on all “political stakeholders to refrain from violence and negotiate a good-faith resolution to the political crisis in accordance with the rule of law.” The president of the Haitian Sénat implored the president of Haiti to suspend Parliament and impose martial law; his rival in the Sénat demanded that the president resign. Reporters sought out Etienne Brutus, directeur générale of the CEH, and found him at his home, where he announced from his doorstep, reading from a handwritten text, that he and his colleagues in the CEH had acted in accordance with the law. He declared Johel’s accusation an assault on his honor. He called on the PNH to shoot the vagabonds, criminals, and gangsters who had “disrupted democracy.” A spokesman for the United States embassy declared that it considered Haiti’s electoral process “subject to Haitian law.” Followers of Haitian politics understood this to mean that the embassy had no rooster in this fight. Then the embassy sent an email to all American citizens in Haiti, advising them to avoid unnecessary travel in downtown Port-au-Prince.

That afternoon, the judge spoke to the press from a conference room at the Hotel Montana. “We’re a nonviolent movement,” he said. “We don’t have guns, we don’t have knives, we don’t have bombs — we’ve just had enough. Enough of the dirty tricks. Enough of these electoral games.” The judge looked into the television cameras and said the phrase that would make him, in Haiti, famous: “Enough of the lost goats.”

The special representative in Haiti of the secretary-general of the United Nations was the point man for the international community in its efforts to keep the peace in Haiti, a job, the SRSG would sometimes joke, not unlike being appointed chairman of an international committee to make soup — only the Russians wanted to make borscht, the Spanish gazpacho, the Americans chowder, the French bisque, and they didn’t have much to work with but pepper, water, and ketchup. Everyone blamed him that the soup turned out lousy. Nobody asked the Haitians if they wanted soup at all.

That morning, the SRSG received a phone call from the ambassador of the United States.

“How are you, Anne?” the SRSG said.

“Frankly, Dag, I’m exhausted.”

The American ambassador is expected to do one thing: she must keep Haiti out of the newspapers. That is how her tenure in Haiti will be judged. If Haiti has not made the headlines while she is ambassador, she will be considered a success. She will have succeeded if American troops are not deployed to Haiti, if Haitian refugees are not flooding the beaches of Florida, if the president of the United States is not required to trouble his busy day with Haitian affairs. This morning Haiti is in the newspapers. The Associated Press put the story on the wires: ELECTION VIOLENCE FLARES IN HAITI. Then the story made The New York Times : ONGOING ELECTION VIOLENCE PARALYZES HAITIAN CAPITAL.