Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

My spelling of Haitian Creole is unorthodox. I have decided to spell Haitian Creole as I have both because the currently accepted spelling of Creole is so ugly on the page, and to allow Francophone readers a firmer toehold into this wonderful but inaccessible language.

I have translated Avocat Noé Fourcand’s speech from the words of the historical Noé Fourcand, quoted in Arthur Rouzier’s Les belles figures de l’intelligentsia jérémienne du temps passé—et du présent. This is the finest introduction to the lost poets of Jérémie.

This book could not have been written without the generous assistance of the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mischa Berlinski is the author of the novel Fieldwork , a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Addison M. Metcalf Award. You can sign up for email updates here.

*In addition to hiring police officers, the United Nations hired armies: the UN offered $1,038 per month per soldier to the national army of any country that sent soldiers on Mission. This was a very attractive offer to those countries with large, expensive standing armies where the soldiers earned less than $1,038 per month. In addition, the United Nations paid contributing armies for every tank, armored personnel carrier, jeep, and generator they provided. This was how the Uruguayan battalion arrived in Haiti.

Peacekeeping missions are a particularly attractive option for nations with some kind of simmering social disorder at home. Wars are expensive, and sending half the army abroad to keep the peace pays for the other half of the army to stay home and fight your Tamil Tigers, your Ibo petro-guerrillas, or your Maoists, which explains why there were large contingents from Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Nepal on the ground.

*The Conseil Electoral Haïtien, known as the CEH, was the bureaucratic organ in charge of organizing the election, from registering voters to preparing ballots to establishing voting centers to counting the votes themselves. One of the prerogatives of the CEH was to ensure that every candidate on the ballot met the requirements of the Haitian Constitution for the office in question. Candidates for the sénat needed to be thirty years old, have a clean criminal record, have lived four years in the territory they wished to represent, own property, exercise a profession in the territory they wished to represent — and be a citizen of one nation, and just one nation, on God’s green earth: Haiti. (Haitian law did not recognize double nationality.) The CEH was ostensibly a neutral administrative body, its members selected by all three branches of government, but no one in Haiti believed that it was anything but the well-trained pet of the president himself. To further isolate the CEH from partisan politics, it was, by constitutional imperative, subservient to no court of appeals. Its decisions — whether about the location of a voting center or the outcome of a close election — were final.

*These local officials were chosen by the Departmental Electoral Office in Jérémie, whose members were selected by the CEH in Port-au-Prince, and to the extent that the CEH was a biased and partisan body, so too the local electoral officials.