(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.”
5
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.
“He was on the phone at three in the morning. He’s in a mood, Dag.”
Every afternoon at the Presidential Palace is naptime. The president dresses himself in pajamas, pulls tightly shut the thick curtains, and cannot be disturbed. But he comes alive at night, pacing the long corridors of the palace. If you wish to deal with PoH, it must be done between midnight and dawn.
The SRSG’s rise through the bureaucratic ranks had been lubricated by a special noise he makes. It comes from the back of his throat; it is somewhere between the sound of clearing his throat and sighing. It acknowledges the suffering of others without himself accepting any portion of the blame.
The SRSG made his special noise, and the ambassador continued.
“This can’t go on,” she said.
The government of the United States felt it an embarrassment, having invested so many hundreds of millions of dollars in Haitian peacekeeping and Haitian nation building, to see the headquarters of the Haitian electoral process under siege. It was a personal embarrassment to the secretary of state, who not two weeks earlier in congressional testimony had mentioned “continuing and ongoing progress” in Haitian reform as justification of the administration’s policies in the Caribbean and Latin America.
“We are under pressure here, Dag.”
The SRSG hung up the phone and massaged his face with his fingertips. It was indeed a delicate situation — but it was to resolve situations like this one that there were peacekeepers, after all, and diplomats, and men like the SRSG, who make special noises. On the one hand, there was the president of Haiti, who was quite correct in denouncing the illegal occupation of the headquarters of the electoral authority. On the other hand (and the SRSG knew, from long experience, there was always a countervailing hand), you had these protesters who were also quite correct. How sad it was that they couldn’t vote. The tragedy of peacekeeping, he reflected, was that you are inevitably on the wrong side of someone who is in the right. Perhaps, he thought, that was the tragedy of life.
The SRSG invited Johel to lunch at his private residence in Bourdon.
* * *
I awoke around dawn to see the marchandes and their donkeys coming down from the hills, saddlebags stuffed with the first breadfruit and avocados of the season, or leading goats to their doom. These women were the Haiti that I loved best — indomitable, mystical, courageous. Nothing would have stopped their slow progression down the hill to market, certainly not politics: that was Port-au-Prince business, something that got the menfolk huddled around the radios all heated up. Even if Jérémie were in flames, they would have kept coming, setting up the breadfruit on a groundsheet, sitting patiently until the good Lord saw fit to send them a client.
That morning, from his pulpit in the cathedral, the bishop called for calm. As always in moments of crisis, the cathedral was full, and the bishop advised his flock to avoid those old devil twins: rage and pride. Later, the town would discuss the sermon, trying to understand the political implications. The bishop had been a prominent supporter of the Sénateur: Was he again coming to his longtime friend’s assistance? Or had his speech been aimed at a narrower audience — the chief of the PNH, who took Communion from his habitual central pew? Was it a tailored message to this man alone, urging him to break with the Sénateur? Nobody supposed that in Haiti the Church represented God alone.