Loe raamatut: «Journey of a Lifetime»

2 A TALK WITH SOMEONE WHO’S NOT TREMBLING

I passed a couple of restless days in Miami—a place quite easy to dislike. I was bracing myself to fly somewhere even worse. Far worse. I had just completed a series of Whicker’s Worlds in South America. All the fun and excitement of filming in Argentina (brilliant), on to Peru (druggy), then up among the volcanoes outside Quito in Ecuador (enchanting) and finally coming to rest in downtown Miami for a couple of apprehensive days awaiting PanAm’s lifeline flight to the kidnap capital of the world: Haiti.

Miami Beach was the place where, waking one morning in a vast white hotel totally surrounded by avarice, I took a taxi to the airport and asked for a ticket to anywhere. They thought I was mad—and probably by then I was, a little.

Now—ice-cold sane—I was approaching a far more dangerous destination: Haiti. The first black republic was only some 700 miles away, but its reputation made trigger-happy Floridians seem cool and chummy. This poorest country in the Western hemisphere survives with 80 per cent of its population below the poverty line.

I was on my reluctant way to examine Papa Doc’s republic—and Papa Doc, I had heard, was about to examine me. Not everyone walked away from those check-ups, our pilot told me cheerfully. In the world’s kidnap centre the dungeons were active, with Papa Doc as a frequent spectator.

Our jet, not surprisingly, was almost empty. It was a good plane to miss. We flew across the fringe of the Sargasso Sea, which seemed a suitable setting for any adventure, landed at François Duvalier Airport in Port-au-Prince, and drew breath. So far, so still alive.

This despairing nation was under the lash of a President for Life whose years of absolute power had brought terror to his people and ruin to his country. As I walked through the damp heat towards the decrepit arrivals building I saw, seared across the peeling white plaster of the wall that confronted me, a pockmarked line of bullet holes.

This was a fairly emphatic take-it-or-leave-it statement. It didn’t say whether it was a gesture from the Tourist Division of the Chamber of Commerce, but it was surely more arresting than the traditional view of Port-au-Prince from the mountains. It was the only airport welcome Haiti offered its rare visitors, and it was right in character.

Inside the building, a more friendly reception from the Pres-ident’s official greeter, Aubelin Jolicœur. This small, unctuous executive silenced the customs men who had scented rich pickings from us with a wave of his ivory-handled cane. I recognized him instantly: he had been drawn to perfection as Petit Pierre in Graham Greene’s frightening The Comedians.

He may have been smiling, but the Haitians watching us in the arrivals hall were expressionless, which suggested he wasn’t all that funny. Tontons Macoutes no longer stripped or frisked arrivals, though I was uncomfortably aware that the airport had just experienced one of those dramatic bloodlettings which would have seemed improbable fiction from Graham Greene.

The eldest of Dr Duvalier’s three daughters, his favourite Marie-Denise, had just married the 6′3″ Commander of his Palace Guard, Captain Max Dominique, who instantly became a Colonel. Then Papa Doc, acting upon different advice, decided his new son-in-law was involved in the plot against him for which he had just executed nineteen brother-officers.

Having considered the pleas of his wife and daughter, then pregnant, he spared Col. Dominique, but sent him into exile and out of the way as ambassador to Spain. As they left for Madrid, the President and Mrs Duvalier came to the airport to bid a sorrowful farewell to Di-Di.

For the traditional VIP goodbye picture the young couple stood at the aircraft door, waving to parents, friends and staff. As the door was closing upon the happy couple, there came a nod from Papa Doc. Their chauffeur and two bodyguards were shot down in front of them. Dr Duvalier was making his own farewell gesture of disapproval.

He turned and left the bloodstained tarmac without another glance at the dying men. They lay in the sunlight under the eyes of the few horrified passengers en route from Miami to Puerto Rico. The aircraft then departed abruptly. An American airman who had seen it all told me, “That captain practically took off with the door open. They just wanted to get out of there.”

There were no further executions on the evening of our arrival, but the scarred walls were adequate reminders. Outside we were distributed among waiting taxi drivers. They were all Tontons Macoutes, Papa Doc’s private army licensed to extort. Driving a cab was the best-paid job in the land at the time—the only one in which a Haitian could get his hands on foreign currency.

My personal Tonton was silent and sinister, with a Gauguin face. He had the poetic name of Racine. He also had red eyes.

There was no question of hotel selection; you went and lived where you were put. Racine drove us skilfully through the bumps and up the hillside to the white concrete Castelhaiti Hotel, overlooking the town. It was empty—but ready for us.

That evening ours was the only occupied table as we tackled some stringy chicken. Groups of listless waiters stood around in the gloom, watching and whispering while a piano and violin wailed mournfully in the shadows. Outside the fearful town, hushed and tense, awaited its regular power cut.

My crew soon gave up, and went to sort their equipment. It was jollier. We had called the camera for tomorrow and would find something to shoot. We needed to establish contact with the inaccessible Papa Doc. “Once we’ve been seen with him, talking to him, we’ll be all right,” said my Australian researcher, Ted Morrisby, who as usual had tuned in cleverly. “Then the Tontons and the rest of the town will know he accepts us. That means we shan’t get hassled, or shot.”

Well, he convinced me. In a land where we had no friends for protection, no embassy to turn to, there was a convincing argument for establishing contact before any more shots rang out.

Certainly Papa Doc was not easy to reach. His massacres had generated terror and despair and hidden fury, so every day he prepared to face some sort of counter-attack. He rarely left the white American-built National Palace, the only important building in town which could be instantly switched into a floodlit armed fortress, yet he did not feel secure even behind its walls and guarded gates.

The President had ousted Paul Magloire, who had twice sent in old B25 aircraft on bombing runs. The grounds were ringed by anti-aircraft guns and elderly armoured cars. The President also beseeched protection from a new prayer of which he was author. He sought support from all sides:

Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for Life,

Hallowed be thy name, by present and future generations

Thy will be done at Port-au-Prince and in the provinces.

Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the

trespasses of the anti-patriots…

By a stroke of Whicker’s luck we discovered that next day Our Doc was making a rare expedition into the anxious surroundings outside his palace. He was to open a new Red Cross centre, a small building a few hundred yards from his fortress.

We left our silent hotel at dawn and reached the area as troops and armed men began to assemble for the ceremony. There were hundreds of soldiers in well-pressed khaki with medals and white gloves, and of course a lot of armament. Militia wore blue denim with a red stripe for the occasion, like army hospital patients; more guns, of course. Mingling with authority among them were men in thin tight suits, snap-brimmed fedoras and shades, like Mods heading for Brighton Beach and waving light automatics around casually: the Tontons.

As usual when overwhelmed by armed men enjoying a little brief authority, I adopted an attitude of polite preoccupied condescension—like a prefect moving down upon a third-former whose mother is hovering. For a new and meaningful relationship with an unwelcoming armed guard, it helps to be slightly patronizing but brandishing a permanent smile. It also helps if you’re saying something like, “Do you mind standing aside, please. British television filming the President. Thank you so much, just back a bit more…” He doesn’t understand, but he gets your drift and suspects you might be Somebody, or know Somebody.

It is hard to shoot a man, or even strike him with your rifle butt, when he is smiling at you in a friendly way and talking about something foreign. It helps the odds.

The confident, cheerful attitude won through again. When they expect you to be humble and timid, a certain pleasant senior-officer asperity throws them off-balance. This is even more effective when guards or police or hoodlums don’t understand English.

To attempt their language, whatever it is, instantly places you in the subordinate position of supplication, and invites questions. Since adopting this haughty approach, I am pleased to say I’ve hardly ever been shot.

So we stood in the searing sunshine in what seemed like a sharpshooters’ convention, waiting for Papa. I became aware that one or two of the more heavily armed men had started talking about us and doubtless about our presence as interlopers upon their scene. Before they could get their little brief authority together, there was a distant roar of massed motorcycles.

The first arrival was, improbably, a chromium-plated Harley-Davidson, ridden by a large black dressed like a tubby boy scout. On his pillion was a younger man in a sort of beach gear. Presumably they were significant figures, but they didn’t seem to threaten my prefect, who was at that moment telling senior spectators to move back a bit to allow better pictures.

They were followed at a distance by a horde of regulation military outriders surrounding an enormous black Mercedes 600. This noisy group had come at least 600 yards from the palace gates. The limo stopped. A sort of tremor ran through the massed troops.

A couple of portly colonels with machine guns struggled out and stood to attention, quivering. After a long pause, a small stooped figure in a dark suit emerged, with a white frizz under his black homburg. Blinking behind thick lenses in the sudden silence, he asked in a whisper for what appeared to be the Mace of Haiti: the President’s own sub-machine gun. This was handed to him and, reassured, he restored it to a guard. His gestures were those of fragile old age, and he walked with a slight shuffle; yet this was the man who held a nation by the throat.

He noticed our white faces and camera instantly, but without acknowledgement. He had presumably been alerted by Joliecœur. After military salutes and anthems, he entered the small Red Cross building with his wife, Mme Simone Ovide Duvalier, a handsome Creole in a large white hat, closely followed by me, as usual brushing machine guns aside with a polite smile and a “So sorry, do you mind?”

In the scrimmage Ted Morrisby and I managed to converge upon the President. In a way we were expected. We explained we had crossed the world to see him for an important programme, and after some hesitant queries received a murmured invitation to visit his palace next day. We fell back with relief from the small figure who seemed to wish us no harm.

Later we learned that his chargé d’affaires in London was a Whicker’s World enthusiast, and upon our request for visas had sent Papa Doc an approving telex.

Coming to power in 1957 with the support of the army, the astute Dr Duvalier had observed that dictators were always overthrown by their own armies—usually the Commander of the Presidential Guard—so he overthrew his, quite quickly.

He explained his military philosophy to me later, in an angry rasp: “Only civilians can own a country, not the military men. The military man must stay in his barracks and receive orders and instructions from the President, from the King, from the Emperor. This is my opinion, this is my philosophy. To have peace and stability you must have a strong man in every country.”

“A dictator?” I suggested. The hesitant soft voice rasped again: “Not a dictator, a strong man! Democracy is only a word—it is a philosophy, a conception. What you call democracy in your country, another country might call dictatorship.”

His Haitian army once had 20,000 men—6,500 of them generals. It was now reduced to ceremonial duties, and colonels. In its place the President created his Volunteers for Defence—the evil militia of Tontons Macoutes. This unthreatening phrase meant “Uncle Bagman” after the legendary giant bogeyman who strode the mountains stuffing naughty children into his knapsack.

In return for loyalty, Duvalier gave his army bully boys the right to lean upon the terrified populace, to tax and torment. Every nationalized hoodlum performed discipline duties with which Papa Doc did not wish to be publicly associated, and was licensed to kill. To provoke or deny any bogeyman intent upon stuffing his knapsack was to invite a beating, at least.

All hope drained from the nation during Duvalier’s years of sudden and unaccountable death, as Haitians submitted to the gangster army which stood over them, controlled improbably by Mme Rosalee Adolph, Deputy, wife of the Minister of Health and Population, who had since 1958 been the Supervisor General of the Volunteers: “They are not paid—though I am paid, because I am a Deputy. If we are attacked someone has to defend the Head of Government. I have always got my gun. It is always ready.”

The smiling little woman packed it, demurely, in her handbag. After she had proved her firepower we all went, obligingly, up a mountainside to see some of her volunteers in action. We had expected a mass of toiling figures but found only a handful working on a road, watched by twice as many whose duty, it seemed, was to watch. Tontons did not volunteer to work—they volunteered to supervise.

By then Papa Doc was believed to have executed 2,000 Haitians and driven 30,000 into exile and the rest into terrified silence. In that manacled land it seemed unlikely that there was anyone left to criticize, let alone attack. A missing Haitian would be unimportant and unnoticed, though the arrest or death of a foreigner could only be ordered by the President. There was little comfort in that, for he seemed totally unconcerned about international criticism.