Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [69]
Inside the building, the noise was deafening, the cries of complaints from the overcrowded holding cell, the police officers marching in, some of them still wearing balaclavas over their faces even while inside. My uncle quickly walked to a desk manned by one of the special forces officers who was not wearing a mask. Like his masked colleagues, this man was tall and large, larger than most Haitians. Sometimes he’d hear his parishioners say that the CIMO officers were not really Haitian or even human at all. They were machines created by the Americans who trained them to kill and destroy.
“Can I help you?” asked the giant officer at the desk, who looked rather kind and mild, not like a brutal killer at all.
“I’d like to make a report,” he said.
His mechanical voice probably echoed throughout the dim room. He may have looked around to see if anyone was watching, anyone who might recognize him, then go outside to wait for him, to kill him.
The officer told him to sit down.
“What are you reporting?” the officer asked, pulling out a form from a folder on top of a desk already cluttered with piles and piles of papers. The officer grabbed a pen from under another set of papers and readied himself to write.
At the top of the form were the words:
POLICE NATIONALE D’HAITI
SERVICE D’IVESTIGATION ET ANTI-GANG (SIAG)
SECTION DE DOLEANCES
The last line indicated that my uncle was in the grievance section of the national police’s investigation and anti-gang unit. And as if to remove any hope that the matter he was complaining about might actually be looked into, the word “investigation” was misspelled on the department letterhead.
The nature of the incident in question was summarized as “pillaging, theft and incineration.” My uncle’s declaration to the officer recounted what had happened that Sunday at the church as well as the following day. Among the many things he said he lost were “nos papiers important,” our important papers. He was asked to pay the officer forty Haitian dollars, the equivalent of five American dollars, for a photocopy of the original document, which the officer then laid on top of another large pile of such documents on his desk.
Could someone be sent to his house in Bel Air now to examine the situation? my uncle asked.
The officer said it was a bad time. They were too busy, but they would look into it later.
What about a justice of the peace, an examining judge, or an investigative judge, who was usually sent to the scene of a crime?
If he could find one to go at his own expense, the officer said, he was welcome to send one there, but good luck to him, since no one was going into Bel Air right now, including CIMO officers and the UN.
But if the gangs took over his compound and he needed to eventually get it back, wouldn’t he need a report from a justice of the peace?
“We’re in a war now,” the officer calmly explained. “We’ll see what happens after the war.”
But how much longer could this war go on? How many more would have to flee? How many would have to die? Wasn’t the UN, the MINUSTAH, there to help end the war?
How could he file a similar report with the UN about the MINUSTAH? he asked.
The officer told him to go up to Bourdon, a small neighborhood up the hill, on the road leading to Pétion Ville, one of the city’s suburbs. The headquarters of CIVPOL, the United Nations’ Civilian Police Unit, were housed at the Villa Saint Louis, a twenty-five-room, sixty-U.S.-dollar-a-night hotel with spacious balconies overlooking parts of Port-au-Prince.
He left the anti-gang unit around noon, carrying his copy of the police report. It was scorching outside and he could feel the sun warm his face through the fuzz of a short beard that had grown