Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  While his friends back in Georgia enjoy cookouts, drink cans of cold lager and let off fireworks to celebrate the birth of America, Omar Jarun has made different plans for 4 July this year. He is sitting in a taxi, the day after the 1-1 draw with Afghanistan, as it snakes its way around the hills of the West Bank towards Tulkarem, his family’s ancestral home. Omar looks out of the window in awe at hills covered green by rows of olive and pine trees stretching out before him. If it hadn’t been for the four ugly concrete Israeli checkpoints that we pass along the way we might have been in Spain or Italy or Greece. ‘I ... I can’t believe it,’ he says, taking photos for his mum and dad back home, who text him periodically to check that he is safe. ‘It’s so ... green. I never thought it would be this green.’

  Fahed al-Fakhouri, Palestine’s third-choice goalkeeper, is as good as his word and is guiding Omar and me around the town in which his grandfather was born. His grandfather’s house is still here. We pass an Orthodox Jew standing on the side of the road, dressed in heavy black coat and fur hat, ringlets curled down his cheek, squinting into the hot sun as he waits for a bus. Opposite him is a collection of Portakabins, dragged up on to the highest suitable piece of flat land. Electrical wires connecting the huts dangle dangerously above them. ‘They put these here,’ shrugs Fahed, almost resigned, pointing at the ramshackle collection of huts. He is referring to the Israeli settlers who view it as their duty to colonise what they call Judea and Samara. ‘And then, in two, three months, they build a house and say: “it’s ours”. They just take it.’

  Banners and murals of martyrs fly proudly in Tulkarem. In the almost continental normality of Ramallah you could be in any moderately wealthy city in the Middle East. But Tulkarem is different. A sign hangs between two white apartment blocks: ‘No Peace Until We Return To Our Homes’. Every female covers her head with a hijab, even the children. Jarun Jarun meets us outside a café in an old, beaten-up blue Mercedes. He is a distant uncle of Omar’s and they have never met before. He drops the keys to his grandfather’s house into Omar’s hand. The Jarun clan, it turns out, virtually run a small village on the outskirts of Tulkarem. Every auto shop and supermarket bears the Jarun name. But first a tour of the area.

  Here is the wall – now thinned out to a wire fence – that separates Tulkarem and the Palestinians from Israel. ‘If you shake it,’ Jarun Snr warns, ‘they [Israeli forces] will take you in minutes!’ He mimics shaking it with his hand, laughing to himself hysterically. Here is the Jamal Ghanem Stadium that Fahed plays in, named after a local player who was shot dead on the pitch by the Israelis during a match in 1992. According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem he was unarmed and was shot three times in the chest after trying to hide behind the referee. In a report into the incident B’Tselem said that the Israeli military claimed ‘the soldiers involved in the incident had shot at Jamal Ghanem’s legs, but he had slipped, and therefore was hit in the body and died’. Omar is incredulous. ‘During the game?!’ he shrieks. And here is Ghanem’s grave. We stand next to the broken tombstone for a few moments in silence. And here is a shopkeeper who lost his sons fighting the Israelis. Omar’s head is spinning as he takes in all the facts, and listens to the story of how the old man’s firstborn was killed. Outside his shop hangs a huge portrait of his son. He is holding a machine gun and wears a black headband bearing the shahada, the Islamic invocation: There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.

  Which group did your son belong to? I ask.

  ‘Islamic Jihad,’ the father replies proudly in Arabic.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know,’ Omar recoils when I tell him later that Islamic Jihad is a fundamentalist organisation devoted to pushing Israel into the sea and replacing it with a caliphate. ‘Thank God someone told me.’

  Fahed takes us to meet his family. He lives in house large by Palestinian standards, festooned with cups and ribbons and rosettes he has won. Fahed’s bedroom is a homage to Catalonia, its walls covered with posters and pictures of Barcelona players. In the front room his father tries to fire up the elderly TV, to show us one of Fahed’s old matches, but is thwarted by technical difficulties. Jarun politely accepts his tea and sips it slowly as we talk about Tajikistan and Fahed’s career. It is only now I notice the biggest portrait hanging in the room, above Jarun’s head: a picture of Saddam Hussein. ‘Hero,’ explains Fahed’s father, holding his hand to his heart. Jarun, whose family, thanks to Saddam, were forced to flee Kuwait for America with little more than the shirts on their backs, almost certainly doesn’t agree. But he turns round, looks at the portrait, smiles, and compliments his hosts on their tea. He is too polite to mention his own experiences at the hands of his host’s hero.

  **

  We arrive at the house of Omar Jarun’s grandfather. It is big, two storeys high, deserted, and has vines and a gnarled but healthy lemon tree growing in the front garden, the same lemon tree that his grandfather used to pick from as a child. Jarun excitedly goes from room to room, filming scenes on a camcorder for his family back home. ‘Man, there’s a graveyard out back. And there’s a donkey here, too,’ he narrates. Jarun films the sick-looking donkey. ‘It’s in pretty bad shape,’ he says as the camera rolls. The donkey he-haws on cue, as if aware he is being disparaged.

  Numerous American politicians tell of a common trip that the Israelis have in the past organised for them: a helicopter flight from Jerusalem to the Mediterranean coast. The journey is so quick that it has seared Israel’s tiny dimensions and its geographical vulnerability into the minds of their American guests. Jarun Jarun and Fahed lead Omar up on to the roof of his grandfather’s house. Shimmering just fifteen kilometres away is the Mediterranean. Skyscrapers from the Israeli coastal city of Netanya can be seen in the distance. Further down the coast, Tel Aviv is clearly visible.

  Omar, his uncle, Fahed and I stand in a line, looking at the contrasting horizon of both proximity and impossible distance as the sea shimmers ahead of us. After a few moments, we go back downstairs. Omar stops in the courtyard, reaches up and picks a lemon from the tree. He smuggles it into his pocket and climbs into his uncle’s Mercedes, ready for the journey home.

  2

  HAITI, US VIRGIN ISLANDS, CURAÇAO

  Port au Prince, Haiti. September 2011.

  The sun is beating down on workers scrubbing the terraces of the Stade Sylvio Cator in the Haitian capital of Port au Prince. In the distance, to the south of the stadium, verdant mountains rise sharply. Closer by sits the city’s Grand Cimitière, famous for its warren of elaborate tombs. But the stadium is alive with movement and purpose. Men with pots of blue, red and yellow paint, the colours of the Haitian flag, coat and recoat the terraces. The burst of sunshine is unexpected, a break from the dark clouds that have been sitting above Haiti for the past few weeks. Hurricane season has begun, a time for prayer and time to ask God for good luck.

  Most years God ignores Haiti. It has long been the poorest country in the western hemisphere after years of being ruled by half-mad despots: first, François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, a man who put close to 30,000 opponents of his regime to death, then his son, ‘Baby Doc’, who looted and maimed until he was finally deposed in 1986. Their most evil legacy, though, was the Tonton Macoutes, a paramilitary force that raped, tortured and murdered with impunity. Anyone who could flee the country did so. Those too poor to get out stayed and waited, surviving from one hurricane season to the next. Yet it was the ground beneath their feet that was the source of Haiti’s biggest betrayal.

  At 4.53 p.m. on 12 January 2010 an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale reduced much of Port au Prince to rubble. By one count alone more than 300,000 Haitians lost their lives, although no one can be sure just how many perished. It left Port au Prince, already on the cusp of anarchy, in a ruinous state. Every spare scrap of ground has now become a city of tents, filled with the internally displaced. Haiti’s national stadium – named after Sylvio Cator, the country’s greatest Olympian, a former footballe
r who won silver in the long jump at the 1928 Amsterdam games – is one of those spaces. At least, it used to be. It became a slum for hundreds of families but they have now been moved on. The street vendors outside the stadium jealously gossip that the families who lived here were offered a $2,000 payment from the government as compensation for leaving. They left, of course. But they didn’t go far. They simply melted into the torn ribbon of blue tents that formed outside the stadium’s heavy metal front gates.

  Now the authorities need the stadium back. Haiti is due to play its first football match since the earthquake: a World Cup qualifier for Brazil 2014 against the US Virgin Islands. This is important for two reasons. Firstly, anything that begins to move Haiti back to a sense of normality is to be cherished. Secondly, the World Cup offers a distraction. World Cup qualification won’t put food in a child’s mouth or cure a pensioner of cholera, but it fills the time. With little work to go around time is something that most Haitians have in abundance. But time also fuels rancour. Haiti’s new president, Michel Martelly, a former singer, is aggressively promoting the match. He loves football, of course; all Haitians do. But a match against the US Virgin Islands, a team of amateurs who have won only three games in their history, all of them against the British Virgin Islands, is a sure thing. Martelly wants to make good on his campaign slogan: ‘Viktwa pou pep la.’ In Haitian Creole this means ‘Victory for the People’. In the absence of any other kind of victory for the people, victory against the US Virgin Islands will have to do.

  Ironically, time is now against him. The refugees have had to be moved, their presence erased by the smell of new paint. A brand new artificial pitch had to be laid, too, as the old one had been ruined by the camps. The smell of fresh paint is momentarily thick and intoxicating, but then the wind changes direction and the smell is replaced by that of burning refuse and human excrement.

  This year Haiti is lucky. Hurricane Irene skirts around the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic to the east, but when it makes landfall in the United States it kills forty-nine people. The near miss is lucky for Haiti because it is not prepared for a hurricane. It is not really prepared for anything, especially not its first 2014 World Cup qualifier in twenty-four hours’ time. The painters work with urgency, moving up and down the terraces in jolting movements like an early stop-go animation film.

  By the main entrance to the stadium a guard wearing a turquoise Haitian Football Federation T-shirt paces nervously in front of the heavy, blue steel door. He is holding a pump-action shotgun tightly in both hands. The guard listens to the almost constant banging on the door from outside, his finger hovering above the trigger. When the banging become urgent he pulls the door open, sticks his head out and fires a volley of abuse in Creole. But this time it is the guests he has been told to expect. The team bus of Les Grenadiers, Haiti’s national team, has arrived, bringing the players for training. It is waiting at the gate under heavy armed guard. A curious mob of Haitians has surrounded it. The guards eye them nervously, but they are not in danger. The bus is driven in and the guard quickly heaves the gate closed behind it. For him everyone is a potential threat.

  Inside the stadium a middle-aged man with short, dark-grey hair and a moustache two shades lighter is walking on to the artificial grass. He is not happy. ‘It’s forty-six degrees on the pitch, we just measured it,’ tssks Edson Tavares, the team’s Brazilian coach. It is three in the afternoon; the match is due to be played at the same time the following day. ‘It’s crazy. FIFA agreed to move the match. CONCACAF said no. What do they know? They work out of New York and know nothing about the heat in the Caribbean.’ The change in time is a necessity, but I don’t say this to Tavares. Electricity is scarce in the city, too scarce for the expensive but now impotent floodlights that have been installed for the match. The team begin to run through their drills in the heat without complaint. Tavares retreats into the shade.

  **

  My plane lands at Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport, named after the great Haitian revolutionary who led the first successful slave revolt. He didn’t live to see the world’s first black-led republic come into existence in 1804: a year earlier he had been deported and died in a French jail. The airport has been fixed since the earthquake, but only nominally. Huge fissures run from the bottom to the top of the white plastered arrivals and departures building. There are no taxis or reliable buses into the city. Too many people had been kidnapped, robbed and killed that way. A driver from an Irish NGO kindly takes me to the city. We sit in silence as I survey the full extent of the slums on either side of the road. Even in the upmarket district of Pétionville, with its nightclubs and Western-style supermarkets, the grinding poverty of the camps sits cheek by jowl with the high-walled, heavily armed compounds with smashed bottle glass and razor wire concreted into the top of the walls.

  It feels obscene to be here for a football match but Haitian football is no different from virtually every aspect of Haitian society affected by the earthquake. The federation’s headquarters were levelled, killing more than thirty of its staff. Its president, Dr Yves Jean-Bart, somehow survived. With a broken arm he joined the efforts to pull other survivors from the rubble. Only one was found. Faced with such devastation, football might be considered of minor importance in Haiti, but Jean-Bart, knowing the place the game has in Haiti’s heart, went on to rebuild the federation and employed Tavares to achieve the dream of emulating Haiti’s golden generation who qualified for the 1974 World Cup finals. They shocked the world back then, briefly taking the lead against mighty Italy before succumbing in all three group matches.

  This time the draw has been kind to Haiti. Alongside the US Virgin Islands, Haiti is in the same group as Antigua and Barbuda and Curaçao, a Dutch colony a few miles off the Venezuelan coast that is playing in the World Cup qualifications for the first time. A few days after the US Virgin Islands match, Les Grenadiers fly to Curaçao’s capital, Willemstad, for the second match in the group. On paper it is a nailed-on six points. The combined population of Haiti’s three opponents is a fraction more than the number of people killed in the 2010 earthquake.

  ‘I arrived in September, nine months after the earthquake. My first impression was to take my flight back to Brazil,’ explains Tavares a few hours before his final training session. We are sitting in the team’s hotel a few minutes’ drive from the stadium. Like almost every building in downtown Port au Prince, the hotel is in a fortified compound with a heavy metal door. We sit in the hotel’s rock garden, a fountain gurgling pleasantly next to us. Well-dressed waiters deliver us ice-cold water and Cokes. The slums seem very far away.

  Tavares had previously been coach of Al Wasl in the United Arab Emirates and Sepahan in Iran, but he gave up any such stability for a shot at the World Cup finals with Haiti and a chance to represent a country in his home city of Rio de Janeiro. ‘You don’t realise how strong the situation was here,’ he says when I ask him about his arrival. ‘Today is a paradise compared. You can see the miserable people, tents everywhere, but if you compare with last year ... well, you could be walking the street and find the amputated legs of people, the arms of people. It was terrible, terrible, terrible.’

  There was no league and no football association as such. Just the surviving football association president and his mobile phone. The question was: how do you begin to rebuild a team like Haiti? Tavares decided that he needed new blood. He paid for his own flight to Europe. With him he had a list with the names of sixty-two professional players of Haitian descent who were playing in Portugal, France, England, Spain, Belgium, Greece, Scotland and beyond. Like the Palestinians I had met a few months earlier, Tavares realised that knocking into shape a team of purely local players was too big a job. Instead, he sought out those playing at a good level of professional football, players who had fallen through the cracks and been ignored by the national teams of the countries that had given them, or, if they were second- or third-generation immigrants,
their parents or grandparents, refuge in the past. ‘I rented a car to travel to five countries to persuade the players to play for their country of origin,’ he says. ‘Only one refused. We contacted twenty players. I was very happy. And they are here. Most of them don’t speak Creole. One only speaks Italian. One only German. For me it is no problem. I can speak different languages but for the federation it was a big problem before, to repatriate the diaspora.’

  The players wander around the hotel rock garden in their cliques. The Haiti-based players huddle together, speaking in rapid Creole, arms wrapped around each other as they walk. The French players sit at a table, coolly surveying the scene. Steward Ceus, the team’s mountainous six-foot-six American-born goalkeeper, mooches along on his own. Tavares hopes that the professionalism of his new team will rub off on the local players. He also believes that the local talent is some of the best he has seen in the world. ‘I am telling you,’ he says, leaning forward. ‘My forty years’ experience I have never seen a country with so many talents like here. Players of fourteen years old here, if you put these guys in Manchester United and Barcelona, they would be a great player. The problem is to be a great player you have to have good food, a good environment, good training, good doctors. So here is nothing.’

  I ask Tavares about his new team, whether there is any lingering resentment from the local players towards their richer, better fed, sometimes foreign-born colleagues who have never been here and don’t speak the language. ‘Always we have some resentment from local players,’ he agrees. ‘But they have to realise they are a long way from the other players. Here in Haiti they can only afford to eat one meal a day.’ The problem, he says, is one of low ambition. ‘The future here is to get a visa to the US and they are 50 per cent happy. Then they can go to America and sell ice cream in the street or go to the garage and clean a car. That is the future here.’