Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  The local players spread around the hotel do not care about the standard of opposition they so comprehensively beat. They are just happy not to have let anyone down. ‘I feel really happy, so lucky,’ says midfielder James Marcelin, who scored Haiti’s first 2014 World Cup goal. ‘I’m happy because what happened in the country to see all Haitian come to the game. It’s incredible.’ Marcelin is now playing in the MLS for the Portland Timbers, but he started his career in Haiti, where he grew up. For him, being back around his people in the country he grew up in is special. ‘It is the only one thing we have left,’ he says, ‘we have soccer.’ When James Marcelin or Jean Alexandre (also born in Haiti) or Jean Eudes Maurice (born in Paris) scored against the US Virgin Islands there was no division between the celebrating Haitian-born or French-born players. I look through my pictures from that day. One shows the team gathered in a circle in the dressing room, arms locked around each other in prayer. Another of Jean Eudes Maurice, after his goal, being hoisted up high by Jean Alexandre in front of the celebrating crowd. A third shows a blur of five players in the aftermath of another goal with only James Marcelin’s smiling face in focus.

  Defender Kevin Lafrance was born in Paris. He was approached after being discovered playing for Slavia Prague in the Czech Republic by Edson Tavares on his player-finding road trip. ‘He contacted me and tells me he wants me to come to the selection,’ Lafrance remembers. He hadn’t thought of playing for Haiti before. ‘To play in the French selection was difficult so I take my chance to play for Haiti.’ Lafrance knew that this was his only chance of playing international football. For many Haitian-born players, indeed for any player from a country looking to attract players from its better organised diaspora, this was a delicate subject. Such issues were being discussed in virtually every national team in the world, from Switzerland to the US. Immigration was redrawing a new map, one of mixed races and countries and religions and allegiances. Lafrance battled with it just like millions of others did. ‘I just want to help the country and the most I can do is play football,’ he says of his first visit to Haiti for the match. ‘It was very special when you see how happy these people were from a simple game of football. I think with the football they forget what has happened before.’

  For a few moments, perhaps. But the window was brief. Yet Lafrance believes that the team needs the diaspora as much as he needs Haiti. ‘In Haiti the level is not too good but I think the mix is a good thing,’ he explains. ‘Some play in France, New York, the Czech Republic; we are playing a good level, better than in Haiti, we can help Haiti. The road is long. I am here because I believe we can do this if we fight together for the qualification.’

  **

  Getting out of Haiti is harder than getting in. While the players take a circuitous root to leave the country, everybody else has to fight their way out. Literally. Hurricane Irene has shut the airport temporarily. It is open now but so many flights have been cancelled that thousands of people queue every morning, desperate to go. A bad-tempered line half a kilometre long snakes back out of the entrance of the Toussaint L’Ouverture departures building. There is no shade and the burning sun has returned as we shuffle forward, pushed on by those joining at the back. I am enclosed from all sides, my face crushed against a Haitian woman’s back. A lone guard tries to manage the crush through the single tiny door, but he is simply taking money from the richer travellers so they can bypass the queue. The departures hall looks like a scene from ground zero of a future zombie apocalypse: thousands upon thousands of people screaming, crying, climbing, vomiting, fighting and collapsing. The rest of us wait, pushing and hustling one foot forward at a time. After three hours of fighting through the crowd, soaking wet and exhausted, I leave Haiti. I realise I am one of the lucky ones.

  When I land in Curaçao it is dark. On the flight are several players from the Curaçao national team. They were born in Holland, professionals who played in the Dutch league but had no chance of ever pulling on the famous orange shirt. I tell them about Haiti. They tell me I should visit Campo Alegre. It is full of bars, they say, and a good place to meet girls. I take a taxi on their recommendation. Campo Alegre is quiet. Outside it looks like an ageing seaside amusement park closed for the winter. It is too early, perhaps, but I pay the entrance fee anyway. Inside row upon row of chalets circle a central bar. A huge screen is showing interracial hardcore porn. Offscreen, young women in crotchless underwear lead men – thin, middle-aged white Dutchmen with ruined complexions – to their chalets. Campo Alegre, I soon realise, is a good place to meet girls, but only if you’re paying for them. It turns out to be the biggest legal brothel in the world. Prostitution in Curaçao is government-regulated, they argue, to protect the women involved in the trade. The US State Department disagrees and believes Curaçao to be a sex-trafficking hub. The man sitting next to me at the bar is wearing an ‘I Girls’ T-shirt. It costs $10 to buy one of these women, from Venezuela, Haiti, Jamaica, Russia or Senegal, but I leave for the clean streets of Willemstad, for the tall-fronted, multicoloured colonial houses. For the designer shops and the Western-style bars and restaurants. But this too is a sham. A few hours later I meet another white, middle-aged Dutchman with sunken cheeks. He lives in a crumbling block of single rooms. He is the only white man who lives here. His room is filthy: a single mattress, a plate and piles of dirty clothes are all that he owns. His hand shakes when he offers it to me. He also sniffs constantly. He lost everything after moving here, he tells me, his job, his savings and, eventually, his wife, too. He was addicted to cocaine, shipped in cheaply in both high quality and high quantity from Venezuela. There are thousands like him, he says, maybe more, now too ruined to return home. He vows to show me the side of Curaçao that no one sees. We walk no more than fifty metres, to the road that runs parallel to and behind the clean boulevards down which the tourists amble during the day. We are now in the middle of a slum. This is where the blacks of Willemstad live, in one-floor concrete blocks. The lights are on in only one of them. A constant stream of people are entering and leaving to buy drugs. There are men slumped on the street. We are eyed suspiciously, but the Dutchman speaks Papiamentu, the Iberian Creole that predominates here. He tells me that the white Dutch are hated. They take all the jobs and want nothing to do with the ‘true’ locals. Neither did he when he had a good job in the oil industry, but now he lives with them, on the edges of Willemstad, moving from one hit to the next. He takes me to a deserted bar and I buy him a drink. I suspect that it is the reason he is showing me all this, for a single, lousy beer. He introduces me to an obese black prostitute smoking what looks like a fat joint. She is surprised when I spurn her sexual advances but instead holds out a huge arm and passes me her cigarette. Both faces, black and white, look at me, silently urging me to inhale. They laugh heartily when I do but it is not marijuana. I am about to collapse. But in my rapidly deteriorating mind I reason that collapsing here would mean almost certain death. I thank them both for their hospitality and leave the bar with as much balance and dignity as my melting brain can muster. I vomit in the gutter, next to a man lying motionless on the ground.

  **

  The Stadion Ergilio Hato is calm and peaceful. It is five days since the chaos of Port au Prince. It is now dark and cool and quiet. A few dozen local fans slowly mooch to their seats, drinking $1 cups of Venezuelan Polar beer as the setting sun leaves a magnificent magenta and orange slash in the sky. Slowly, the sound of Haiti returns. A large expat community lives here, doing the jobs that others don’t want to do: the security guards, the chefs, the chambermaids, the bus drivers, the waiters. Anyone who can get a day off arrives, outnumbering the home crowd eight to one, expecting to see another victory and another step towards the World Cup finals.

  ‘I am the voice of Haitian people in Curaçao!’ shouts Joseph, a frail but aggressive middle-aged man who is leading a large group of Haitian fans into the stadium. When I ask him what he does for a living he says cryptically: ‘Everything I can to survive.’ He has been
in Curaçao for nineteen years. He fled for political reasons, he says, just after the return of President Aristide. It crosses my mind that he might once have been a member of the feared Tonton Macoutes. ‘Haiti is not a poor country,’ he shouts in my face. ‘We have everything. It is the politicians.’ Joseph is angry now, but he has a World Cup football match to attend. ‘Tonight we have won already. We know we are going far. We expect to see three thousand fans.’

  And he is right. Three thousand fans, maybe more, fill one stand of the stadium, their songs echoing off the other three empty terraces. But their certainty doesn’t last long. The first time Haiti’s goalkeeper Steward Ceus touches the ball with his own hands during World Cup qualification is to pick it out of the back of his net. Curaçao have taken a shock lead. Their team of Dutch professionals have caught Haiti unprepared. Haiti equalise but Curaçao take the lead again. Half-time comes with Haiti 2-1 down, facing a fatal blow to their World Cup chances. Players from both teams are brawling on the pitch. Tavares marches on to the grass and drags them apart, shoving them towards the dressing room. The previously boisterous Haitian expats are silent. For the second half Tavares switches to a 3-5-2 formation and watches Jean-Eudes Maurice and Portland Timbers’s James Marcelin dominate the midfield. Haiti score three unanswered goals and spare their blushes. The match finishes 4-2. Having survived their first scare, the players link arms and bow in front of the fans. ‘Yes, sir! Yes, sir!’ shouts Joseph, the fan I had met outside before the game, as he leaves the stadium. ‘I tell you before the match that we will win!’

  The Haiti team achieves what it set out to do. It has won its first two games. But the harder games will come later. Antigua and Barbuda is the only realistic threat to their qualification to the next round, the next group stage, where they could meet the US. A US–Haiti match in New York will be a home match for the visitors in all but name. It is the game everyone wants. Victory against Antigua and Barbuda is all they will need, against a side that has never been past the first round of World Cup qualification. Antigua is more famous for producing cricket players than footballers. They don’t even have a proper pitch to play on. Instead the crunch Antigua and Barbuda versus Haiti game will be played at the Sir Viv Richards Stadium, a cricket ground named after the island’s most famous son. But Antigua now has an ambitious young English coach, Tom Curtis. They also beat Curaçao in their first game, also after initially going behind. I check to see how the US Virgin Islands has fared in the Sir Viv Richards Stadium, a game that their captain, Reid Klopp, had hoped would offer them the best hope of a victory. Antigua and Barbuda win 8-1. The US Virgin Islands will go on to lose every game in qualification, including the return, home game against Antigua 10-0, and score just twice. They will concede forty goals.

  In Willemstad, no one has heeded the eight-goal warning from Antigua. Tavares marches his team into their dressing room, a small concrete cube with a metal door. I walk around the back and listen to the Haiti team celebrating, their victory songs drifting through the ventilation holes drilled into the brickwork. The team bus is waiting. It careers through Willemstad’s empty streets with an unnecessary police motorbike escort. Through the capital’s upmarket centre they are greeted by the Haitians who couldn’t be at the game; the working poor who couldn’t afford the time off. They desert their posts and run into the streets as the bus passes them, clenched fists in the air, shouting: ‘Ayiti! Ayiti!’ The players disembark into the arms of chefs still wearing their whites, waiters still wearing their ties, warehouse workers still wearing their boiler suits and waitresses still wearing their aprons. It is a victory. For the people.

  3

  RWANDA, ERITREA

  Kigali, Rwanda. November 2011.

  No one is waiting for the Eritrea national team because no one believes the Eritrea national team will ever arrive. The Amahoro Stadium in Kigali, Rwanda, is devoid of life. Tropical rains have washed through here minutes before, but the dark clouds promise more, and the rains will wash through here again in a few minutes’ time. But, for a few moments, it is safe to venture out between the deluges and onto the centre circle of the pitch.

  The second leg of a preliminary African 2014 World Cup qualifier is due to take place here between Rwanda and Eritrea. Twenty-two of Africa’s lowest ranked teams have been drawn for two matches, home and away. The competing countries read like a UN list of failed states and conflict zones. Somalia will not be allowed to play at home. The vicious Islamic fundamentalist Al-Shabaab militia – which essentially means ‘The Boys’ or ‘The Lads’ in Arabic – is still waging war against the embattled quasi-government in the ruined capital Mogadishu. They will play Ethiopia, a team that was once one of Africa’s best. They won the Africa Cup of Nations in 1962, and dominated throughout the sixties before it too succumbed to civil war and famine. The Democratic Republic of Congo, a country the size of Western Europe that has seen 5.4 million of its citizens killed in a civil war that appears to have never really ended, begins its journey to Brazil. Chad, Burundi, Kenya, too. Yet Rwanda versus Eritrea is the most unusual of the games, and not just because Rwanda is still emerging from one of the darkest chapters in human history. It is also a rare outing for the Eritrea national team.

  Eritrea is one of the worst countries in the world by almost any metric. Freedom of speech, freedom of press, torture, poverty and, of course, football. They are ranked 190th by FIFA even though they, too, were once a footballing power. Since independence from Ethiopia in 1993 following a long and bloody guerrilla war, Eritrea has done little of note on the pitch, but the Ethiopia team that won the 1962 Africa Cup of Nations was overwhelmingly Eritrean. Somewhere, talent is lurking.

  The trouble isn’t spotting it, it’s holding on to it. Such is the paranoia of the regime in the capital Asmara that it is virtually illegal for Eritreans to leave the country. One of the only ways out is to represent Eritrea in sport. Once out, however, Eritreans tend not to return. The entire national team disappeared and claimed asylum in Kenya while at the regional CECAFA Cup in 2009. Thirteen members of Red Sea FC, Eritrea’s leading club side, fled four months ago. That was the last time Eritrean footballers were allowed to leave the country. This is the national team’s, the Red Sea Boys, first match away from home in two years. Or it will be if they arrive.

  The stadium is vast, an unbroken bowl of steps raised atop sheer blue walls to prevent anyone from getting on to the pitch. The pitch is circled by a clay running track, the same colour as the dirt roads that meander through the shanties and slums found on the nearby hills. Amahoro means peace in the local Kinyarwanda language but the stadium has come to symbolise some of the worst, and the best, of human nature for Rwandans. Like the Afghans who pass their national stadium, where women considered immodest would be executed by the Taliban, or the Chileans who pass the Estádio Nacional, where thousands were tortured by forces loyal to General Pinochet during the 1973 coup, the Amahoro is symbolic of something more than football. During the 1994 genocide the stadium became a rare safe haven for Tutsis fleeing the massacres perpetrated by Hutu militias after a plane carrying Rwanda’s Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down near Kigali International Airport.

  One hundred days of night followed. A million people, maybe more, were hacked, bludgeoned, shot, strangled, stabbed, burned and drowned to death. A lucky few found shelter at the Amahoro where the UN set up a command centre and offered protection to anyone who made it. Ten thousand, though some claim 50,000, lived within the stadium while being under constant bombardment from outside. ‘Efforts by the genocidal [Hutu] Interahamwe militiamen to enter the stadium were blocked, though some hapless dwellers were killed by artillery rounds fired at the stadium,’ writes John G. Heidenrich in his book How to Prevent a Genocide. ‘Many others suffered from dysentery and cholera, and everyone had to endure the nauseating stench of their own accumulated filth.’ The Amahoro barely survived, but survive it did. Tutsi forces led by the current president Paul Kagame reached the stadium after a thre
e-month siege. And so began a long road to forgetting the genocide had ever happened.

  The Amahoro Stadium today is spartan but clean. There is no memorial here. It’s hard to imagine what this scene must have looked like in 1994. The tropical rains return. I run to the dugout and sit waiting in an empty, cold stadium for a team that may never show up.

  **

  A few days earlier the sun is setting over the Amahoro. It is perched on the top of a hill. Kigali is a series of dark green hills and valleys. The richer you are, the higher up the hill you live. Nearby two practice pitches are a hive of activity. One is a mud and sand rectangle spotted with rocks and broken glass. A third of the pitch is flooded but the youth team of the second division team practising here simply and skilfully flick the ball over any potentially crippling obstacles without complaint. Next to them is a state-of-the-art, all-weather field. More than 500 Rwandans stand around its perimeter in reverential silence. There is a gap every few metres from the amputees holding themselves upright on crutches. There are many amputees in Rwanda. They move silently, like phantoms, through the crowds and are largely ignored.