By David Winch, UN Special, May 2009
The arrival was a shock. The airport, a shambles. After a day and a night on flights from Geneva to Paris to Togo and beyond, here we were in Central Africa. Years later, the memories of this, my first field mission, remain vivid.
Arriving from the North, the tropical climate suddenly changes the feel and smell of everything. Palm leaves waved languidly at the edges of the terminal, while small lizards skittered through the airport lobby. A brigade of customs inspectors was persuaded by our UN country team not to rummage through our belongings. Then we jammed ourselves into a convoy of white Japanese minivans. We bounced along pockmarked roads on their rocky chassis into the capital, Bangui.
This was the first of my two electoral observation missions, legislative and presidential, in the Central African Republic. Arriving in Bangui on a long weekend before the first meeting on Monday, we had a few days to walk through the battered streets of town, and to take in this new world.
Idyllic vision
How on earth did I get here? Fairly simple. There had been an urgent call for Geneva staff willing to go on a mission to the Central African Republic. Best of all, no special qualifications: just speak French and look reliable. Would I go? Definitely! For someone whose career took a detour through Headquarters posts, this was contact with the “real work” of the UN.
Once arrived, we gathered at a big French chain hotel on the river’s edge with other staff flown in from New York, Geneva, Vienna. The jarring juxtapositions soon began. Here was a scene from any tropical resort — a hotel with pool, bar, reception — but looking directly across the mighty Oubangui at turbulent ex-Zaire. It was an idyllic vision: across the broad river, a single house sat halfway up the hill, a vision of tranquility. But that was also, we were reminded sternly, rebel-held territory.
Island of order
This was not an active war front, and the humanitarian situation had not yet declined accordingly. Road pirates (“coupeurs de route”) abounded in the north of the country, but for these long-distance trips, we generally flew in wide-bodied cargo planes piloted by able Ukrainians (who landed on bare, rough forest clearings). The truth was, a UN mission in these conditions was more like an adventure tour abroad. I had been in more obvious danger on trips in remote Canada or Mexico. It was low stress, small danger, high anticipation and a political challenge.
Camp Béal, our mission HQ, was an island of military order: gated, with gardens tended, roads swept and cabins’ privacy respected. The soldiers were mostly burly troops from West Africa, cruising back and forth on white UN emblazoned jeeps and vans. UN drivers held a prized post and a much-needed skill (as we soon learned on a test drive, getting stuck on a single-lane forest road while trying to find a lost village in advance of the elections). After days of training and orientation at Camp Béal, including driver’s tests and detailed preparation about polling and voting observation, we were ready.
On the town
In the meantime, we had to eat. Lebanese restaurateurs predominate in Bangui, but some of us chose a first evening out at a restaurant on the edge of town. A weather-beaten French expat manned the kitchen, and his menu was memorable: grilled termites, caterpillar salad and such Franco-African delights as kanda de poisson, carpaccio d’antilope fumé, boa à la niçoise, tortue au vin blanc, porc-épic aux côtes de Provence and pavé d’autruche. Dinner-bound snakes slithered about in nearby aquarium tanks. The next evening, other restaurants proved more popular! These featured the delectable “capitaine” redfish wrapped in steamed palm leaves with rice.
Killing time at night or just wandering around, we often had to wade past young boys (“les gamins”), camping out on the city streets. Clearly, we were privileged. This was our first taste of “field guilt”: we lodged in secure compounds with cash advances and well-fed evenings, but on the sidewalks children surrounded us, grabbing for scraps. A well-known moral quandary for privileged foreign correspondents and humanitarian workers, chronicled in works ranging from the film The Year of Living Dangerously to the novel Emergency Sex. This guilt even extended to our staff: Where would our driver end up once the mission closed? We wrestled with these feelings as we prepared for the elections.
The big vote
On the day of the parliamentary vote, we staggered out after the 4 a.m. wake-up. Scrambling to get dressed, it was a race down the hotel’s recalcitrant elevators to waiting jeeps. We met our soldier-escorts, from Côte d’Ivoire, in the Army parking lot, then rumbled north through the dark city, past dormant markets and vacant stalls. Morning fog blocked the view, and we were lucky to see tail lights of the vehicles ahead, glowing like cigarettes in the dark.
By 5 a.m., some light appeared over trees on the plains. Finally, a semi-day emerged. After an hour on the newly paved, EU-built highway, we suddenly arrived at the small town of Damara, and drove to its red-dirt hilltop. At the town limits, a road sign beckoned north to Chad.
Few people were around yet. An empty, locked school building was supposed to be the polling station. Were we in the right place? Townspeople eventually came: mostly very lucid, cheerful, optimistic about things. They lined up to vote in sensible queues. Our soldier-escorts, likeable but heavily armed, stayed in the background. Were they intimidating?
Here the UN’s real “observer” work began. We earnestly asked questions of voters: Have you been instructed how to vote? Have you been warned against voting? Are you here freely and with no obligation? Do you understand what is required in the polling station?
This electoral process wound up late in the evenings, with ballot-counting by candlelight, one election in the lobby at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the next on the floor of a small-town schoolhouse. After our late-night returns, work was still not done; at least one presidential candidate awoke with us with loud honking at the hotel gate to protest “irregularities”. We listened carefully, took notes, then fell back in bed.
Back to Geneva
Once voting was completed and our mission finished, transport problems meant we had to wait 4-5 days in Bangui for the weekly flight out. I later joked to friends that this felt like “Mission: Implausible”: I killed time watching old French movies on Canal Plus in my hotel room and reading second-hand novels.
Meanwhile, East Timor had started to explode and UN staff were under the gun … That was a real mission! But in fact, ours was “real”, too.
Back at UN Geneva, I used what remained of my daily-expenses cash to help pay for a washer-dryer at home. A year or two later, the duly elected government was overthrown.
–Who came out ahead? I wondered.
@DavidWinchEditoral, 2018
