Nan
2006-09-02 18:54:19 UTC
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Haiti: 8,000 Murders, 35,000 Rapes Since Coup
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Democracy Now - Aug 31, 2006
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/31/144235
8,000 Murders, 35,000 Rapes and Sexual Assaults in Haiti
During U.S.-Backed Coup Regime after Aristide Ouster
A shocking new report published in the British medical journal The
Lancet has found widespread and systematic human rights abuses in
Haiti following the ouster of democratically-elected president Jean
Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.
New figures reveal that during the 22-month period of the U.S.-backed
Interim Government, 8,000 people were murdered in the greater Port-au
Prince area alone. 35,000 women and girls were raped or sexually
assaulted, more than half of the victims were children. Kidnappings,
extrajudicial detentions, physical assaults, death threats, and
threats of sexual violence were also common.
Those responsible for the human rights abuses include criminals, the
police, United Nations peacekeepers and anti-Lavalas gangs.
The findings are based on a new report published in the British
medical journal the Lancet. The study is based on an extensive survey
of households in the Port-au-Prince area.
* Athena Kolbe, master's level social worker with the Wayne State
University school of social work in Detroit Michigan. In December
2005 she coordinated an extensive survey of households in the
Port-au-Prince area to determine rates of human rights abuse under
the interim Haitian government.
* Dr. Royce Hutson, assistant professor of social work at Wayne
State University. He co-authored the Lancet study on human rights
abuses in Haiti.
AMY GOODMAN: The findings are based on a new report published in the
British medical journal, The Lancet. The study is based on an
extensive survey of households in the Port-au-Prince area of Haiti.
Athena Kolbe is one of the authors of the report. She's a
Master's-level social worker with the Wayne State University School
of Social Work in Detroit, Michigan. She joins us from a studio in
San Francisco. We're also joined by Dr. Royce Hutson, on the phone
from Detroit, co-author of the report, assistant professor of social
work at Wayne State University. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!
Athena Kolbe, these are startling findings. 8,000 murdered. Over what
time period? And how do you know this?
ATHENA KOLBE: We started -- well, basically what we did is we
randomly selected households in the greater Port-au-Prince area,
1,260 households, and then went and interviewed them about their
experiences with human rights violations beginning in February 29,
2004 with the departure of Aristide through December of 2005, which
is the one-month period, where we did the interviews. So based on
that, we found that 23 households out of the 1260 had members who had
been assassinated in that time period. And the figure of 8,000 is
derived from estimating that based on the population of the greater
Port-au-Prince area.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, when you say "randomly selected," obviously in
Haiti, one of the poorest -- the poorest country in the western
hemisphere, a lot of people don't have phones -- or even locating
folks. Could you explain your use of GPS to actually develop who
would be the random households selected?
ATHENA KOLBE: This was actually kind of a unique type of a study,
because this methodology hasn't really been used before in public
health and human rights studies. It was a used a little bit in
another Lancet study about Iraq just before and after the U.S.
invasion of Iraq. But what we did is we randomly selected GPS
locations, 1,500 of them, and then went and visited each location,
eliminated the ones that weren't actually households, the ones that
were, you know, the side of a mountain or the airport runway or
whatever, and then went and interviewed people at the remaining ones
that were households.
And we had an over 90% response rate, which is extraordinarily high
and really indicates that even those that were legitimate sites,
where we went and talked to people, most people were willing to talk
to us, indicating that they had something to say and wanted their
story to be told about their experiences with human rights.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about who carried out these killings?
ATHENA KOLBE: Yeah. We had -- the largest number of perpetrators for
most of the violations were criminals, indicating that there was high
rates of criminal activity. But also, we also had a number of
assassinations that were done by members of the Haitian National
Police, as well as killings by UN soldiers and killings by
demobilized soldiers from the ex-Haitian army that was disbanded by
President Aristide in 1995.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of the rapes and sexual assaults, because
you said that you had -- you identified actually 23 families that had
actually experienced assassinations or killings within their own
families, and in terms of the raw numbers on the actual rapes and
assaults, and then how you extrapolated those to this astounding
number of 35,000.
ATHENA KOLBE: Dr. Hutson could actually talk a little bit more about
that, because he has the figures right in front of him. But I believe
that it was 93 families total out of the 1,260 that had sexual
assault victims in their household. And some of those had multiple
victims within one household.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Royce Hutson, could you follow up on that?
DR. ROYCE HUTSON: Sure, absolutely. Yeah, actually, Athena, it was
94, but very close. Yeah, so we took 94, and we essentially
extrapolated it to the greater Port-au-Prince area with the estimated
number of females in the greater Port-au-Prince area that we got from
our own sample. Census data wasn't really available with regards to
what the average household size, what percentage of the population is
female. So we had to sort of construct those figures for ourselves.
And then we took those constructed figures and extrapolated our
findings to the greater Port-au-Prince area. And we got to 35,000,
roughly, female sexual assault victims.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break, and then we're going to come back
to this discussion and also go to Haiti, some videotape that is quite
shocking of UN forces moving into the neighborhood around Cite Soleil
and opening fire. We're also going to talk with an attorney who has
brought a lawsuit against a man who now sits in a New York jail. He's
sitting there for mortgage fraud charges, but he's a leader of a
paramilitary death squad, Emmanuel Constant, and they have brought a
lawsuit against him for sexual abuse and rape of women in Haiti.
Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: On the phone with us, Athena Kolbe, social worker with
the Wayne State University School of Social Work in Detroit. We're
also joined on the telephone by Dr. Royce Hutson, assistant professor
of social work at Wayne State. Athena is in a San Francisco TV
studio. Athena -- Juan, a question.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. I'd like to ask Dr. Hutson, these findings are so
startling that obviously a lot of people are going to question them,
because this is something that really has not been extensively
reported in the past. So I'd like to ask you, in your figures you
claim that over 50% of the murders were committed by government
forces or anti-Lavalas groups and the bulk of the others by
criminals, very few by Lavalas supporters themselves. And also in the
rapes, about a quarter of them were committed by either government
forces, police or anti-Lavalas groups. Now, obviously this is a
peer-reviewed study, appearing in the Lancet, but your defense of
those who will say that you're basically extrapolating from very
small numbers of people that you actually interviewed who were
victims of these crimes?
DR. ROYCE HUTSON: Well, actually, I would argue that it was not
really that small of a number, though it was 1,260 households that
really represented 5,720 individuals. And in survey methodology,
that's considered a rather large number of people to be surveying. If
you looked at our -- for instance, if you looked at our confidence
intervals, you'll find that for at least a number of -- in
extrapolated figures, I should explain, that those are pretty tight
figures, because our sample sizes are rather large.
With regards to who is committing these, we made a special point of,
for instance, not using interviewers that are associated with Lavalas
or less political parties, in the interest of trying to keep the
study nonpartisan. I mean, of course, there's a possibility that
people would claim that someone did something to them when they
didn't. But we find that , in fact, probably was not the case, in
that when we look at the figures, you know, it goes across the
breadth of various anti-Lavalas groups -- the demobilized army, the
HNP -- which are not exactly what I consider to be a sole entity.
They are, in fact, separate groups.
AMY GOODMAN: And just to explain, Lavalas being pro-Aristide forces.
Aristide removed in Haiti in 2004 in a U.S.-backed coup against him.
We're talking about this period after his removal.
DR. ROYCE HUTSON: That's correct. We didn't find any -- we didn't
detect any Lavalas atrocities with regards to murder or sexual
assault. We did detect some physical assaults by Lavalas members and
some threatening behavior by Lavalas members. So they're not
completely exonerated from any human rights abuses. However, as the
questioner noted, a vast majority of the atrocities that weren't
committed by criminals, but by others, were from groups affiliated in
some fashion with anti-Lavalas movements.
AMY GOODMAN: Athena Kolbe, who are the restaveks?
ATHENA KOLBE: The restaveks are unpaid domestic servants. They are
children, usually from the countryside, who come into the city, and
they work with Haitian households in exchange for room and board. And
we found that girls who were restaveks were particularly at risk for
sexual assault, more so than other children, although children in
general were particularly at risk, but also more so than even adult women.
And this really begs the question of, when you have so many restaveks
who were sexually assaulted -- and when we're talking about sexual
assault, also I want to clarify, we're not just talking about
molestation or someone grabbing someone sexually when they don't want
it. We're talking about more than 90% of the sexual assaults in our
study involved penetration. And some of the them involved multiple
perpetrators, involved penetration with inanimate objects, like a
piece of metal. These were very brutal sexual assaults that we
recorded. And when we're looking at such high numbers of children
being sexually assaulted by officers from the Haitian National
Police, and then particularly this vulnerable group of child domestic
servants, it really makes you wonder what exactly was going on under
the interim Haitian government in regards to the sexual assault of
children by police officers.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about the international peace monitoring
force that is stationed there? Did you find any indication of
violations, human rights violations, by them?
ATHENA KOLBE: We certainly did. Although the rates were lower than
some people might have expected, we found that they had very high
rates of threatening behavior, of committing death threats, threats
of sexual and physical violence. And by threats, we mean not just
pointing your gun at someone, because when you're a peacekeeping
soldier, you know, you carry a gun. If you have to point it at
people, then some people might interpret that as a threat. We didn't
count that as a threat. We counted threats as something verbal, a
verbal, you know, "Do this, or I'll kill you," where the person
really felt like they were legitimately threatened, like their life
was really at stake or the life of their family was really at stake.
And they had actually relatively high numbers of death threats and
threats of sexual and physical violence, which is perhaps indicative
of a pattern of perhaps a lack of training, or since it was so many
troops from different countries, as well, who are involved in this
threatening behavior, that perhaps the United Nations forces are not
interacting with the Haitian populous in a really appropriate way.
***
Democracy Now - Aug 31, 2006
UN Forces Open Fire on Poor Haitian Neighborhood
Is life in Haiti improving under the new presidency of Rene Preval?
Well just last week, UN forces opened fire on a poor neighborhood
outside of Cite Soleil. An international delegation of activists was
in the area and witnessed what happened. They also caught much of the
raid on tape. In a moment we are going to play some of that tape. But
first we are joined in our firehouse studio by one of the witnesses.
Ben Terrall is a writer and activist. He just returned from Haiti this week.
* Ben Terrall, writer and activist who just returned from Haiti.
His writings have appeared in CounterPunch, In These Times, the San
Francisco Chronicle and else where.
We go back to the day of the UN raid in Simon Pele. These are members
* Witnesses describe the UN raid as it is caught on tape.
Nineteen year-old Wildert Sanedy was shot and killed by UN troops in
the raid. The delegation caught up with his mother, Adacia Sanedy,
four days after the shooting. She spoke about her son.
* Adacia Sanedy, son killed by UN troops in Haiti.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to stay on this issue of UN forces. Is life
improving under the new presidency of Rene Preval? Just last week UN
forces opened fire on a poor neighborhood outside Cite Soleil. An
international delegation was in the area and witnessed what happened.
They also caught some of the raid on tape. In a moment, we'll play a
clip of that tape, but first we're joined in our Firehouse studio by
one of the witnesses, Ben Terrall, who is a writer and activist, just
returned from this delegation in Haiti. Ben, would you set the scene
for us about what we're going to see?
BEN TERRALL: Well, I was with other members of this delegation on a
road in Simon Pele, which is adjacent to Cite Soleil. It joins it on
one side. And we saw two armored personnel carriers come in as we
were there and go down one street, and on a perpendicular street
there were two other APCs. And I personally saw five or six Brazilian
UN troops run out of one of the APCs into the neighborhood. And we
went towards the APC, and we got footage.
AMY GOODMAN: This footage is quite something. Let's go to the day of
the UN raid in Simon Pele. These are members of the international
delegation describing the scene.
SASHA KRAMER: We're in Pele in Cite Soleil, and we just heard several
rounds of gunfire. We saw soldiers jump out of the tank and run into
the houses nearby. Sounds like they were shooting from inside the houses.
HAITIAN CIVILIAN: [translated] Last week, there were several groups
in Cite Soleil who said they would turn over their weapons. But
since, MINUSTAH has continued to shoot on the population. They have
not done that. As you can see right here, they are continuing to
shoot on the population.
DELEGATION WITNESS: There's the MINUSTAH soldiers firing from their
tank into a residential neighborhood. And the blue helmets signify
that it's UN soldiers. They're wearing the Brazilian uniforms.
They're getting instructions over the radio right now. They don't
seem to be at all deterred by our presence. More troops have moved
into position here, and it looks like a military operation underway.
The foot troops are going into the area -- the infantry troops are
going into the area. They're positioning themselves for some kind of
an attack in this civilian neighborhood.
HAITIAN CIVILIAN: [translated] This is the same formula they used
when they killed Dred Wilme on the 6th of July last year. So they are
cutting off a street here using bulldozers, so people can't get in
and out. They say they are looking for bandits. But we do not know
exactly who they are looking for.
AMY GOODMAN: 19-year-old Wildert Sanedy was shot and killed by the UN
troops in the raid. The delegation caught up with his mother, Adacia
Sanedy, four days after the shooting. She talked about her son.
ADACIA SANEDY: [translated] After I lost my son, I didn't even know
what to do. I couldn't even stand up. I felt like I lost him in a
very bad situation. My message to the UN is to thank them for the son
that they killed. They are always looking for bandits. Apparently
they didn't get them. At this time, any innocent civilians just
passing can get shot for nothing.
AMY GOODMAN: Ben Terrall, there is a grieving mother. Explain what
she's saying, because maybe it misses something in translation, as
she says I thank the UN troops.
BEN TERRALL: Well, I was going to ask her if she had a message to the
outside world, but we just sort of let her talk about the experience.
And she described how her son was fixing the radio on the roof as the
snipers came in. And she said, 'This is my message to the UN: I want
to thank you for killing my son. You come in here. I don't know why
you're here. Civilians are killed all the time.' So this is part of a
pattern. This operation --
AMY GOODMAN: She's being sarcastic.
BEN TERRALL: Completely sarcastic. Yeah, she's very obviously very
bitter about this. And her son did nothing to deserve this. He wasn't
connected to an armed group. He was just fixing a radio on the roof.
And this has been true throughout these operations. I talked to an
older man who was leaving the neighborhood, who said there had been
many people killed. We have him on tape, as we were interviewing him.
He said many people had been killed, and they weren't connected to
armed groups.
So the UN, they're -- basically the UN is operating without
oversight. They're operating with impunity. They're going in, and
they're just, quote/unquote, "securing" these neighborhoods at the
behest of the ultra-rightwing small elite in Haiti that want to kill
as many people as possible in these areas. They're not going after
death squads. They're not disarming the rightist-backed forces and
the holdover forces from the coup, which unfortunately are still
controlling the judiciary. They're controlling much of the Haitian
government.
And though there have been a small number of high-profile political
prisoners released, as well they've been targeting people. So this
week I spoke with an incredible Lavalas organizer who's very close to
Aristide. He had been with Lavalas from their early years. They come
back from exile. His name is Rene Civil. He had come back from exile,
and he was picked up for what looks to be a completely bogus charge.
His lawyers denounced the charges on the radio. And I spoke to him,
and it just looked completely ridiculous. He left his car in Haiti.
He went to the D.R. They're charging him with crimes committed by the
police, when they had his car when he was in exile.
So this guy spoke to us earlier in the week about a program he was
running, which was getting scholarships to poor kids. He's working
with the poorest of the poor, as the Lavalas movement is all about.
I mean, their motto was "From misery to poverty with dignity." And
apparently, the U.S. continues to just feel -- clearly the U.S.,
France, and Canada continues to not be willing to accept that. And
their friends who are still in power there just want to target these
people as much as possible and kill people and do all the things that
we heard of in the Lancet reports.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I'd like to ask you about some of these incidents and
the atrocities of the UN peacekeepers. What kind of coverage in the
media -- first of all, in Haiti, because the rest of the world has
already, like, forgotten Haiti, ever since Preval came back, was
re-elected as president. But in terms of -- what's happened now in
terms of the Haitian media?
BEN TERRALL: Well, the largely rightwing elite-controlled Haitian
media is driven by these ultra-rich, ultra-right forces that want the
UN to crack down further. They want them to kill more people. There's
been a campaign of complete dehumanization of the poorest
neighborhoods in Haiti. And so, you're not getting accurate
information in most of the Haitian press and a small number of radio
stations.
But certainly internationally, we don't hear the broader -- we never
hear the broader context of what the UN has been doing, since the
beginning of the coup, which is backing up the Haitian police, aiding
and abetting slaughters. And this went on in the first two years. A
key factor of this is this went on in the first two years. And they
were provoking the population by engaging in vast numbers of
killings, the police. And it's been thoroughly documented before the
Lancet study by the University of Miami Law School, by filmmaker
Kevin Pina, by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.
So they kill off, they imprison, they torture the nonviolent
leadership. And then a small number of people, after two years of
these attacks, take up arms. But they're very limited in number. And
it's something that I think people in Houston would do if their
neighborhoods were under siege by armed forces for two years. And you
have to remember, in the '91 coup, there were like 5,000 people
killed, so people have this memory of that. And it's always -- in the
media reporting, it's always taken out of that context.
And also, you never hear about the people that are running free, you
know, the rightwing people like Guy Philippe, who was a key player in
the coup forces that came in from the north, who was trained by the
U.S., you know; and Jodel Chamblain is out now, too. And these people
are running around. They're old Duvalier people running around, who
were backing all these death squads, and nobody's disarming them.
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Haiti: 8,000 Murders, 35,000 Rapes Since Coup
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Democracy Now - Aug 31, 2006
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/31/144235
8,000 Murders, 35,000 Rapes and Sexual Assaults in Haiti
During U.S.-Backed Coup Regime after Aristide Ouster
A shocking new report published in the British medical journal The
Lancet has found widespread and systematic human rights abuses in
Haiti following the ouster of democratically-elected president Jean
Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.
New figures reveal that during the 22-month period of the U.S.-backed
Interim Government, 8,000 people were murdered in the greater Port-au
Prince area alone. 35,000 women and girls were raped or sexually
assaulted, more than half of the victims were children. Kidnappings,
extrajudicial detentions, physical assaults, death threats, and
threats of sexual violence were also common.
Those responsible for the human rights abuses include criminals, the
police, United Nations peacekeepers and anti-Lavalas gangs.
The findings are based on a new report published in the British
medical journal the Lancet. The study is based on an extensive survey
of households in the Port-au-Prince area.
* Athena Kolbe, master's level social worker with the Wayne State
University school of social work in Detroit Michigan. In December
2005 she coordinated an extensive survey of households in the
Port-au-Prince area to determine rates of human rights abuse under
the interim Haitian government.
* Dr. Royce Hutson, assistant professor of social work at Wayne
State University. He co-authored the Lancet study on human rights
abuses in Haiti.
AMY GOODMAN: The findings are based on a new report published in the
British medical journal, The Lancet. The study is based on an
extensive survey of households in the Port-au-Prince area of Haiti.
Athena Kolbe is one of the authors of the report. She's a
Master's-level social worker with the Wayne State University School
of Social Work in Detroit, Michigan. She joins us from a studio in
San Francisco. We're also joined by Dr. Royce Hutson, on the phone
from Detroit, co-author of the report, assistant professor of social
work at Wayne State University. We welcome you both to Democracy Now!
Athena Kolbe, these are startling findings. 8,000 murdered. Over what
time period? And how do you know this?
ATHENA KOLBE: We started -- well, basically what we did is we
randomly selected households in the greater Port-au-Prince area,
1,260 households, and then went and interviewed them about their
experiences with human rights violations beginning in February 29,
2004 with the departure of Aristide through December of 2005, which
is the one-month period, where we did the interviews. So based on
that, we found that 23 households out of the 1260 had members who had
been assassinated in that time period. And the figure of 8,000 is
derived from estimating that based on the population of the greater
Port-au-Prince area.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, when you say "randomly selected," obviously in
Haiti, one of the poorest -- the poorest country in the western
hemisphere, a lot of people don't have phones -- or even locating
folks. Could you explain your use of GPS to actually develop who
would be the random households selected?
ATHENA KOLBE: This was actually kind of a unique type of a study,
because this methodology hasn't really been used before in public
health and human rights studies. It was a used a little bit in
another Lancet study about Iraq just before and after the U.S.
invasion of Iraq. But what we did is we randomly selected GPS
locations, 1,500 of them, and then went and visited each location,
eliminated the ones that weren't actually households, the ones that
were, you know, the side of a mountain or the airport runway or
whatever, and then went and interviewed people at the remaining ones
that were households.
And we had an over 90% response rate, which is extraordinarily high
and really indicates that even those that were legitimate sites,
where we went and talked to people, most people were willing to talk
to us, indicating that they had something to say and wanted their
story to be told about their experiences with human rights.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about who carried out these killings?
ATHENA KOLBE: Yeah. We had -- the largest number of perpetrators for
most of the violations were criminals, indicating that there was high
rates of criminal activity. But also, we also had a number of
assassinations that were done by members of the Haitian National
Police, as well as killings by UN soldiers and killings by
demobilized soldiers from the ex-Haitian army that was disbanded by
President Aristide in 1995.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of the rapes and sexual assaults, because
you said that you had -- you identified actually 23 families that had
actually experienced assassinations or killings within their own
families, and in terms of the raw numbers on the actual rapes and
assaults, and then how you extrapolated those to this astounding
number of 35,000.
ATHENA KOLBE: Dr. Hutson could actually talk a little bit more about
that, because he has the figures right in front of him. But I believe
that it was 93 families total out of the 1,260 that had sexual
assault victims in their household. And some of those had multiple
victims within one household.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Royce Hutson, could you follow up on that?
DR. ROYCE HUTSON: Sure, absolutely. Yeah, actually, Athena, it was
94, but very close. Yeah, so we took 94, and we essentially
extrapolated it to the greater Port-au-Prince area with the estimated
number of females in the greater Port-au-Prince area that we got from
our own sample. Census data wasn't really available with regards to
what the average household size, what percentage of the population is
female. So we had to sort of construct those figures for ourselves.
And then we took those constructed figures and extrapolated our
findings to the greater Port-au-Prince area. And we got to 35,000,
roughly, female sexual assault victims.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break, and then we're going to come back
to this discussion and also go to Haiti, some videotape that is quite
shocking of UN forces moving into the neighborhood around Cite Soleil
and opening fire. We're also going to talk with an attorney who has
brought a lawsuit against a man who now sits in a New York jail. He's
sitting there for mortgage fraud charges, but he's a leader of a
paramilitary death squad, Emmanuel Constant, and they have brought a
lawsuit against him for sexual abuse and rape of women in Haiti.
Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: On the phone with us, Athena Kolbe, social worker with
the Wayne State University School of Social Work in Detroit. We're
also joined on the telephone by Dr. Royce Hutson, assistant professor
of social work at Wayne State. Athena is in a San Francisco TV
studio. Athena -- Juan, a question.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. I'd like to ask Dr. Hutson, these findings are so
startling that obviously a lot of people are going to question them,
because this is something that really has not been extensively
reported in the past. So I'd like to ask you, in your figures you
claim that over 50% of the murders were committed by government
forces or anti-Lavalas groups and the bulk of the others by
criminals, very few by Lavalas supporters themselves. And also in the
rapes, about a quarter of them were committed by either government
forces, police or anti-Lavalas groups. Now, obviously this is a
peer-reviewed study, appearing in the Lancet, but your defense of
those who will say that you're basically extrapolating from very
small numbers of people that you actually interviewed who were
victims of these crimes?
DR. ROYCE HUTSON: Well, actually, I would argue that it was not
really that small of a number, though it was 1,260 households that
really represented 5,720 individuals. And in survey methodology,
that's considered a rather large number of people to be surveying. If
you looked at our -- for instance, if you looked at our confidence
intervals, you'll find that for at least a number of -- in
extrapolated figures, I should explain, that those are pretty tight
figures, because our sample sizes are rather large.
With regards to who is committing these, we made a special point of,
for instance, not using interviewers that are associated with Lavalas
or less political parties, in the interest of trying to keep the
study nonpartisan. I mean, of course, there's a possibility that
people would claim that someone did something to them when they
didn't. But we find that , in fact, probably was not the case, in
that when we look at the figures, you know, it goes across the
breadth of various anti-Lavalas groups -- the demobilized army, the
HNP -- which are not exactly what I consider to be a sole entity.
They are, in fact, separate groups.
AMY GOODMAN: And just to explain, Lavalas being pro-Aristide forces.
Aristide removed in Haiti in 2004 in a U.S.-backed coup against him.
We're talking about this period after his removal.
DR. ROYCE HUTSON: That's correct. We didn't find any -- we didn't
detect any Lavalas atrocities with regards to murder or sexual
assault. We did detect some physical assaults by Lavalas members and
some threatening behavior by Lavalas members. So they're not
completely exonerated from any human rights abuses. However, as the
questioner noted, a vast majority of the atrocities that weren't
committed by criminals, but by others, were from groups affiliated in
some fashion with anti-Lavalas movements.
AMY GOODMAN: Athena Kolbe, who are the restaveks?
ATHENA KOLBE: The restaveks are unpaid domestic servants. They are
children, usually from the countryside, who come into the city, and
they work with Haitian households in exchange for room and board. And
we found that girls who were restaveks were particularly at risk for
sexual assault, more so than other children, although children in
general were particularly at risk, but also more so than even adult women.
And this really begs the question of, when you have so many restaveks
who were sexually assaulted -- and when we're talking about sexual
assault, also I want to clarify, we're not just talking about
molestation or someone grabbing someone sexually when they don't want
it. We're talking about more than 90% of the sexual assaults in our
study involved penetration. And some of the them involved multiple
perpetrators, involved penetration with inanimate objects, like a
piece of metal. These were very brutal sexual assaults that we
recorded. And when we're looking at such high numbers of children
being sexually assaulted by officers from the Haitian National
Police, and then particularly this vulnerable group of child domestic
servants, it really makes you wonder what exactly was going on under
the interim Haitian government in regards to the sexual assault of
children by police officers.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about the international peace monitoring
force that is stationed there? Did you find any indication of
violations, human rights violations, by them?
ATHENA KOLBE: We certainly did. Although the rates were lower than
some people might have expected, we found that they had very high
rates of threatening behavior, of committing death threats, threats
of sexual and physical violence. And by threats, we mean not just
pointing your gun at someone, because when you're a peacekeeping
soldier, you know, you carry a gun. If you have to point it at
people, then some people might interpret that as a threat. We didn't
count that as a threat. We counted threats as something verbal, a
verbal, you know, "Do this, or I'll kill you," where the person
really felt like they were legitimately threatened, like their life
was really at stake or the life of their family was really at stake.
And they had actually relatively high numbers of death threats and
threats of sexual and physical violence, which is perhaps indicative
of a pattern of perhaps a lack of training, or since it was so many
troops from different countries, as well, who are involved in this
threatening behavior, that perhaps the United Nations forces are not
interacting with the Haitian populous in a really appropriate way.
***
Democracy Now - Aug 31, 2006
UN Forces Open Fire on Poor Haitian Neighborhood
Is life in Haiti improving under the new presidency of Rene Preval?
Well just last week, UN forces opened fire on a poor neighborhood
outside of Cite Soleil. An international delegation of activists was
in the area and witnessed what happened. They also caught much of the
raid on tape. In a moment we are going to play some of that tape. But
first we are joined in our firehouse studio by one of the witnesses.
Ben Terrall is a writer and activist. He just returned from Haiti this week.
* Ben Terrall, writer and activist who just returned from Haiti.
His writings have appeared in CounterPunch, In These Times, the San
Francisco Chronicle and else where.
We go back to the day of the UN raid in Simon Pele. These are members
* Witnesses describe the UN raid as it is caught on tape.
Nineteen year-old Wildert Sanedy was shot and killed by UN troops in
the raid. The delegation caught up with his mother, Adacia Sanedy,
four days after the shooting. She spoke about her son.
* Adacia Sanedy, son killed by UN troops in Haiti.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to stay on this issue of UN forces. Is life
improving under the new presidency of Rene Preval? Just last week UN
forces opened fire on a poor neighborhood outside Cite Soleil. An
international delegation was in the area and witnessed what happened.
They also caught some of the raid on tape. In a moment, we'll play a
clip of that tape, but first we're joined in our Firehouse studio by
one of the witnesses, Ben Terrall, who is a writer and activist, just
returned from this delegation in Haiti. Ben, would you set the scene
for us about what we're going to see?
BEN TERRALL: Well, I was with other members of this delegation on a
road in Simon Pele, which is adjacent to Cite Soleil. It joins it on
one side. And we saw two armored personnel carriers come in as we
were there and go down one street, and on a perpendicular street
there were two other APCs. And I personally saw five or six Brazilian
UN troops run out of one of the APCs into the neighborhood. And we
went towards the APC, and we got footage.
AMY GOODMAN: This footage is quite something. Let's go to the day of
the UN raid in Simon Pele. These are members of the international
delegation describing the scene.
SASHA KRAMER: We're in Pele in Cite Soleil, and we just heard several
rounds of gunfire. We saw soldiers jump out of the tank and run into
the houses nearby. Sounds like they were shooting from inside the houses.
HAITIAN CIVILIAN: [translated] Last week, there were several groups
in Cite Soleil who said they would turn over their weapons. But
since, MINUSTAH has continued to shoot on the population. They have
not done that. As you can see right here, they are continuing to
shoot on the population.
DELEGATION WITNESS: There's the MINUSTAH soldiers firing from their
tank into a residential neighborhood. And the blue helmets signify
that it's UN soldiers. They're wearing the Brazilian uniforms.
They're getting instructions over the radio right now. They don't
seem to be at all deterred by our presence. More troops have moved
into position here, and it looks like a military operation underway.
The foot troops are going into the area -- the infantry troops are
going into the area. They're positioning themselves for some kind of
an attack in this civilian neighborhood.
HAITIAN CIVILIAN: [translated] This is the same formula they used
when they killed Dred Wilme on the 6th of July last year. So they are
cutting off a street here using bulldozers, so people can't get in
and out. They say they are looking for bandits. But we do not know
exactly who they are looking for.
AMY GOODMAN: 19-year-old Wildert Sanedy was shot and killed by the UN
troops in the raid. The delegation caught up with his mother, Adacia
Sanedy, four days after the shooting. She talked about her son.
ADACIA SANEDY: [translated] After I lost my son, I didn't even know
what to do. I couldn't even stand up. I felt like I lost him in a
very bad situation. My message to the UN is to thank them for the son
that they killed. They are always looking for bandits. Apparently
they didn't get them. At this time, any innocent civilians just
passing can get shot for nothing.
AMY GOODMAN: Ben Terrall, there is a grieving mother. Explain what
she's saying, because maybe it misses something in translation, as
she says I thank the UN troops.
BEN TERRALL: Well, I was going to ask her if she had a message to the
outside world, but we just sort of let her talk about the experience.
And she described how her son was fixing the radio on the roof as the
snipers came in. And she said, 'This is my message to the UN: I want
to thank you for killing my son. You come in here. I don't know why
you're here. Civilians are killed all the time.' So this is part of a
pattern. This operation --
AMY GOODMAN: She's being sarcastic.
BEN TERRALL: Completely sarcastic. Yeah, she's very obviously very
bitter about this. And her son did nothing to deserve this. He wasn't
connected to an armed group. He was just fixing a radio on the roof.
And this has been true throughout these operations. I talked to an
older man who was leaving the neighborhood, who said there had been
many people killed. We have him on tape, as we were interviewing him.
He said many people had been killed, and they weren't connected to
armed groups.
So the UN, they're -- basically the UN is operating without
oversight. They're operating with impunity. They're going in, and
they're just, quote/unquote, "securing" these neighborhoods at the
behest of the ultra-rightwing small elite in Haiti that want to kill
as many people as possible in these areas. They're not going after
death squads. They're not disarming the rightist-backed forces and
the holdover forces from the coup, which unfortunately are still
controlling the judiciary. They're controlling much of the Haitian
government.
And though there have been a small number of high-profile political
prisoners released, as well they've been targeting people. So this
week I spoke with an incredible Lavalas organizer who's very close to
Aristide. He had been with Lavalas from their early years. They come
back from exile. His name is Rene Civil. He had come back from exile,
and he was picked up for what looks to be a completely bogus charge.
His lawyers denounced the charges on the radio. And I spoke to him,
and it just looked completely ridiculous. He left his car in Haiti.
He went to the D.R. They're charging him with crimes committed by the
police, when they had his car when he was in exile.
So this guy spoke to us earlier in the week about a program he was
running, which was getting scholarships to poor kids. He's working
with the poorest of the poor, as the Lavalas movement is all about.
I mean, their motto was "From misery to poverty with dignity." And
apparently, the U.S. continues to just feel -- clearly the U.S.,
France, and Canada continues to not be willing to accept that. And
their friends who are still in power there just want to target these
people as much as possible and kill people and do all the things that
we heard of in the Lancet reports.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I'd like to ask you about some of these incidents and
the atrocities of the UN peacekeepers. What kind of coverage in the
media -- first of all, in Haiti, because the rest of the world has
already, like, forgotten Haiti, ever since Preval came back, was
re-elected as president. But in terms of -- what's happened now in
terms of the Haitian media?
BEN TERRALL: Well, the largely rightwing elite-controlled Haitian
media is driven by these ultra-rich, ultra-right forces that want the
UN to crack down further. They want them to kill more people. There's
been a campaign of complete dehumanization of the poorest
neighborhoods in Haiti. And so, you're not getting accurate
information in most of the Haitian press and a small number of radio
stations.
But certainly internationally, we don't hear the broader -- we never
hear the broader context of what the UN has been doing, since the
beginning of the coup, which is backing up the Haitian police, aiding
and abetting slaughters. And this went on in the first two years. A
key factor of this is this went on in the first two years. And they
were provoking the population by engaging in vast numbers of
killings, the police. And it's been thoroughly documented before the
Lancet study by the University of Miami Law School, by filmmaker
Kevin Pina, by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.
So they kill off, they imprison, they torture the nonviolent
leadership. And then a small number of people, after two years of
these attacks, take up arms. But they're very limited in number. And
it's something that I think people in Houston would do if their
neighborhoods were under siege by armed forces for two years. And you
have to remember, in the '91 coup, there were like 5,000 people
killed, so people have this memory of that. And it's always -- in the
media reporting, it's always taken out of that context.
And also, you never hear about the people that are running free, you
know, the rightwing people like Guy Philippe, who was a key player in
the coup forces that came in from the north, who was trained by the
U.S., you know; and Jodel Chamblain is out now, too. And these people
are running around. They're old Duvalier people running around, who
were backing all these death squads, and nobody's disarming them.
sent by The Freedom Archives
http://freedomarchives.org/mailman/listinfo/news_freedomarchives.org
GENOCIDE !!!
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