21905: Lemieux: Miami Herald: Rape Unpunished in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

 Posted on Sun, May. 16, 2004



By JOE MOZINGO
jmozingo@herald.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- With the night lit by burning
barricades, a delicate young woman named Eozelor
was walking near her little cinder-block home
when three men tried to sweet-talk her into the
shadows.

She refused, so they punched her in the side of
the head, shoved her into a dark corner of an
industrial area and raped her on the dirt and
gravel.

When they finished, Eozelor ran crying to the
police station. One officer seemed concerned --
then pulled the 21-year-old into a dark
guardhouse and raped her while two others
watched.

Her rape, like so many others here, was suffered
alone and was lost in the din of political
upheaval that engulfed this Caribbean nation in
the weeks before and after the departure of
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

No one ever looked for the rapists. No one
reported the police abuse. Eozelor has yet to
visit a hospital or a shelter, much less seek
psychological counseling. Her body is breaking
out in sores, and her menstruation is coming out
in clots.

''The only thing I feel right now is that inside
my body is dirty,'' she said.

Hundreds of women and girls -- some younger than
6 -- were raped, often by police and pro-Aristide
gunmen called chimres, with impunity, according
to human rights observers and local women's
shelters.

They say the situation for the last two years had
already rivaled the terror that the military
regimes and death squads of the early 1990s
inflicted on women.

But the last four months degenerated far beyond
what anyone could imagine.

''It was worse than I have ever seen,'' said
Yolette Jeanty, director of the women's rights
group Kay Fanm. ``At least before, there were
some ways to get justice.''

A COMMON VIEW

Rape has always carried a certain level of
impunity in Haiti. Even the concept of rape is
often limited to young victims.

''The adult women, they don't consider it rape,''
Jeanty said. ``There is this mentality that if
you're not a virgin, it's not a rape.''

By Haitian law, rape is considered a crime
against honor -- a squandering of virginity that
can often be settled with a payment to the
victim's family.

''Sometimes the judge will even suggest as a
reparation that the rapist marry the girl,''
Jeanty said.

And more often than not, it is not the rapist who
reaps shame and scorn, but the woman. So, few
ever report the crime.

Eozelor did not report hers. Nor did Daphney, who
was 27 when two police officers stopped her two
years ago on her way to a job sewing T-shirts.
They raped her next to a Texaco station in broad
daylight.

She still has not summoned the courage to tell
her family, and she has to avert her gaze when
she recounts the attack. Her eyes well up, and
she speaks just above a whisper. ``I don't even
know how to put it into words.''

Like the majority of rapes, hers is not even a
statistic.

Women's rights groups estimate that only one in
10 women report their rapes, but there is no way
of knowing for sure.

Between January and April, Kay Fanm documented 46
rapes, involving mostly young girls. That is
about 13 a month, compared with fewer than two a
month in the preceding four years.

A larger women's group, Solidarity of Haitian
Women, reported 46 ''political rapes'' -- those
allegedly conducted by armed political factions
-- in January alone.

Under military rule in the early 1990s, ''rape
was used as a form of political repression,''
said Olga Benoit, the group's director. ``We can
see now that the situation was repeated during
Aristide. The tool of rape was used
systematically by the chimres.''

STALKED AND RAPED

A 22-year-old woman named Nadege told The Herald
that chimres stalked her for months, trying to
find her adoptive father, a university professor
active in demonstrations against the government.

Finally, in October, they came out of the
darkness to her house in Leogane. They beat her,
threw her into a car and took her back to
Port-au-Prince, where she was raped and held
hostage for 18 days.

The tragic irony to stories like that, Benoit
said, is that one reason the United States
restored Aristide to power in 1994 was ostensibly
the rapes perpetrated by the people who ousted
him in 1991.

During his exile, the paramilitary group known as
FRAPH allegedly raped mothers in front of their
families. Yet, only a handful of rapists were
convicted after Aristide returned to power.

Haiti's National Coalition for Human Rights
places blame for the rapes squarely on Aristide's
Lavalas Family party.

''Lavalas were the ones encouraging impunity,''
said Pierre Esperance, the coalition's director.
``They opened the doors for chimres to do
whatever they wanted.''

Lavalas leaders deny the charge, saying they had
nothing to do with whoever committed the crimes.
''Now anything done by gangs is blamed on
Lavalas,'' said party member Leslie Voltaire.

While the women's advocates have received reports
of political rapes by only pro-Aristide groups,
they have no illusions that the armed rebels who
ousted Aristide this time -- mostly former
chimres, FRAPH and military -- are above the
crime.

At least now they see a window for justice.
Benoit and Jeanty are busy documenting the
attacks and working with attorneys to bring cases
to the justice department -- when, and if, it
begins functioning again.

There is little else that women like Khetia, a
new mother from the town of St. Marc, can hope
for.

ANOTHER ASSAULT

On Feb. 27, Khetia, 21, accompanied her friend
Anne to a police station to look for Anne's
boyfriend, who had been detained by chimres.

When the pair arrived, there were no police. A
man hit Khetia in the mouth with the butt of his
pistol, chipping a tooth.

''Five men dragged me into a room and raped me
over and over,'' she said. ``They kept me until
late at night.''

She was kicked onto the street. The rapes had
ripped the tissue where she had a C-section just
a month before. ''I couldn't even walk,'' she
said. ``A man on the street had to carry me
home.''

Her friend Anne, 25, was also raped.

Weeks later, in a women's shelter in
Port-au-Prince, 50 miles south, they told their
story to a Haitian radio reporter, who broadcast
their full names.

When they returned to St. Marc, everyone knew
what happened. They were threatened. They were
shunned. The father of Khetia's infant son took
him away.

''He was ashamed that all of St. Marc knew I had
been raped,'' she said.

She is in hiding now.

UTTER IMPUNITY

What is perhaps most disturbing about those cases
is the impunity shown in such brazen assaults.

Take Lourna, 13. On Dec. 27, two men with
machetes climbed through her bedroom window and
raped her while her mother was out for the night.
''I know who they are,'' she said. ``They are
from the neighborhood. One has two kids. The
other has a daughter.''

Or Tristel, 9, who taps her tiny shoes and
fidgets in her seat as she earnestly tries to
tell her story. Her stepfather, enraged at her
mother, kidnapped the girl and raped her
repeatedly over two months, she said. When the
police found her, they didn't arrest him.

And there is Sonita, 21, a wisp of a woman, not
even 90 pounds, living in a shack in the slums
with a skeletal baby who is on the verge of
death.

She made the mistake of going to a hospital in
search of treatment for vaginal hemmorhaging.

She was in a hospital bathroom one day when armed
chimres burst in. Two of them put a pistol to her
neck and a rifle to her temple, and raped her.

She screamed. No one came. When the two finished,
others lined up. Finally, a groundskeeper ordered
them to stop and took her back to her bed.

After that, everyone, including the doctors, fled
the hospital, leaving her alone for days.

''I think about it constantly, wondering why this
happened to me,'' she said. ``It's a lot to have
in my head.''











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