29045: Fenton: (news) Shocking Lancet Study: 8,000 Murders, 35,000 Rapes and Sexual Assaults in Haiti During U.S.-Backed Coup Regime After Aristide Ouster (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Anthony Fenton <fentona@shaw.ca>

Shocking Lancet Study: 8,000 Murders, 35,000 Rapes and Sexual
Assaults in Haiti During U.S.-Backed Coup Regime After Aristide Ouster

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/31/144231

Rush Transcript:

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 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.

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