29147: Esser: (news) Death Threats Against Lancet's Haiti Human Rights Investigator (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser


counterpunch
<http://www.counterpunch.org/sprague09112006.html>

September 11, 2006


"You Are a Dog. You Should Die!"
Death Threats Against Lancet's Haiti Human Rights Investigator
By JEB SPRAGUE and JOE EMESBERGER


"You are a dog ... you should die. We are going to necklace you,"
whispered a British-accented caller into the phone. It was the latest
in a round of death threats that Athena Kolbe, Human Rights
Investigator and Master's level social worker at Wayne State
University, had received. According to police officials, Kolbe first
began receiving threatening calls at home and on her cell phone at
4:00 AM on the morning of Monday September 4.

Kolbe, who co-coordinated a human rights study carried out in late
2005 by the Wayne State University School of Social Work with Dr.
Royce Hutson, led a team of twelve Haitian interviewers in surveying
1260 randomly selected households in the greater Port-au-Prince area.
The Haitian researchers interviewed Port-au-Prince residents about
their experiences with human rights abuses since the installation of
Gerald Latortue as interim Prime Minister following the violent
overthrow of Haiti's elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The Lancet article titled "Human Rights Abuse and Other Criminal
Violations in Port-au-Prince Haiti: A Random Survey of Households"
exposes massive human rights violations in Haiti, under the
foreign-installed interim government of Gerald Latortue. It estimates
that 8000 persons were murdered and approximately 35000 sexually
assaulted in the greater Port-au-Prince area between February 2004
and December 2005. More than 90% percent of the sexual assaults
reported in the study-involved penetration, explained the authors.
The study first became public knowledge on August 30 when Pacifica
Radio's Flashpoints aired an interview with Kolbe and Royce
discussing the findings of the survey. It has stirred controversy
ever since.

Days after an interview with Flashpoints' Dennis Bernstein, Charles
Arthur, president of the UK's Haiti Support Group, denounced Kolbe as
a "pro-Lavalas Family journalist" implying that Kolbe manipulated the
survey findings. Articles about the study were quickly published in
the Guardian and the Toronto Globe and Mail in which Charles Arthur
was prominently quoted, but much remained unexplored --most
conspicuously the findings of the study--but also what Kolbe has had
to endure since the study was published.

It was her volunteer service in 1995 with Lafanmi Selavi, an
orphanage for street children and child domestic servants in
Port-au-Prince which Arthur claimed makes Kolbe too"biased" to
conduct research. Aristide founded the orphanage when he was a parish
priest ten years prior. Kolbe met Aristide and says she was
"impressed with commitment to promoting the idea that children are
people who need to be loved, respected and valued." Kolbe volunteered
in several orphanages during postings in Haiti, Croatia and Israel.

Kolbe formerly wrote for the Pacific News Service writing under the
name Lyn Duff (her mother's maiden name), publishing a smattering of
articles during the next ten years about the experiences of
marginalized Haitians including rape survivors, homeless children,
factory workers, child laborers, and human rights victims. It was her
experiences in Haiti and other developing countries that Kolbe says
motivated her to return to university to peruse an academic career.
Kolbe's co-author in the study is Royce Hutson, a former doctoral
fellow at the Madison, Wisconsin-based Institute for Research on
Poverty and a current associate professor of social work at Wayne
State University.

Kolbe says, "I felt that in academia I could have a greater impact on
developing ideas and policies which would help promote justice and
healing for human rights victims," explaining that advocating for
social justice is an essential tenet of the National Association of
Social Worker's code of ethics. When starting her studies in late
2004 Kolbe decided to go by her father's surname rather than the
hyphenated name she had been using previously. That decision, she
says, was to avoid persecution for her sexual orientation, as she had
previously been the subject of media reports about discriminatory
treatment of gay youth.

In response to Arthur's allegations of "bias", Kolbe replies, "I am
in no way a Lavalas propagandist as Arthur implies. Just because I
wrote about Haiti and do not believe Aristide was a dictator, that
does not make me Fanmi Lavalas. That is ridiculous," she said. "This
survey was conducted fairly and accurately. The researchers conducted
themselves without bias and interviewed and gathered information from
1260 randomly selected homes. To insinuate that the report is
misleading is to allege a grand conspiracy involving dozens of people
including our university's ethics committee which had full knowledge
of my past history in Haiti and had no problem with it when they
approved our research protocols."

A Haitian resident of London, who wishes to remain anonymous due to
the death threats, explains that on Sept. 2 Charles Arthur told her
and several other people that "We need to find this woman?s phone
number so people can contact her and complain to her directly." The
following day a flyer emblazed with Kolbe's photo was released titled
"Who is Athena Kolbe?" Respond to Fanmi Lavalas Propaganda!!!!"
Another witness, wishing to go unnamed due to the fear of being
targeted, explains that Arthur was responsible for distributing the
fliers. The flyer's text is identical to portions of Arthur's letter
to the Lancet, which he posted online. It ends by encouraging people
to "ask her why she is hiding her affiliation with Fanmi Lavalas" and
gives Kolbe's phone numbers, email address, home address, and the
address and phone number of her family members.

The calls began the next day, Kolbe explains, as she received over a
dozen. One caller with a "clearly Haitian accent" called her a
"Lavalas chimere" saying, "Do you know what we do to Lavalas chimere?
You deserve to die painfully. We know where you are. We know who you
are." In a later call she was threatened with rape, evisceration and
death, said a police official. The harassment is being investigated
by the FBI who have given the Wayne State University researchers
"several options" to find the callers, says Hutson.

On September 6, Kolbe received a dead rat in the mail. Postal
investigators are investigating the source of the package, which was
postmarked in Brooklyn, New York. Just six days after Kolbe received
the dead rat in her mail a frequent poster on the Internet forum
Haitiforever.com, Michel Nau, a senior analyst at Georgetown
University, commenting on the Lancet survey claimed it smelled "like
a dead rat."

"Intimidation and violence against journalists and human rights
investigators critical of the coup government is nothing new, as
Kolbe's death threats are the most recent." explains Randall White
editor of Haitiaction.net, which frequently covered assaults on the
poor by security forces of the interim government. Radio WKAT
reporter Abdias Jean was executed on January 12 2005, according to
witnesses after photographing the summary execution of three young
men by Interim government police. Later that year, in September, SWAT
members of the Police Nationale d'Haiti (PNH) arrested American
journalist Kevin Pina and a Haitian photojournalist working for AP
Jean Ristil. Ristil was arrested again and subjected to torture later
in 2005 on orders from Haiti's Central Headquarters of the Judicial
Police.

The persecution of those who expose human rights abuses is to be
expected, says Hutson who explains that the research team expected
?our methodology and findings to be subjected to intense scrutiny
because we examined patterns of violations by political actors who
might not have wanted those violations to be exposed.? But, he says,
"the charges of bias are baseless. We were aware Athena had written
under another name and found no conflict. Our concern is the way UN
soldiers are interacting with Haitians." Lancet Publisher, Richard
Horton, explains the study had excellent credential and peer reviews,
stating in the UK?s Guardian newspaper, "It was very thoroughly
reviewed by four external advisers," he said.

Several other human rights studies, such as those by the Miami
University of Law, the New York University School of Law, the
National Lawyers Guild, and Amnesty International, found the interim
government and paramilitary forces guilty of extra-judicial violence,
reports that received little coverage in the press (Sprague, 2006).
One of the few local Haitian human rights groups to focus on violence
within Port-au-Prince's slum communities, the Association of
University Graduates Motivated For A Haiti With Rights (AUMOHD), has
reported frequently on violence against Lavalas communities.

Kolbe concludes, "Our type of study can not be used to prove that no
violations happened by a particular group; it can only be used to
show broader patterns of abuse against the populace. Human rights
workers reported patterns of violations by political actors against
people throughout Port-au-Prince during 2004 and 2005 and that?s
exactly what we found."

The Lancet study found that 21 percent of the killings were
attributed to members of the interim government's Haitian National
Police (HNP), 13 percent to the demobilized army and 13 percent to
anti-Lavalas gangs such as Lame Timachet. Most of the rest of the
violations were attributed to criminal elements. The study also found
a high amount of sexual violence committed since Aristide's ouster,
much of it committed by anti-Lavalas political actors. Although Kolbe
points out that the study found a number of sexual threats and
threats of physical violence were issued by UN troops and Lavalas
supporters.

Charles Arthur's organization the Haiti Support Group acknowledges
amongst its associates a number of organizations which failed to
report on the interim government's wave of violence upon Haitian slum
dwellers, such as the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organizations
(POHDH) which received funding from the Canadian quasi-governmental
agency "Rights and Democracy", a partner with the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED). Also affiliated with the Haiti Support Group,
the Batay Ouvriye (BO) who called for Aristide to "leave the country"
is the recent recipient of $450000 USD in NED and State Department
programs through the American Center for International Labor
Solidarity (ACILS). Camille Chalmers, head of the Haitian Advocacy
Platform for Alternative Development (PAPDA) another group affiliated
with the Haiti Support Group, lobbied for the resignation of Aristide
and coauthored a letter labeling Aristide a "dictator" with another
PAPDA official, Yves Andres Wainwright who later become environment
Minister under the Latortue government. Chalmers then established
close ties with the Canadian "Democracy Promotion" agency
Alternatives, who works with the NED and receives 50% of its budget
from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Christian
Aid a financer of the Haiti Support Group receives significant
funding from the British government as well as CIDA.

The controversial human rights activist Pierre Esperance and his
organization National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR) refused to
go into poor neighborhoods after the coup, which they explained to a
Quixote Center delegation in March 2004. Esparance at the time of
Aristide's ouster was a treasurer of POHDH, while his other
organization NCHR received $100000 USD from CIDA, renewable every six
months.

While the cost of the Lancet study was under $5000 USD the
aforementioned groups heavily funded and closely connected with
Canadian, European, and U.S. government and quasi-government agencies
have yet to subject their claims on human rights abuses in Haiti to
similar peer-review. Charles Arthur did not respond to our requests
for comments.

Joe Emesberger is a writer living in Canada with an interest in Haiti.

Jeb Sprague is a graduate student and freelance journalist. Visit his
blog at  <http://www.freehaiti.net>