29733: Hermantin(News)Child kidnappings raise fears in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Wed, Dec. 27, 2006


HAITI
Child kidnappings raise fears in Haiti
In hard-hit Haiti, the kidnappers have turned on the children as well as the 
adults in their campaigns of abduction for ransom.

By JACQUELINE CHARLES
jcharles@MiamiHerald.com

The first time she called her daughter's cellphone, no one picked up. Then 
Maggy Dessources dialed the number again. This time, a man answered.

''Is this not Natacha's telephone?'' she asked curiously.

''Yes, Madame,'' the man said. Dessources' heart sank.

''Natacha has a little problem,'' the man said, pausing after every word. ``She 
has been kidnapped.''

Dial tone.

In perpetually turbulent Haiti, where children already suffer high rates of 
illiteracy, child slavery and mortality, its most vulnerable citizens now face 
a growing danger: kidnappings.

They are being snatched while walking to or from school; hijacked while riding 
in school buses; abducted during home invasions; delivered to kidnappers by the 
family driver. And in the horrifying case of Natacha Farah Kerbie Dessources: 
shoved into a waiting car with five armed men as she pounded on the front gate 
of her house.

''I didn't think they were going to kill my child,'' Maggy Dessources said. But 
they did. Even after a ransom of $500 was paid. Natacha's bullet-riddled body 
was found near a heap of trash two days after she was kidnapped last month.

Haitian and international authorities can't say with certainty how many 
kidnappings have taken place in the recent past.

Victims tend to avoid reporting abductions, they say, especially if they 
involve children.

`CAN'T GET LOWER'

But the Haiti director of the U.N. Children's Fund estimates that 48 youths 
have been kidnapped since November; a U.N. official familiar with the issue 
puts it at 60 since November; and a Port-au-Prince human-rights organization 
says at least 68 children were abducted from Nov. 10-Dec. 15.

''Given the state the country is in, the state of the insecurity, the state of 
the impunity, the state of kidnapping, the state of crimes in Haiti, we can't 
get lower than this,'' said Pierre Esperance, executive director of the 
Port-au-Prince-based National Human Rights Defense Network. ``The government 
has an obligation to reinforce the key state institutions -- justice and 
police.''

ANGRY MOURNERS

A 20-year-old student at a teacher's college in Port-au-Prince, Natacha 
Dessources wasn't a child.

But she has become a poster child for Haiti's child-kidnapping phenomenon. 
Angry mourners at her funeral later protested at the National Palace, demanding 
that President René Préval do something about the kidnappings.

Maggy Dessources, who is unemployed, told the kidnappers in one of many phone 
calls negotiating a ransom that she had no money. After she dropped off what 
she managed to gather by begging family and friends, she was almost certain 
they would release the young woman, like other kidnappers had done with so many 
other victims before.

When Natacha's body was found, her eyes had been gouged, and she had been shot 
several times. Two of her fingers had been broken, her mother said in a 
telephone interview from Haiti, where she has been in hiding with her 
15-year-old son.

OTHER CASES

Shortly afterward, police announced they had found the strangled body of 
6-year-old Carl Rubens Francillon, kidnapped on Nov. 8 in Port-au-Prince. His 
family driver has been arrested. His parents also had paid a ransom. On Dec. 
13, kidnappers hijacked a school bus with seven children on their way to 
school. It was one of four kidnapping incidents that day involving 22 kids, 
officials say. All were released unharmed after their parents paid ransoms.

''Children are in a state of panic,'' said Adriano González-Regueral, UNICEF's 
representative in Haiti. ``They are having their childhoods destroyed by the 
situation right now. They are shaken. If they are being educated in fear, we 
can expect the future will not be so brilliant.''

In a country where 49 percent of the 8.3 million people are under the age of 
18, children already face daunting odds, according to UNICEF statistics: 1,000 
are involved in armed gangs; 170,000 live in virtual slavery as household 
servants known as restavecs, and fewer than 50 percent attend school.

''They are more and more afraid to go to school,'' González-Regueral said.

As a result of the child kidnappings, schools closed early for Christmas 
vacation and some frustrated Haitians have been calling for kidnappers to be 
shot on sight. Some lawmakers have proposed a return of the death penalty, now 
forbidden by the constitution.

POLITICAL MOTIVE?

But the child kidnappings may be more than simple, yet horrific, crimes.

Both González-Regueral and Esperance say kidnappers are deliberately targeting 
kids to destabilize the government of Préval, elected in February after two 
years of rule by an interim government following the violent ouster of 
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

''The concentration of children being kidnapped implies a kind of coordination, 
of some kind of plan,'' González-Regueral said.

`CLEAR SIGNAL'

Fred Blaise, spokesman for the foreign policemen deployed in Haiti as part of a 
U.N. peacekeeping force, said authorities have been unable to discern any 
pattern.

At the very least, the child kidnappings have highlighted the inability of the 
Haitian government and the 9,000-strong U.N. mission to control the country's 
daunting security problems -- despite ongoing government efforts to negotiate 
with the armed gangs to demobilize and surrender their weapons.

''There needs to be a clear signal from the government they have divorced 
themselves from the people who are terrorizing the population,'' said 
Esperance. ``There has to be a message they are going to reinforce the police 
and justice.''

Case in point: A report by Esperance's group shows that only 20 kidnappers have 
been tried and sentenced in two years.

The longest sentence: 10 years, despite a decree by the U.S.-backed interim 
government that kidnappers and accomplices are to be given life behind bars.

''There has to be a cleaning inside the justice system,'' said Esperance, 
accusing Haiti's dysfunctional and often corrupt judiciary of allowing the 
problem to grow.

ARRESTS

Haitian and U.N. police say they are making progress with an anti-kidnapping 
operation they launched earlier this month, going after the perpetrators in 
their hangouts. So far, there have been 25 arrests.

''We've tried to stop reading their minds on why they are going after kids,'' 
said Blaise. ``All we can do as police officers is ask the population to keep 
calling and we can try to put these people in jail.''

Last week, Haitian police announced they had arrested a suspect in Natacha 
Dessources' kidnapping. But that brought little comfort to her mother, who is 
trying to leave Haiti with her son.

''I see visions of her on the ground . . . I can't sleep at night,'' said Maggy 
Dessources, adding that she continued to get threatening phone calls from 
kidnappers even after Natacha's death. ``Every time I hear about another child 
being kidnapped, I don't feel good. I can't live. I can't eat.''

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