August 30, 2006. Today on Flashpoints: A new study in the prestigious Lancet Journal of Medicine shows that under the US-imposed Haiti government, there were rampant human rights violations, including murder, beatings and sexual assault by the National Police; also, the Block Report returns today with an in-depth look at independent media and its effect in the way we see the news; we’ll also feature an ongoing report on continuing attacks of the San Francisco Bayview Newspaper website; and the Knight Report.

06:00 Lancet Journal of Medicine on Haiti Human Rights Abuses
Athena Kolbe, co-author of report, researcher at Wayne State
Dr. Royce Hutson, co-author - Interviewed by Dennis Bernstein

Dennis: The prestigious Lancet journal, it’s a journal of medicine, confirmed what we have been reporting on Flashpoints ever since the US took over Haiti, moved Aristide out and imposed it’s own coup government on Haiti. We were reporting then that there were massive human rights violations including murder and sexual assault and we were very suspicious of what the National Police were up to. Well this new study shows a lot very troubling, it’s a study of some 1260 families, nearly 6000 people in Haiti spoken to about the situation in this context.

Joining us are both of the study’s authors. Athena Kolbe, she is a researcher in the Wayne State University School of Social Work and also the co-author of the study is Dr Royce Hutson he is a professor of social work at Wayne State University . Let me start with you Athena.

What led you to get into this to do this kind of exhaustive human rights study.

Athena:  After the elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in February 2004 we heard that there were a number of reports of human rights violations including sexual assaults, murders by different political actors, by the Haitian National Police, by UN troops by different political factions on both sides, Lavalas members and anti-Lavalas gangs. But it wasn’t clear who exactly was having their human rights violated and who was doing the violating.

Several reports came out, one that I know you reported on by University of Miami School of law by Tom Griffin. The US state department released a statement, as did NCHR and Amnesty International. They talked to victims so we learned a lot about what the victims’ experienced but we didn’t have firm numbers. I know that Tom Griffith tried to establish how many people had been killed by talking to people at the state morgue and saying how many people in a two or three day period after the departure of Aristide had been killed.

But we really had no sense of who was doing the killing overall and what the real numbers were. So that’s what we were looking at. We wanted to know how many people in the Greater Port-au-Prince area under the interim Haitian government during this 22-month period from February 2004 to December 2005 were victims of rape, murder, physical assaults, and illegal detentions. And who were the people who were doing the violating.

Dennis: How did you identify the people to interview, 1260 families, nearly 6000 people?

Athena: We used a technique that’s actually a little unique for this. It’s called Random Coordinate GPS Sampling. Usually when you do this kind of a large-scale public health study you use a census list or an address list from the government. But nothing like that existed. Because this is Haiti , it’s a developing country. They hadn’t had a recent census in the past 20 odd years so we generated a list of 1500 households and eliminated the ones that weren’t actually households.  We had a 90 percent success rate which is extraordinarily high for this kind of study.

So these were all randomly selected, we didn’t just go and talk to victims, we talked to a cross section of the population of the Greater Port-au-Prince area.

Dennis: Dr. Royce Hutson, basically lay out the findings.

Royce: We found extreme rates of violations across the continuum. For murders, for instance, we estimate that for the time period examined that about 8000 people were murdered. For sexual assault we estimated that during the 22-month time period under the Interim Haitian Government that 35,000 females were sexually assaulted with over half of those females being children under the age of 18. We also found that slightly over    20,000 people had been physically assaulted as well and that about 11,000 people had been kidnapped.

Dennis: And how would you contextualize that terms of in a similar period when Aristide was president, was in the country?

Royce: Unfortunately we don’t have any data to compare our study with. As Athena noted, this was a rather unique study in both methodology and findings. The studies prior that examined human rights essentially looked at victims and were more qualitative in nature. Our study being more epidemiological was the first time in my knowledge having been conducted in Haiti . So it’s difficult for us to ascertain whether rates had increased or decreased since the interim government. However we can make the conclusion that rates under the interim government are extraordinarily high.

Dennis:  Talk a little bit more about that. And how do you go about stating that? What’s the force behind that?

Royce: The statement that it’s extraordinarily high?

Dennis: Yes.

Royce:  Well if you compare the murder rate of say, Detroit Michigan , which is historically rather high relative to the rest of the United States , and you look at the murder rate for Port-au-Prince .   We’re looking at, if I remember it correctly, almost eight times the murder rate relative to Detroit , Michigan , often referred to as the murder capital of the United States . So that puts it into context how bad things really are in Haiti .

Sexual assaults, we found that for all females, three percent of all females in the study were sexually assaulted during the time period examined. In children it was even higher. And then among restaveks, which are child domestic servants, one in ten of the child domestic servants was sexually assaulted in the 22 month time period. That’s very, very high.

Dennis: You’re listening to Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio. That’s the voice of Royce Hutson, he’s a professor of Social Work at the Wayne State University . He’s the co-author of a new study that’s been published today, released today in the Lancet Journal, a prestigious journal, a journal of medicine, and a significant study that gives some pretty troubling results. And Athena Kolbe, let me come back to you. I want you to talk about the implications and in part, what can we say about the people who were killed, who were raped. And what was perhaps the most stunning, surprising to you?

Athena: I think what shocked me the most was finding out who was doing the violations, who the perpetrators were. For instance in the media there were so many reports about the human rights violations and they would say it was these pro-Aristide gangs that were going and doing all the violations. When we actually went and talked to the victims we found that there were a lot of people whose stories were not being told. That in fact there were victims who had been raped or their family member had been killed in their home by the members of the Haitian National Police, by the demobilized soldiers from the ex-Haitian army that was decommissioned in 1995 by President Aristide and by armed anti-Lavalas groups such as Lame TiMachete.

We didn’t find any murders by UN troops or Lavalas members, but of course, we all read the papers and have heard those reports. We know that Lavalas partisans have been blamed and that UN troops have accepted responsibility for murders but those didn’t necessarily show up in our study because we were looking at broad trends cross the metro area, not specific neighborhoods or groups of people. Still, the rates were high with pretty much every group implicated in human rights violations.

For instance just looking at the sexual assault rate which we’ve been talking about, it is incredibly high. And I just want to point out too that when we’re talking about sexual assault we’re not just talking someone being molested or grabbed or something like that. We’re talking about sexual assault where more than 90 percent of the sexual assaults we recorded in our study were penetration. So we’re talking about rape. And rape of people of all ages. Our youngest victim was five-years-old, I think our oldest victim was in her 80s.

Just looking at the sexual assaults almost 14 percent of those that were reported in our study were committed by officers of the Haitian National Police.  I think that shows that there’s a systematic problem within the police. There have definitely been human rights violators who have been integrated into the ranks of the Haitian National Police and that needs to be addressed on a larger level, on a governmental level.

We also saw that armed anti-Lavalas groups and demobilized soldiers committed a number of violations including rapes. Those two groups combined were almost 13 percent of the sexual assaults reported in our study. That rate seems to verify what some human rights groups have been putting out during the past few years.

So I think I was most surprised by that, by seeing that so many of the violations were committed by police officers who one would think would be those trying to prevent the rapes from happening.

Dennis: And this begs the question and I will start with you Athena and then we’ll move back to the professor. This begs the question about the nature of authority in the context of the US-supported coup government. We know that the National Police were a re-creation of the United States government.  We know that the UN almost apparently became the enforcers of US foreign policy. What can we say? Where was the UN, where was this government imposed by the United States when all this was happening? How can we evaluate that?

Athena: I don’t know how we can evaluate that. Because obviously the people whose job it was to protect weren’t doing protecting or else these rates would not be so high. But also your bring up the MINUSTAH, the United Nations soldiers who have been stationed in Haiti since June of 2004. We had human rights violations also that were reported as having been committed by the United Nations soldiers. As well as by soldiers who were under the multinational forces, which were made up of American marines, Canadians and French troops between February and June of 2004. The fact that they were also involved in human rights violations is I think a serious thing.

Dennis: Dr. Royce Hutson, professor of social work at Wayne State University , co-author of this study. What was I guess most surprising to you? What were the other things we need to know about this study? And what would you like to get out of this?

Royce: I wasn’t necessarily surprised that human rights abuses were occurring in Haiti or that the rates were rather high. What I was rather surprised by was the amount of sexual abuses which were occurring, particularly against children.  It seems to be a very coordinated attempt by some, almost in a way that suggests that this was a political tool. The way that we defined human rights violations were as criminal violations committed by political actors. And what we found, as Athena noted, was 14 percent of the assaults were committed by Haitian National Police. You wonder whether children are engaged in some sort of political activities, because children, they aren’t political generally, so why would police be interacting …

Dennis: so rape as a tool of oppression, of political oppression? As a pattern of political oppression?

Royce: I don’t know what other conclusion to draw.  It seems to have been a tool of political repression. Had it been isolated cases we could say it was the fault of the individual perpetrator, but when you have one in eight rapes being committed by the Haitian National Police you have a pattern. And having been committed against children. Not that being committed against adults is any less horrible.  But against children? That is completely and utterly deplorable.

Athena: I would agree and one of the other things we looked at, one of the other things we studied were prolonged and illegal detentions.  Being arrested in and of itself is not a human rights violations but when you have these patterns, systematic patterns of people being arrested and detained and not being allowed to see any attorney as is mandated by the Haitian constitution, that is indicative of possible human rights violations. And when there are these patterns of arrest you start to wonder exactly what’s going on. One of the things we found was that I think something like 20 percent of the arrests recorded in our study were preventative detention, which is a sort of a status used to detain juveniles in Haiti who have not been accused or convicted of a crime. So children are held indefinitely without seeing a judge.

Dennis: And in limbo so that anything can be done to them…

Athena:  And that’s the scary thing. We actually asked anyone who was arrested  or reported an arrest in the household where was the arrested person held and sometimes the children were not being held in the children’s prison. They were being held with adults. That is, I mean it seems like there was a problem there. If 22 percent of the arrests we recorded of household members were children being detained it makes you wonder exactly what’s going on on a larger level.

Dennis: I want to thank you Athena Kolbe and also I want to thank you very much Dr. Royce Hutson. This is a study released today. We are delighted that we could break the story today here on Flashpoints. You can go to the website, what would be the website for the Lancet Journal?

Athena: It’s www.Lancet.com.

Dennis: And people can get in touch with the two authors that way?

Athena: Yup, our contact information’s on the pdf of the article.

Dennis: All right, Professor Hutson, Athena Kolbe, we thank you for joining us on Flashpoints.