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

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A shocking new report published in the British medical journal The Lancet has found widespread and systematic human rights abuses in Haiti following the ouster of democratically-elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.

New figures reveal that during the 22-month period of the U.S.-backed Interim Government, 8,000 people were murdered in the greater Port-au Prince area alone. 35,000 women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted, more than half of the victims were children. Kidnappings, extrajudicial detentions, physical assaults, death threats, and threats of sexual violence were also common.

Those responsible for the human rights abuses include criminals, the police, United Nations peacekeepers and anti-Lavalas gangs.

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 .

• Athena Kolbe, master's level social worker with the Wayne State University school of social work in Detroit Michigan. In December 2005 she coordinated an extensive survey of households in the Port-au-Prince area to determine rates of human rights abuse under the interim Haitian government.
• Dr. Royce Hutson, assistant professor of social work at Wayne State University. He co-authored the Lancet study on human rights abuses in Haiti.

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.