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.

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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.

Source:  Democracy Now
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