Amnesty International documented cases of sexual violence in camps. Four of the victims interviewed were children. An 8-year-old girl called Celine (not her real name) was alone in the tent at night when she was raped. Her mother had left the camp to work and had no one to look after her daughter during her absence. A 15-year-old girl, called Fabienne (not her real name) was raped when she left the camp to urinate, as there were no latrines within the camp. Carline (not her real name), 21, was raped by 3 men when she went to urinate in a remote area of the camp, as the latrines were too dirty to be used. Pascaline (not her real name), 21, was raped and beaten in her tent, neighbors failed to intervene because they believed she was with her partner.
*****
What can I say? These folks that continue to promote this idea that security is not important, or that contracting security is disaster capitalism will have the crimes and violence in Haiti all over their pen holding hands. Shame on you. All I have to say is that you cowards have to look at yourself in the mirror every day and realize that people are suffering because of this ‘non-action’ you keep promoting.
But it gets worse. Now we are sending cops from one humanitarian disaster (Rwanda) to another disaster (Haiti), and somehow this gets a free pass?
The first article below is about sending Rwandan cops to Haiti. Whose hair brained idea was this and how are these clowns going to actually increase security in Haiti? As the first article below has clearly stated, Rwanda is the last country to get get security forces from or claim some kind of humanitarian award for excellence.
The second article is about the $ 13.55 billion that world wide donors have raised to rebuild Haiti. Billions…. That’s nice and all, but if there is that much money floating around, why are Haitians having any issues at all regarding security? In my view, that money should be used to first provide security in Haiti, so that the building process can actually take place. Food, water and shelter is great, but if you get murdered/raped/robbed, then what good is that other stuff? Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs comes to mind.
To depend on piss poor UN troops, Rwandan security, or a depleted and ravaged Haitian police is not working. I say contract a police force to come in and assist, and in the mean time build the prison up and build police capability. But for security right now when it is most needed, there should be no hesitation. Get it done, or watch crimes, murders, and rapes continue to be committed. That would be a good use of a small portion of that large sum of money. That isn’t disaster capitalism, that’s just human decency and compassion. To stand by and watch is unacceptable.
The third article goes into detail on how the Haitian police are struggling to bring order to the chaos. They are simply overwhelmed. Thousands of prisoners have escaped, gang violence has increased, rapes have increased, and the police is dealing with a destroyed city and people. So why is it that we are not sending in the cavalry? Oh that’s right, the Rwandans are the cavalry. Pfffft.
Now get this. In the fourth article, it discusses how the locals have had to organize their own security forces to deal with this stuff. If that is not an indicator that police are in trouble, I don’t know what is. So is street justice better than contracting security who would be supporting Haitian security forces?
The last quote and article is from Amnesty International. They are screaming for more police in their recommendations, and their report is pretty clear. Crimes are up, as is sexual assaults, and of course they want something done about it. What is not in the report, is AI’s position on Rwandan cops trying to secure the mess in Haiti. The other thing that is missing is that AI made no mention of contracting security forces to step in to stop these stuff. It’s strange and somewhat disgusting to me that the humanitarian option in Haiti that continues to be promoted by all of these so called ‘humanitarian groups’, is to not do ‘everything’ within our power to stop this. -Matt
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US-UN Peace-keepers” bring Rwandan Police to Haiti
March 11, 2010
by Ann Garrison
In case anyone needed further evidence that President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda is the Pentagon’s proxy, 140 Rwandan police are about to undertake special training before heading to Haiti, as reported in the Rwanda New Times, because, according to Rwandan Police Chief Edmund Kayiranga, “Rwanda wants to be involved in promoting peace in other countries” and, if need be, they would send more peacekeepers to other countries.
Rwanda police are off to Haiti to promote peace, even as:
1) Grenades explode in Kigali in the run up to its 2010 presidential election, and two of three viable parties are still unable to register and field candidates against incumbent President Paul Kagame.
2) A new list of the five most horrible prisons on earth includes Rwanda’s Kigali Gitarama Prison and describes it as the most overcrowded penitentiary in the world, so overcrowded that prisoners have no choice but to stand up all day while their feet rot in filth, often developing gangrene, which may require amputation. (Amnesty International reported, in 2005, that Gitarama Prison was way overcrowded, with 7,477 prisoners in space designed for 3,000.)
3) Top military commanders and government officials flee the country, and journalists go into hiding to escape arrest.
4) Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative Group, the Africa Faith and Justice Network, the Greens European Free Alliance and Sen. Russ Feingold, chair of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Africa, call for human rights, an end to attacks on political opposition, and a free and fair presidential campaign and election, with polls scheduled for Aug. 9, 2010.
Read the rest of the story here.
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World raises $13.55 billion for quake-hit Haiti
Apr 02, 2010
International donors have pledged some US$9.9 billion ($13.55 billion) to help shell-shocked Haiti recover from January’s devastating earthquake.
The pledge from some 50 donors on Wednesday includes US$5.3 billion for the next two years, far in excess of the US$3.8 billion sought by conference organisers to help the Haitian government fund reconstruction projects.
The biggest contributions came from the United States and the European Union. Dignitaries emphasised the need to follow through on the pledges, which United Nations chief Ban Ki Moon said will be “tracked by a Web-based system” established by the UN and Haiti.
Story here.
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Haiti’s police struggle to control ravaged capital
April 11, 2010
By JONATHAN M. KATZ
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A police inspector taunted the gangster they call “Obama” through the bars of a downtown lockup. Stuffed into a tiny cell with nine other men, the 23-year-old inmate looked panicked, exhausted and freshly beaten.
It’s guys like this, the pudgy cop said, who threaten to upend Port-au-Prince three months after the earthquake, exploiting the continuing chaos to commit murder, assaults and kidnappings just as the international community arrives with billions of dollars to rebuild the ravaged capital.
Fears of such insecurity have prompted the U.S. government to invest millions in stabilization and security to protect its post-quake development programs. More than $422 million of U.S. aid has come from the Defense Department.
The United States is expanding a pre-quake anti-crime effort — which focused on building infrastructure, community ties and police controls in what was the city’s most dangerous slum, Cite Soleil — to the new hotspot of Martissant, on the western periphery of the capital.
Now with some $35 million in funding, the Haiti Stabilization Initiative was established to rebuild communities where extreme poverty and desperation, both exacerbated by the Jan. 12 disaster, provide fertile ground for gangs. Its first phase in Martissant involves a flood-control project employing nearly 700 residents, paying them $4.60 a day for six days a week of work.
“What happens in the urban hotspots in Haiti affects (the United States),” said Laurence Jones, deputy coordinator of the U.S.-run program. “We have an interest in a stable, prosperous and democratic Haiti.”
The United Nations’ Community Violence Reduction program — a broader-based outgrowth of its effort to disarm gangs following the 2004 rebellion and ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — is also focused on Martissant.
“Martissant is huge. Every area has its own gang affiliation, and they are all heavily armed,” said Port-au-Prince police commissioner Michel-Ange Gedeon.
People in the slums say they are grateful for efforts to combat the violence, including stepped-up patrols by Haiti’s expanding National Police Force. On Friday, a team of 14 heavily armed officers charged over rubble piles and cracked pavement through a warren in Martissant’s Saint-Bernadette section looking for illegal weapons and the targets of outstanding warrants.
“If there are more police here, maybe food will follow,” said Johnny Saint-Fort, an unemployed 41-year-old mason.
But with poverty this entrenched — in urban areas this cramped — the crime problem is likely to remain daunting.
Residents complain that gang shootouts are on the increase since the earthquake, and local media have reported a steady uptick in gunshot wounds in Martissant. Aid workers say armed gang members have shown up at their meetings.
As crime spills over to touch the wealthy and elite — at least three foreigners have been kidnapped in recent weeks — security is taking on an even more central role in the rebuilding effort.
That concerns some non-governmental aid groups who worry that too much of the money meant for Haiti’s reconstruction will be spent on anti-crime measures, specifically the hiring of private security firms.
About a dozen groups wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ahead of the March 31 Haiti U.N. donors conference to urge that funds not go to contractors such as Virginia-based DynCorp, which prior to the quake built a Cite Soleil police headquarters with $1 million from the Haiti Stabilization Initiative.
It’s too soon to say how much will be spent on security now. The United Nations is still crunching numbers from the conference, which raised a preliminary $9.9 billion for Haiti. The State Department has not released a breakdown of the $1.15 billion pledged by President Barack Obama’s administration but not yet approved by Congress.
In the meantime, maintaining law and order falls mostly to local police and security forces, who are increasingly taking on a larger role in a country where crime fighting has been entirely the province of some 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers since 2004.
Essentially out of the picture are U.S. troops, who numbered as many as 20,000 in the weeks after the earthquake but have reduced their presence to a rump logistical force and are now rarely seen around the capital.
Even as local police work to improve their public image by stepping up patrols and community recruiting, suspicion of corruption and collusion abounds. An investigation is under way into how 4,300 prisoners — some hardened criminals — escaped the overcrowded and dangerous national penitentiary during the quake.
“You know, I don’t want to anticipate the result of the investigation, but to me it’s very suspicious,” national police chief Mario Andersol said.
There have been some successes: Haitian police were the ones who captured the 23-year-old who took the U.S. president’s name as a power-signifying nom de guerre. “Obama,” born Fenel Mesieus, was recognized by an officer responding to a traffic accident in another part of Port-au-Prince.
Police accuse him of commanding a gang of 1,000 members, masterminding kidnappings and the murder of two off-duty police officers. Now he’s cramped in a cell sweating through his undershirt, pants falling around his skinny hips, fresh cuts on his arm and a broken nose.
Mesieus denied the charges, which only made the inspector laugh harder. The prisoner’s eyes hardened into a cutting glare before he lowered himself into a cramped corner of the cell. He’s been in this position before, having served time in the national penitentiary until a judge ordered his release last year.
Asked if inmates who escaped from the prison were responsible for the mayhem, the taciturn young man shook his head.
“Port-au-Prince was always insecure,” Mesieus said.
Story here.
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In Haiti’s camps, civilians fight back against sex crimes
March 28, 2010
By Jessica Leeder
From Monday’s Globe and Mail
A grassroots security movement at Pinchinat is trying to protect women and children, who are vulnerable in the dangerous and poorly lit camp
It was close to midnight and pitch dark in Martine’s sheet-cordoned section of the mass tent when she opened her eyes and saw the shape of a man locked on top of her second-youngest daughter.
The willowy nine-year-old was lying motionless on her thin cot.
“What are you doing to my child?”
The sound of Martine’s panicked voice didn’t break the trance of the man, who she recognized as an adult friend of her son. The darkness spared her a detailed view of what was happening to her daughter, but she knew anyway, and she started to scream.
That startled the attacker, who fled the tent, sprinting through crammed Pinchinat, the walled school soccer field that is Jacmel’s largest and most notorious camp for the displaced.
Minutes later, the man was caught and pinned down – not by police, but by a team of civilians assigned to night-time patrol by the camp’s citizens committee, a grassroots group devoted to better security for the tent city’s 5,000 residents.
Most sex-related crime and violence takes place at night inside the camp, a sprawling field that has only two gas-powered light standards. The cavernous military tents, donated by Venezuela’s army, are both a blessing and a curse: They provide shelter from the rains, but they are dark and dangerous at night.
As well, the communal nature of the tents violates international shelter standards, which advocate single-family tents whenever possible. Experts prefer to enforce the separation of men from women and children when families cannot live alone, to avoid the kind of insecurity and violence that has developed at Pinchinat.
With only two Haitian police officers assigned to the camp at a given time, the citizen’s committee, called Voluntaires mixte du village Pinchinat, focuses on ensuring the well-being of the most vulnerable residents – women and children.
The welfare of both groups seems to have slipped through the cracks of the patchwork aid system that has been stitched together in meeting rooms across Haiti since the Jan. 12 earthquake.
While there are international meeting “clusters” appointed to deal with broad issues such as shelter, education and logistics, none have focused on the welfare of Haiti’s women, who were immersed in a deeply entrenched battle for equality, rights and sexual autonomy long before the earthquake.
Since the disaster, the vulnerability of women and their children has increased noticeably. In Jacmel, sexual assaults and domestic violence have been rising in the city’s larger camps for displaced people and families, according to statistics collected by Fanm Deside (“Women Decide”), the only women’s-rights group in the city.
On Friday, Amnesty International issued a report imploring the aid community in Haiti and police officials to turn their attention to the rising sexual violence against women and girls in camps.
“Sexual violence is widely present in camps where some of Haiti’s most vulnerable live,” said Chiara Liguori, an Amnesty researcher who was part of a team that visited eight camps in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane. “It was already a major concern in the country before the earthquake, but the situation in which displaced people are living exposes women and girls to even greater risks.”
In Jacmel, as in other parts of Haiti, women living in tent encampments still bear the burden of providing food for their families, even though they have no work and few supplies. With the economy stalled, a growing number of desperate women are turning to prostitution for food, or allowing their daughters to do so.
At Pinchinat, a sexual act earns about 25 Haitian gourdes – less than one Canadian dollar – according to Charlotte Charles, director of the camp’s citizens committee. It was she who decided, out of frustration and disgust, that combatting sexual crimes against women and children would be the committee’s priority, ahead of the many other problems that plague the camp.
“The parents here accept for their children to be prostitutes,” Ms. Charles said, adding that a condom-distribution program run by the United Nations at Pinchinat after the earthquake only exacerbated the situation by appearing to condone promiscuous behaviour. “Normally the distribution of condoms is good. But when I give them out here, prostitutes come,” she said.
Ms. Charles’s ultimate aim is to run classes for the camp women to help train them to support themselves and their families. “If children are well kept, when they come of age, they’ll have intercourse based on their own choices, not because they have nothing to eat,” she added.
For now, there is no money for such a program. So Ms. Charles is working with Fanm Deside, whose members recently began patrolling the camp’s crowded rows of tents to talk with women. They also set up a tent on the soccer field where they conduct daily support-group meetings.
So far, turnouts have been small; meetings are open to all, but aimed at those who have experienced sexual violence, assault or prostituted themselves, said Marie-Ange Noel, the group’s director. “Normally at Pinchinat, the females are embarrassed to come forward,” she said. “They’re afraid they’re going to be ridiculed by the other females.”
Ms. Noel and her field workers have been building a cache of reports from women in the camp who report that middle-aged and elderly men with money have been visiting Pinchinat to buy sex. They are also tracking several cases similar to that of Martine’s daughter; most have not resulted in arrests. “The tents have no light at night. It’s difficult for them to be detected,” Ms. Noel noted.
Martine said that, two weeks after the attack, her young daughter still wasn’t sleeping, talking much or acting like herself. “He was trying to rape her,” Martine said in an interview, as the little girl sprawled mutely on her lap.
“She has bruises,” Martine said, pausing. “If I had another option, I would leave. We don’t feel safe here.”
Story here.
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From AI’s Report on Haiti Sexual Violence
Amnesty International documented cases of sexual violence in camps. Four of the victims interviewed were children. An 8-year-old girl called Celine (not her real name) was alone in the tent at night when she was raped. Her mother had left the camp to work and had no one to look after her daughter during her absence. A 15-year-old girl, called Fabienne (not her real name) was raped when she left the camp to urinate, as there were no latrines within the camp. Carline (not her real name), 21, was raped by 3 men when she went to urinate in a remote area of the camp, as the latrines were too dirty to be used. Pascaline (not her real name), 21, was raped and beaten in her tent, neighbors failed to intervene because they believed she was with her partner.
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Haiti’s emergency response must include protection from sexual violence
Insecurity, overcrowding and inadequate sanitary facilities are putting women at risk
25 March 2010
Thousands of women living in temporary camps around Haiti are threatened by sexual violence and have inadequate protection from any authorities, Amnesty International said on Wednesday after concluding a three-week visit to the country.Sexual violence is widespread across the hundreds of spontaneous camps that sprung up in the capital and other affected areas of Haiti following the massive earthquake that struck the country in January.Amnesty International said that the lack of measures to prevent and respond adequately to the threat of sexual violence is contributing to the humanitarian crisis and urged the Haitian authorities to take immediate and effective measures to curb sexual violence and protect women living in the camps.”Sexual violence is widely present in camps where some of Haiti’s most vulnerable live,” said Chiara Liguori, Caribbean researcher at Amnesty International from Port-au-Prince. “It was already a major concern in the country before the earthquake but the situation in which displaced people are living exposes women and girls to even greater risks.”Insecurity, overcrowding and inadequate sanitary facilities are putting women and girls at great risk of abuse because they are exposed and without protection. The lack of capacity of the police forces and the justice system in the aftermath of the earthquake means that perpetrators are unlikely to be punished.”Authorities in Haiti must prioritize strengthening the police presence in camps, especially at night, including capacity to protect women and girls from sexual violence and to respond adequately to reported cases,” said Chiara Liguori.There is a general feeling of insecurity inside and around the camps, particularly at night. Women and girls living in makeshift shelters feel vulnerable and are afraid of attacks.Most victims of sexual violence interviewed by Amnesty International were minors. One eight-year-old girl was raped when alone in her tent at night. Her mother had gone out of the camp to work and did not have anybody to look after her daughter during her absence. A 15-year-old was raped when she went out of the camp to urinate, as there were no latrines within the camp.
Lack of adequate protection mechanisms for women and girls is discouraging them from denouncing the violence. A local women’s organization reported 19 cases of rape in just one small section of Champ-de-Mars, one of the biggest camps in Port-au-Prince. None of the women and girls had reported the attacks to the police for fear of their aggressors and instead moved out of the camp.”There are no shelters in the country where victims of sexual violence can be protected and have access to services. Shelters for women and girl victims of violence must also be part of the emergency response and the international NGOs, massively present in Haiti, can only make this possible with the coordination of the Haitian authorities,” said Chiara LiguoriAmnesty International’s delegation visited eight camps of displaced people in Port-au-Prince, and the cities of Jacmel and Lascahobas, some of them more than once.Amnesty International’s delegates met government authorities, including the President of the Republic, René García Préval, and Prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive. They held talks with the head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and with various UN agencies operating in Haiti, local and international human rights organizations and the ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, and France.
Story here.