Haitian soldiers, police accused of mass rape

[struggle4progress]

by Lyn Duff

<snip> "Rape is becoming a common tool of oppression," explains attorney Mario Joseph, whose organization, Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), has investigated hundreds of human rights cases in the past year. Joseph, who assisted in the prosecution of the human rights crimes committed during the last coup, says that it is discouraging to see the number of convicted human rights violators who are now walking free and serving in the new American-installed interim government.

"Women and young girls are raped because their father or another relative is a member of Lavalas or is targeted (by the political opposition). They are raped as a form of punishment. The victims do not feel they can go to the police for help with their problems because in many areas the people who victimized them are the ones running the show; they are the ones patrolling the streets as if they are police, committing crimes with impunity under the eyes of the UN. And even in Port-au-Prince, the former military has been hired into the national police force." <snip>

No one knows how many women and girls have been victims of politically motivated rapes since the violence began early last year, say human rights advocates. The two major human rights organizations in Haiti, the CARLI hotline and the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR), refuse to investigate human rights reports in the poorer neighborhoods, where most of the attacks have occurred, "because those zones are all Aristide-supporter; it's not safe for us to go there," says NCHR's Pierre Esperance.

Both organizations receive extensive funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), including a large chunk of the $1.4 million which was distributed primarily to anti-Aristide organizations in the year prior to the February 2004 coup, according to USAID area director Pamela Callen. In an ironic twist, critics say that the CARLI hotline and NCHR focus their energies only on the few human rights violations they say were committed by members of the pro-democracy movement. <snip>

http://www.sfbayview.com/030205/accused030205.shtml