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An unsavory effort to discredit Haiti report
By Tim Pelzer
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11-27-06, 8:32 am
A London-based Haiti solidarity group with ties to shadowy U.S./Canadian-backed non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that participated in the campaign to destabilize the former center-left Haitian government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is behind efforts to discredit a new report from the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet.
The Lancet study, "Human rights abuse and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince: a random survey of households," written by Wayne University school of social work researchers Athena Kolbe and Royce Hutson, was released in September.
It reveals that 8,000 people were murdered and 35,000 women raped in Port -au-Prince between Feb. 29, 2004, and December 2005, the period immediately after the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Security forces belonging to the U.S./Canadian/French imposed interim government as well as anti-Lavalas gangs carried out a large share of these atrocities.
Media coverage of the Lancet study began casting doubt on the validity of the report. Charles Arthur of the London-based Haiti Support Group was widely cited as claiming that the Lancet report is seriously marred by bias because co-author Athena Kolbe had worked in an orphanage set up by Aristide. She also worked as a journalist under the name Lyn Duff, writing favorably of Aristide.
Arthur maintains that Aristide supporters also raped and murdered innocent people and that this is not reflected in the Lancet report. "I am concerned The Lancet has unwittingly been used as part of the pro-Aristide propaganda campaign," he told the Toronto-based Globe and Mail.
According to sources who have requested anonymity, Arthur has been pressuring the Lancet to re-evaluate the study, claiming that Kolbe used fabricated data. Other U.S.- and Canadian-funded NGOs have also complained to the Lancet. After weeks of pressure, Lancet editor Richard Horton asked Wayne University to investigate whether a conflict of interest colored Kolbe's reporting.
Arthur's criticisms of the Lancet report, as well as his motivations, must be viewed with suspicion. All other major human rights studies on the period on Haiti, from Harvard and the University of Miami to the U.S. National Lawyers Guild, support the Lancet study's findings that Aristide supporters were overwhelming the victims rather than the perpetrators of human rights violations.
When I asked Arthur about this via e-mail, he responded, "I am not sure that the reports that you mention are entirely reliable (apart from Amnesty) as they appear to see the undoubted violations committed by agents of the interim government, former soldiers, right-wing gangs and the Minustah (UN Stabilization Forces) but not the abuses committed by FL [Fanmi Lavalas Party] supporters." Instead he sent me extracts of Amnesty International (AI) reports (October 8, 2004; July 28, 2005) that make unsupported claims that gangs loyal to Aristide had killed many people. Well after the coup against Aristide, human rights activists in Haiti criticized Amnesty for not investigating and speaking out against the repression carried out by the interim government and its allies.
According to Marguerite Laurent of the New York-based Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, the organizations that Arthur promotes, such as the Organization of People in Struggle (OPL), Platform to Advocate for Alternative Development (PAPDA), Haitian Women's Solidarity Organization (SOFA) and Kayfanm "stood silent during the horrific killings and illegal arrests of Lavalas supporters and rapes of Haitian women and men after the 2004 coup d'etat."
"Arthur was losing his credibility," she said. "This attack [against Kolbe] puts his name back in the circle." The groups that Arthur supports played a role in the U.S./Canadian/French-led effort to destabilize and undermine the elected Aristide government. OPL, PAPDA, SOFA and Kayfanm receive funding from either the U.S. government-backed National Endowment for Democracy, International Republican Institute, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or the Canadian government-backed Canadian International Development Agency.
After U.S. Marines seized Aristide on Feb. 29, 2004, and flew him to the Central African Republic, the interim government recruited heavily from the U.S./Canadian-financed anti-Aristide opposition movement. This included groups that Arthur supports. For instance, PAPDA leader Yves Andre Wainwright became environment minister.
Furthermore, the British-based organization Christian Aid provides funding to Arthur's Haiti Support Group. Christian Aid receives money from the U.S. government through grants from USAID.
Witnesses in London have also accused Arthur of distributing the telephone numbers and home address of Kolbe, which resulted in numerous death threats and two bomb scares that are under investigation by US and British authorities.
Arthur's efforts to undermine the Lancet report deserves to be firmly rejected.
--Tim Pelzer is a freelance writer whose articles appear in numerous publications.
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Comment List
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Michael Collins
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11/27/2006 09:48
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The Lancet article on Haiti has already been discredited yet people continue to quote this piece of propaganda.
Athena Kolbe is - in fact - Lyn Duff a journalist who has featured in California's radical media. Her previously published articles have been wildly pro-Aristide. She is said to have worked for his ONG is Haiti.
There is nothing wrong with being pro-anything, however, when one publishes a lot of propaganda- using another name - it makes sensible people wonder about her motivation.
I have been in Haiti for the past ten years, and have close contacts within most groups...pro and anti-Aristide. There is asolutely no basis for her claims. Sure there are problems, most of which have been generated by Aristide's associates, in an effort to destabilize Haiti to the point where Aristide will be seen as the only one who can return law-and-order. (He used this approach during the fall of 1995 - with some success.)
Kolbe is stupid enough to blame the violence on everyone except Lavalas. Lavalas may not be responsible for everything...however, their hands are not clean.
It is really sad when outsiders do their utmost to destroy Haiti, with absolutely no regard for the well-being of Haiti's hungry millions ...who don't know how to spell Democracy and could care less about this abstract foreign concept. What Haitians want is security, jobs, school for the kids and something to eat. They are sick and tired of the stupid political game.
Lyn Duff...Athena Kolbe or as she sometimes calls herself Athena Lynn Duff Kolbe... should come and live in Haiti, amongst the chaos she and people like her have caused...or shut up.
Michael Collins
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Nicolas Rossier
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11/28/2006 12:07
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Mr. Collins,
The study has been discredited by the same people who shut their eyes on the political repression against Lavalas members, former government representatives and critics of the coup in 2004. For the poor masses of Haiti, Lynn Duff is maybe less an outsider than others who write against her or send her death threats. Lynn Duff has been living in and out of Haiti as well for some time and she used another name precisely because she knew her report would be attacked if people knew she had been working with Aristide in the past (in Haiti as you know the messenger is shot and not the message so it is only normal that some people decide (specially if they work in a tensed political situation) to hide behind a different mame (some writers do that all the time). I would have rather have her kept her real name and let the press debate the real findings of the study rather than only focusing on the scandal itself. Even if one can think that the report is slightly overblown, I believe that it is pretty clear who had to suffer the most and that report is very useful to show the extent of the systematic repression. Who are the ones who had to flee for their safety in Florida, New-York, Martinique, Guadeloupe, France? Where is the well organized andwell armed army of Aristide which attacks the people of Cite Soleil daily? Let's focus now on who were the first victims of the coup? I met many and if that coup was such a happy liberation then people would not have fled by thousands in the post coup period or been jailed by hundreds without due process or any judgement. How many polical prisoners did Aristide have in his jails? Most of the violence created in POP after the coup is due to two things:
- the United States has sent hundreds of Haitian criminals to the Caribbean island each month since Dec 2003 and even more recently (see Reuters article today).
- because of the coup, about 2000 of criminals fled Haitian prisons in Haiti in the few days following the coups. A lot of them are treated as heroes today or just hanging around never caught by the Latortue/Minustah 10'000 HNP/blue helmet forces.
- Aristide is not free of movement (he is heavily guarded, supervised....interviews are screened by the SA gvt etc..). He is incapable of organizing a resistance from the hills of Pretoria and those who pretend that are simply misinformed. As of today, the Lavalas leadership is technically divided and not operational.The party (not the movement) has been pretty much destroyed and coopted over the last few years.
Some of the Lavalas leaders are still in jail.
The violent kidnappings occurring in the last two years are very well organized operations which could only be done with the participation of police insiders etc.. The random shootings against Minustah soldiers are individual non coordinated retaliations from people in the slums who have lost family members and don't want these random UN incursions anymore (see last Sunday protest asking the UN to leave).
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jean d
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11/28/2006 14:12
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The most important issue that critics of the report fail to mention is that it was approved by academic peers and that it used scientific methods such as random spacial sampling. People who do not live in the poor slums in Port-au-Prince have not clue as to high level of violence these people have been under. If you added the deaths of people in the north of Haiti it would probably be a few more thousand. The paramiliatires in the north have killed a lot of people too. The U.S. installed dictatorship mounted a government campaign of mass repression. They had over a thousand people in jail illegally. 1,000 political prisoners atleast! People denying the Lancet report are not only denying scientific methods for collecting human rights data but they have presented no human rights analyisis of their own. Why have they not conducted studies? The pro-coup USAID financed "human rights" groups do not care about poor lavalas dead.
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Michael Collins
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11/28/2006 16:53
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>
> The most important issue that critics of the report fail to
> mention is that it was approved by academic peers and that
> it used scientific methods such as random spacial
> sampling. People who do not live in the poor slums in
> Port-au-Prince have not clue as to high level of violence
> these people have been under. If you added the deaths of
> people in the north of Haiti it would probably be a few
> more thousand. The paramiliatires in the north have killed
> a lot of people too. The U.S. installed dictatorship
> mounted a government campaign of mass repression. They had
> over a thousand people in jail illegally. 1,000 political
> prisoners atleast! People denying the Lancet report are
> not only denying scientific methods for collecting human
> rights data but they have presented no human rights
> analyisis of their own. Why have they not conducted
> studies? The pro-coup USAID financed "human rights"
> groups do not care about poor lavalas dead.
>
>
>
> This just proves that her peers are idiots too.
Do a proper bit of research on the fallout from the Lancet article and you will see, unless you are blinded by some sort of prejudice - that there are reasons to doubt its validity.
If you had ever spent any time in Haiti you would realize that trying to apply a statistical analysis to the Haitian scene is an impossibility.
Why should anyone try to create more studies that do not make the slightest bit of difference to Haiti's massive population. Studies waste money that would be better spent on rice and beans for the hungry of Haiti.
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jean d
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11/28/2006 21:26
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Mr Collins,
Excuse me, but who they hell are you to tell me I have never been to Hatii or lived in Haiti? The Haitain people need not only food they can afford but jobs they can get. Aristide was trying to do both when elites and foreigin agencies destablized and destroyed his government. Haitians also need a respect for democracy from the international community, including agencies financing elite organizations and the dominican military which backed rebel death squads.
We in Haiti also need human rights reports that tell the truth and tell the world what is happening in the poor slum. I find it shocking that you think you speak for all Haitians in denying the mass murder of poor Haitains. You should be ashamed of yourself and the propaganda you are posting on this website. Please respect democracy, respect the poor to have a say in politics, and respect human rights for all - not just for the wealthy and elite groups you side with.
I applaud the author of this article and all those who have looked into the mass murder of the poor in slums of port-au-prince and haiti. Merci, Merci, Merci ampil!
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