Canada complicit in suppressing democracy in Haiti
Does the Canadian-promoted “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine in Haiti include murder, rape, and threats of violence?
That’s the question we should be asking Canadian officials after a study in the prestigious Lancet medical journal released at the end of August revealed there were 8,000 murders, 35,000 rapes and thousands of incidents of armed threats in the 22 months after the overthrow of the elected government in Haiti.
In September 2000, Canada launched the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The commission’s final report, The Responsibility to Protect, was presented to the United Nations in December 2001. Then, at the 2005 World Summit, Canada urged world leaders to endorse the new doctrine. It asserts that, where gross human rights abuses are occurring, it is the duty of the international community to intervene, over and above considerations of state sovereignty.
In January 2003, the Canadian government organized the “Ottawa Initiative” in which U.S., Canadian and French government officials who met at Meech Lake decided that Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, should be removed from office. This intervention was justified, they claimed, by the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine.
In due course, Aristide was forced from office. And since then, Canada’s intervention in Haiti has exacerbated, rather than improved, Haiti’s human rights situation.
Confirming numerous prior human rights investigations, the Lancet study estimates that 8,000 people in Port-au-Prince were killed in the 22 months after the toppling of Aristide’s government. The Lancet study gives an idea of the scale of the persecution of those close to Aristide’s Lavalas movement.
Of the estimated 8,000 people murdered–12 people a day–in the greater Port-au-Prince area, nearly half (47.7%) were killed by governmental or anti-Aristide forces. Of the killings, 21.7% of them were attributed to members of the Haitian National Police (HNP), 13% to demobilized soldiers (many of whom participated in the coup), and 13% to anti-Aristide gangs. (None were attributed to Aristide supporters.)
Canada commands the 1,600-member UN police contingent mandated to train, assist, and oversee the Haitian National Police. Yet, while Canadian police have been supporting them, the Haitian police have been attacking peaceful demonstrators and carrying out massacres, often with the help of anti-Aristide gangs. The UN police have announced investigations in a few particularly egregious cases, but not one report from such inquiries has ever been released.
The Lancet study also uncovered some evidence that Canadian forces in Haiti were more than mere silent accomplices. Athena Kolbe, co-author of the study, recounts an interview with one family in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince: “Canadian troops came to their house, and they said they were looking for (pro-Aristide) Lavalas chimeres, and threatened to kill the head of household, the father, if he didn’t name names of people in their neighbourhood who were Lavalas chimeres or Lavalas supporters.”
Canada took command of “reforming” Haiti’s judicial system, yet, by all accounts, huge numbers of political prisoners, including the former prime minister, have languished in prolonged and arbitrary detention. The Lancet found a huge number of unconstitutional detentions.
The study also found a “shocking” level of sexual violence committed since the coup, with an estimated 35,000 women raped in Port-au- Prince, more than half of the victims teenagers.
In a harrowing account, co-author Kolbe told of interviewing a mother who had been raped with a metal bar, which destroyed her cervix. Gravely ill, the woman was transported by Kolbe’s crew to the general hospital, where they offered to pay for medical costs. On discovering that a uniformed police officer was implicated, the hospital refused medical treatment. The victim was eventually treated at another facility, but ultimately succumbed to her injuries. Kolbe then paid for relocation of the traumatized family.
(This necessitated not including the rape in the Lancet survey data.)
Throughout the period investigated by the researchers from Wayne State University in Michigan, Canada was heavily involved in Haitian affairs. After withholding aid to Aristide’s elected government, Canada gave nearly $200 million to the imposed Gerard Latortue regime. Nearly 500 Canadian troops with six CH-146 Griffon helicopters were on the ground until August of 2004. And the imposed Prime Minister was feted in Ottawa on a number of occasions.
On April 13, 2006, in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised “Canada’s very important role in Haiti.”
We suspect that anyone who reads the Lancet study will not share her praise.
(Nik Barry-Shaw is a member of Haiti Action Montreal. Yves Engler is the author of Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority (with Anthony Fenton).)
