May 27, 2011: At a forum held on May 6, 2011 to discuss how to bolster Haiti’s anti-rape laws, Haiti’s then president-elect Michel Martelly promised to address what he called the “very serious” problem of rape.
According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which organized the discussion, the gathering marked the first time that grassroots women’s groups sat together with senior officials from the ministries of women, health, and justice, as well as the chief prosecutor’s office and the police.

Through its TrustLaw initiative, the foundation is drawing on international expertise to advise Haiti on ways to stem the alarming number of sexual assaults against women and girls living in post-earthquake tent camps. Tightly cramped living conditions put females at risk. In one case, a child was lured into a tent to watch television only to be raped by the tent’s occupant.

More than 600 rape cases were reported in 2010, but actual numbers are likely much higher. Victims are often too ashamed or afraid to file a complaint. A general lack of sensitivity toward female victims of sexual assault and the absence of a legal system to support their claims are part of the problem President Martelly hopes to tackle.

Reducing Violence Against Women and Children

Mr. Martelly, who assumed Haiti’s presidency on May 14, promised part of his mission would be to ensure that “the rule of law reigns in Haiti [and] that justice is for everybody.” Women’s groups have accused male police of not taking rape cases seriously. One change Mr. Martelly supports is the presence of a female agent at every police station so women can feel more comfortable about reporting cases of rape.

Forum participants agreed on the need to create information campaigns to inform women and girls of their legal rights and to more effectively disseminate a currently existing rape hotline. All recognized that a large barrier to justice is linguistic, because French rather than the more common Creole is the language of the courts. Delegates also concurred that doctors and judges need to get on board to put in place a fairer and more effective medical certificate system for rape victims.

A little girl at SOS Children’s Villages in Santo, Haiti.
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By Melissa Dribben, Inquirer Staff Writer

In early April, two weeks before she opened her latest restaurant, Talula’s Garden, Aimee Olexy, crowned royalty of the region’s culinary scene, met with her coffee supplier to choose beans she would serve at the end of each finely tuned meal.

He’d brought her usual favorites from Nicaragua, Brazil, and Africa. But a stranger in the cache caught her eye.

“What’s in that little unmarked bag?” she asked.

The supplier didn’t answer. Instead, he brewed a small batch and poured her a cup.

“I loved, loved, loved it,” Olexy said. “It was like a coffee I dreamed of in the morning.” Unlike so many that seduce you with aroma, then disappoint with a slap to the tongue, this coffee was true to its promise. “The smell matched the taste,” she said, with hints of caramel and butterscotch and a toasty finish.

She ordered it – an entire shipping container’s worth, about 33,000 pounds.

A month later, Nelson Robinson, 34, a Haitian coffee farmer, stood in the restaurant weeping grateful tears.

The coffee Olexy had fallen for, Haitian Blue Forest, came from Robinson’s home in the destitute mountains of southeastern Haiti. The beans had been handpicked from semiwild vines that his great-grandfather and neighbors had planted from heirloom seeds linked to ancient Ethiopia.

Robinson told Olexy and her staff how, as a child, he had watched his father burn most of the family’s coffee plantation. Although Haiti was once one of the world’s major coffee exporters, politics and economics had conspired to kill off the trade. Precipitous drops in the price along with rising oil costs made the vines more valuable as a fuel source and the land more useful for growing peas.

After finishing college, Robinson had the chance to emigrate to Canada. Instead, he returned home to the family farm and worked with a coffee cooperative, Coopcab, representing 5,000 families.

They were barely getting by when, in January, a tall, odd American loped into the village – Todd Carmichael, cofounder of La Colombe, the Philadelphia-based roasting company.

Since he started the business 17 years ago, Carmichael has traveled around the “planet,” as he prefers to say in his caffeinated disquisition, searching for worthy plants and deserving farmers. The 47-year-old coffee savant and world adventurer (he holds the world record for crossing Antarctica solo) says his motives are almost as pure as his product.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, May 28 (UPI) — Haiti’s new president, who came to power pledging to house earthquake victims, is now under fire as they are evicted from refugee camps.\

© 2011 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A businessman nominated to be Haiti’s next prime minister said Wednesday that he wanted to scrap the earthquake reconstruction commission, which has been criticized for slow progress. The nominee, Daniel-Gérard Rouzier, said that the 27-member Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, led by President Bill Clinton, was “dysfunctional” and would be replaced by a new government agency. Mr. Rouzier said that the commission “as it exists today will not continue. I don’t mean to crucify the people who came up with the concept. But sometimes when something doesn’t work you have to fix it.” Mr. Rouzier, who is awaiting Senate confirmation of his nomination, did not provide details of his proposal for a new agency. A spokesman for Mr. Clinton and other commission officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Rouzier said he hoped that the former American president would continue to be part of the reconstruction effort.

by Michelle Chen

This month, Port-au-Prince hailed Michel Martelly as he took office as president, trumpeting new hope for his disaster-stricken country. Elsewhere in the Haitian capital, hope was stifled in the smothered screams of women and girls.

More than a year after a massive earthquake sent the city crumbling to the ground, the chaos continues to reverberate in refugee camps through a wave of systematic sexual violence. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has reported widespread rape and sexual violence against women. The IOM notes that rising reports of sexual violence may be “linked to a growing trust between survivors and the police and service providers,” but safety protections for women and girls are still desperately lacking. And the primary problem remains that, nearly one year and a half after disaster struck, some 680,000 people still languish in squalid encampments.

Behind each assault is a swelling humanitarian crisis that has bred violence, fear and desperation. Lacking infrastructure and electricity, Haiti’s camps for displaced residents are a seedbed for social instability, and by extension, sexual assault and violence.

The advocacy organization MADRE, working with the local NGO KOFAVIV, has investigated and documented the brutalization of women since the earthquake. In one documented case, a group of men abducted a woman, gang raped her, choked her until she opened her mouth and “bit off her tongue.” Last July, a woman was reportedly attacked when she went out to use the bathroom at night. Countless cases of rape go unreported, and a precious few will ever be investigated or prosecuted, due to unresponsive and ineffective law enforcement. Rape was not officially a crime in Haiti until 2005.

Patterns of rape are a measure of a society’s inability to protect its most vulnerable. MADRE’s report explains the context of these attacks:

In the wake of disaster, women generally have less access to resources and are excluded from decision-making. This discrimination makes women and girls more vulnerable to the impact of disasters, including the specific conditions that give rise to sexual violence. Disproportionate vulnerability in times of disaster also exacerbates the consequences of sexual violence, such as disease, disability and depression. Women and girls are put at increased risk of rape by the collapse of social infrastructures, the erosion of family and community networks, inequitable access to social services, absence of law and order, lack of secure housing or safe neighborhoods and dependence resulting from economic dislocation.

The trauma that Haitian women have suffered has had the additional corrosive impact of marginalizing them further through stigma and terror—at a time that Haiti needs women’s voices more than ever to restore civil society and help guide the fractious recovery effort.

As Yifat Suskind, executive director of MADRE told me:

Our partners have told us that women who go to the police after an attack are afforded no privacy and are often blamed for the attacks. Women are told that they need medical certificates to prove that they have been raped, but they are made to wait hours or days before a doctor will see them at one of the overburdened hospitals. Unable to find another option, they are made to return to the camps and live alongside the attacker who raped them. Each of these dangers compounds the initial trauma of the attack.

In this climate, it’s not surprising that along with rape, the problem of child trafficking has intensified as well, according to the IOM:

Since January this year, IOM has identified close to 400 cases of trafficked children living in the displacement camps in extreme poverty, with about 50 percent of them having suffered physical and sexual abuse by the time they were rescued.

Martelly promised a turnaround at recent conference of civil society groups and officials, reports the charity SOS Children’s Village. He talked about ensuring that women agents would be posted at camps to facilitate the reporting of rapes. The majority party leader Joseph Lambert pledged to pass legislation to curb sexual violence.

So Haiti’s new government may finally be ready to confront the issue as the recovery sputters forward. But for the women who have to sleep in the camps tonight, their best hope is collective security, organizing themselves to keep watch over each other when no one else will. International donors have begun pumping in more resources for simple security measures, such as better lighting in public spaces, as well as grassroots safety training to help women stay out of threatening situations.

It’s too easy to frame rape in Haiti as a singular epidemic, reflecting a ravaged country that has come unhinged. Yet gender-based violence has afflicted communities around the world, particularly in war-torn countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 1,100 women are raped every day by some estimates. As some critics have pointed out, the reductive “cultural” explanations for systematic rapes in these situations don’t capture the full sweep of culpability. Rape is both a symptom and a cause of social devastation, which pervades any environment where extremes of power and subjugation have shattered the whole social structure, from the rule of law to the sovereignty of women’s bodies.

If there are social patterns that drive sexual violence, they often trace back to the impunity and indifference of those who bear witness and avert their eyes, and this happens not just in the camps or on the battlefield but in the media and our minds. Rape makes headlines when the assailants are political celebrities, not when the victims are nameless and faceless. Rape evokes our pity for the developing world while numbing us to its seemingly intractable “savagery.” Haiti’s crisis isn’t merely rape but the grotesque banality surrounding violence in Port-au-Prince, the fatigue that settles in the wake of tragedy.

The communications office of President Michel Martelly, confirms, that the President has officially made the choice of the entrepreneur Daniel Gérard Rouzier to be his next Prime Minister. An official letter confirming this choice, was sent to the Presidents of both chambers.

The Head of State is convinced that Mr Rouzier has the capacity and the willingness to accompany him in his quest for a better future for all Haitians and hopes that his choice is supported by all sectors of the population. “My choice is based on the fact that Daniel Rouzier is a father integrates, entire and pious and who succeeded in business and who knows how to transform dreams into reality. In addition, he shares my vision and is ready to support me so that together we can build a better Haiti” declared the President of the Republic, Michel Martelly.

The President of the Republic reaffirms once again his determination to change the lives of the people and requests the frank collaboration of all sectors in order to achieve this goal.