The exercise yard at Pétionville women's prison is like nothing so much as an
empty water tank. The sheer concrete walls seem unnecessarily high - far
beyond anyone's most optimistic escape attempt. At the top, bright
bougainvillea spills over the grey, where it meets the deep blue of the
Caribbean sky.
At 9am the yard is already full of brutal white light. A dozen or so women
huddle in an angle that gives shade; among them is Roselaure Volmar, 15
years old, shy and skinny under her embroidered T-shirt.
Like most of the Pétionville inmates, Roselaure is dressed up today. Officials
from the United Nations peacekeeping mission to Haiti are coming to see the
prisoners' handicrafts. A tent has been set up in the yard, with a banner
that proclaims the work - or the women - to be “Jewels in the Dust”.
There has been an unsuccessful attempt to scrub off some of the Creole
graffiti on the walls. Sim Kompat, ranm yan ti chans reads the boldest: “If
I'm guilty, give me a little chance.” I wonder if the visiting VIPs will
know that few of the women are guilty, technically. All but 10 of the 234
inmates - 96 per cent of them - have had no trial.
Roselaure is the youngest. She was 14 when she was arrested, nearly two years
ago. Talking to her in the yard is not easy. We attract a crowd of curious
older women in cut-off T-shirts that show tattoos. They are all a lot bigger
than Roselaure. We try to shield the girl as we ask about the night when
everything went wrong for her.
Roselaure speaks fast, almost inaudibly. Her braids hang over her face. “It
was April 11. I was sitting at home early in the evening, working on some
T-shirts - that's what I do to make money when I'm not at school - and my
mother asked me to go buy some water. So I went out. I was alone. A man - I
don't really know him, but he was from our neighbourhood - came out and
grabbed me. He pulled me into an alley and tried to rape me. I was still
holding my scissors and I pushed them at his stomach. He let me go and I
ran. I got home and told my mother what had happened.
“Maman went out to see. She found the man lying on the ground. We were trying
to get him to hospital. She took me to my uncle's house and while we were
there we heard that the man's friends had set fire to our home.” Her small
face crumples as she tells us the next bit. “I heard that they got the man
to hospital but he was already dead. He had died on the ground outside my
house.” Roselaure takes a deep breath, and continues. “The police came and
arrested me the next day. I said ‘I am the one who killed him' and I told
them what he tried to do.” I ask if she knows what will happen to her. She
shrugs. “I've seen the judge three times but she didn't tell me why I was in
prison. She just asked questions. My family found a lawyer but he doesn't
explain what's happening, either. I'm going to court again next Wednesday.”
It will be the first time she has been in court for four months: “I'm really
excited.”
The press of other inmates is too much now and the prison officers, all male,
are looking nervous. So we go into the cell wing. Roselaure sleeps in one
room with 22 other juveniles. It's about 20ft by 12ft (6m by 4m). There is
no fan and no window, just a narrow ventilation grille at the top of the
walls. The girls sleep on iron bunk beds, head to toe, two to a mattress. A
sheet is hung round each bed in an attempt at privacy. Pots under the bunks
serve as latrines.
“I'm frightened. I'm lonely,” says Roselaure, when I ask her what is worst
about prison. “I faint sometimes and I regularly have fevers. I miss my
friends and my three older sisters. I can't see them because to visit the
prison you need an ID card, and theirs were burnt in the fire.” She misses
school, too: her favourite subject, she says, was French grammar. Out in the
noisy corridor, a crowd of girls is waiting. They flood into the room when
we leave - but none of them goes to talk to Roselaure.
Marjorie St Jean is the young and able commissionaire of Pétionville, which
is, everyone agrees, easily Haiti's best prison.Two-year waits for a trial
are commonplace, says St Jean, and some inmates have waited much longer. The
prison has no space to separate the girls from the adults, she says, “but
there have been improvements”. She gestures at the computer in the corner of
the office: “Now we have all the prisoners on a system, so it's impossible
nowadays for any of them to disappear.”
St Jean is interested in prisoners' rights: “If we didn't respect them I
wouldn't be here”, she says solemnly. So what about the children in the
prison? What about Roselaure Volmar? St Jean says she is unhappy about the
case: “The investigating judge has come here and I've told her this girl
should not be in prison.”
Haitian criminal law is a relic, a version of the Napoleonic Code that
lingered after the French sugar planters were thrown out in the revolt of
1804 that established Haiti as the world's first black republic. Rape became
a criminal offence only in 2005. One of the chief tasks of MINUSTAH, the UN
peacekeeping and stabilisation mission sent to Haiti in 2004, is to help the
Haitian Government to reform the country's justice and penal system. But
some observers in other non-governmental organisations have accused the UN
of presiding over an “epidemic of rape” in which victims, if they go to law,
are violated again by the justice system.
I go to the children's tribunal on the next Wednesday, in an old building
recently reclaimed from Port-au-Prince's gangsters. Here I find Roselaure
waiting on a bench in a dark recess under the stairs, in a line of
tough-looking adolescent boys. She waves excitedly. But when Rosy Auguste, a
lawyer with the Haitian human rights organisation RNDDH, and I try to enter
the courtroom to watch proceedings, the female judge orders us out.
In the street outside I find Roselaure's parents, Mimose and Jacques: she with
her church hat on, he in a pressed check shirt. They are both nervous,
Mimose close to tears. They tell me that they hoped their daughter - they
call her Ti' Rose [short for Petit Rose] ]- would get out today. But their
lawyer won't tell them what's going on. If she is released, they plan a
celebration - first at the nearby cathedral to give thanks, then a family
get-together.
That would be a rare event for the Volmars. They have three other daughters
but the family has lived apart since the murder and Ti' Rose's arrest. “When
the house was burnt down we had to separate,” says Jacques sadly. His work
as a carpenter dried up when the Haitian economy collapsed in the unrest of
2004. “We could not afford a house, so each of us has gone to live with a
different relative.”
I ask Mimose what she thinks happened on the night of April 11. “Well, the boy
who was killed, Jerry Mardi, had been pestering Ti'Rose for some time,” she
says, “wanting to have sex with her. But she has never even had a boyfriend.”
She stops, and Jacques takes up the story.
“Mardi was 18,” he says grimly. “He was a member of the same gang who raped
her when she was 12.” This was something that I hadn't heard. “Yes, she was
raped so badly that she had to go to hospital for stitches. We still have a
medical report that says she was raped. We told the police.” Jacques turns
his head away in disgust. “They did nothing,” Mimose goes on. “The gang has
guns, the police are frightened of them.
“They said it was too dangerous to investigate - for them and us. There were
witnesses but they were too frightened to come forward. It was the same this
time - the witnesses saw him trying to drag her away but they won't talk.
That's why Jerry's friends burnt down our house - to show what happens if
anyone talks.
“We don't understand why she is still in jail. It's a case of
self-defence. We've been told by our lawyer that it's all about money. If
you have money, the file will move faster. That's what he said.”
Rosy Auguste nods at this. “It's true,” she tells me later. “I'm afraid the
system is still deeply corrupt. Of course the lawyer could ask for the girl
to be released on caution, while the investigation of her case continues. If
not freed, she should be released, according to the law, into a juvenile
detention centre - but Haiti doesn't have one. The law also says that the
investigation should take only three months. It's a simple case. I don't see
why it should take 17.”
Mimose gives me a photo of her daughter. Roselaure had several taken in prison
for her family, because all the family albums were destroyed in the fire:
“She was worried that we would forget her.” The picture shows her
long-legged, too thin, with a big grin. On the back, in French, is written:
“I dedicate this photo as a support to Maman. When you look at this photo,
you will think of me, Maman, only Maman, dear to me for life. I'll love you
for the rest of my life. Ti' Rose.”
Sexual violation and mass murder have punctuated Haiti's history ever since
Columbus gave the girls of newly discovered Hispaniola to his officers as
gifts, and traded in them. The French sugar planters imported and raped
black Africans, who in turn rose up and slaughtered all the white people who
could not escape.
Nearly half of the 65 Haitian heads of state since then have been overthrown
or assassinated, and stories of sexual violence stain much of that sad
history of coup and counter-coup.
In modern times rape has been a weapon of control, of political repression,
and a means of earning money. In Cité Soleil, Martissant and Carrefour
Feuilles, the vast slums that stetch out from Port-au-Prince's old centre
along the dry coastal plain, rape is a habitual tool of the gangs that rule
the inhabitants - a third of a million of them, living in abject poverty.
In 2006 a UN report stated that “almost half” of the young women and girls
living in Cité Soleil and other conflict-zone slums had been raped or
sexually assaulted. These figures are comparable with those that emerge from
the conflicts in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But Haiti is
not at war. Rather the opposite: it has a functioning democratic Government
and a rehabilitated police force, supported by a UN mission whose four years
in the country are widely acclaimed as a success.
According to another report on armed violence and women in Haiti, written for
the UN in 2006, organised rape is endemic in the country's slums. For the
gangs of teenage males known as vagabonds or chimeras, “gang rape of young
girls and adolescents is their principal activity”. They do it, writes Wiza
Loutis, the report's French author, to punish girls whose behaviour is not
“normal”. Such girls may have refused a gang member's sexual advances.
Older men form gangs called the bandits. “Rape is not their principal
activity,” writes Loutis, though they may use gang rape as a way of
subjugating their community. Bandit groups will threaten witnesses of rapes,
or burn down the houses of victims' parents. The rapists are not all male.
According to Loutis, there are groups of lesbian bandits - girls and
teenagers - who also rape young women and work with male gangs in
kidnappings and rapes.
Massimo Toschi, a child protection specialist working for the UN mission, is
appalled at the attitudes to the rape epidemic among Haiti's rulers, both
inside the UN mission and among the Haitians. “You cannot imagine the lack
of interestthere is in the UN system over this problem,” he says. He
suspects that as the mission tries to encourage Haiti's first healthy
Government in 30 years, its leaders do not want to cause too much offence.
“Things are improving in the penal system,” says Toschi. “Two years ago we
found a ten-year-old who had been in the women's prison without trial for a
year, accused of theft of a chicken. Things like that have stopped.
“But the problem with sexual violence in Haiti lies deep in the system.
Charges of rape are diminished by judges to sexual assault. The police won't
follow up complaints. In the countryside, the authorities deal with cases
through bargaining - often a rapist is made to marry his victim. Many
Haitians, among them members of the police and the judiciary, still believe
that rape is rape only if the victim is a virgin.”
The only definitive statistics on rape in Haiti come from the legal system.
They don't tell you much, but what they do tell is terrible. In the first
judicial semester of 2007 in Port-au-Prince, 41 cases of rape came to trial.
Of these, 21 concerned older teenage girls and 13 others girls aged under
13. But only one resulted in a conviction.
Is rape reported to the police? We looked into a dozen or so cases while we
were in Haiti, and of them only Roselaure's had been. Benedetta Faedi, a
researcher at Stanford University, California, who has researched violence
against women and children in Haiti, told me that no rape victim she had met
there had informed the police: “One of the problems is that girls who are
known to have been raped are very unlikely to find a marriage partner.”
I leave Mimose and Jacques at the children's tribunal and go to the offices of
the UN mission, in a vast former hotel on a ridge high above the city, not
far from Pétionville. As the taxi wheezes up the hill, I look back - but the
slums, the Palais de Justice, all the mess and clamour of old Port-au-Prince
is hidden in a haze of cooking-fire smoke. Somewhere behind it lies the
Caribbean and the long arm of Haiti's northwest.
Inside the UN headquarters, the Hotel Christopher, all is crisp and
air-conditioned - it is probably the coolest place in the country. The
officials who work here are chauffeured from their guarded residences to
their desks and back each day in UN 4x4s. They earn high salaries and
“danger money” bonuses but are, naturally, somewhat removed from Haitian
realities.
In an office on an upper floor I meet Dominique Eliaers-Wouters and Denis
Racicot, the two senior officials in the mission's justice section. Racicot
has been working in Haiti since 1993, he says, and, while there is always
more to be done, “things have never looked as good in the judicial system as
they do at the moment”.
Eliaers-Wouters is more combative. The UN cannot intervene in the judicial and
penal system, she says, as soon as I begin to talk of the children I met in
Pétionville prison. Its mandate merely empowers the mission to support the
Haitian Government in its reforms.
Eliaers-Wouters assures me that Roselaure's case is being monitored by her
staff. Meanwhile, she says, progress is being made on the necessary reforms.
Reports and analyses have been done, and useful advocacy with the Haitians
has produced striking results. But as the lawyers reason and explain,
regretting the lack of a proper children's detention centre and the absence
of a system of bail in the criminal code, I think of Roselaure's thin face
again, bright and intent as she sat in the row of boys under the stairs of
the court a couple of hours ago. “If I ever go back to school,” she said to
me, “I'd like to be a lawyer.”
“Do explain to me,” I ask - patiently, I hope - “at what point you have to
recognise that these are flagrant contraventions of UN conventions, carried
out by a Government with whom you are co-operating? Just a mile or so from
this office, basic, universally agreed rights of children are being
systematically ignored. Don't you, as a UN mission, have to act to stop
that?” Eliaers-Wouters replies angrily that it is pointless asking the
Haitian Government to do the impossible. Advocacy works - two months ago,
pressure from journalists and parliamentarians got an eight-year-old and a
ten-year-old released from the women's jail.
I point out that MINUSTAH's mandate specifically mentions a duty to support
the human rights of women and children. Eliaers-Wouters shrugs. But as I
leave, Racicot promises to raise the case of Ti' Rose with the Haitian chief
prosecutor.
Outside the building, still in a rage, I receive a phone call. Roselaure was
not released. She didn't even get to see the judge. At about four o'clock,
while I was debating the Napoleonic Code with the UN lawyers, Roselaure was
told that the official court note-taker had not turned up, and that she
would have to go back to jail.
A couple of months later, I receive an e-mail from Massimo Toschi. Roselaure
Volmar's case has at last been heard, and a judgment delivered. She was
found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to two years in a rehabilitation
facility for former gang members who are under 18. But, according to Rosy
Auguste, since the centre is judged “inadequate”, she is now serving her
sentence back in Petionville prison.
As Petit Rose had been in custody for 18 months before sentencing, she will be
released next month.
Alex Renton and Caroline Irby's trip to Haiti was hosted by Oxfam. For more
information on how to support Oxfam's work in Haiti and internationally to
combat violence against women, visit www.oxfam.org.uk
