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Posted on Wed, Dec. 27, 2006

HAITI: Child kidnappings raise fears in Haiti

In hard-hit Haiti, the kidnappers have turned on the children as well as the adults in their campaigns of abduction for ransom.

The first time she called her daughter's cellphone, no one picked up. Then Maggy Dessources dialed the number again. This time, a man answered.

''Is this not Natacha's telephone?'' she asked curiously.

''Yes, Madame,'' the man said. Dessources' heart sank.

''Natacha has a little problem,'' the man said, pausing after every word. ``She has been kidnapped.''

Dial tone.

In perpetually turbulent Haiti, where children already suffer high rates of illiteracy, child slavery and mortality, its most vulnerable citizens now face a growing danger: kidnappings.

They are being snatched while walking to or from school; hijacked while riding in school buses; abducted during home invasions; delivered to kidnappers by the family driver. And in the horrifying case of Natacha Farah Kerbie Dessources: shoved into a waiting car with five armed men as she pounded on the front gate of her house.

''I didn't think they were going to kill my child,'' Maggy Dessources said. But they did. Even after a ransom of $500 was paid. Natacha's bullet-riddled body was found near a heap of trash two days after she was kidnapped last month.

Haitian and international authorities can't say with certainty how many kidnappings have taken place in the recent past.

Victims tend to avoid reporting abductions, they say, especially if they involve children.

`CAN'T GET LOWER'

But the Haiti director of the U.N. Children's Fund estimates that 48 youths have been kidnapped since November; a U.N. official familiar with the issue puts it at 60 since November; and a Port-au-Prince human-rights organization says at least 68 children were abducted from Nov. 10-Dec. 15.

''Given the state the country is in, the state of the insecurity, the state of the impunity, the state of kidnapping, the state of crimes in Haiti, we can't get lower than this,'' said Pierre Esperance, executive director of the Port-au-Prince-based National Human Rights Defense Network. ``The government has an obligation to reinforce the key state institutions -- justice and police.''

ANGRY MOURNERS

A 20-year-old student at a teacher's college in Port-au-Prince, Natacha Dessources wasn't a child.

But she has become a poster child for Haiti's child-kidnapping phenomenon. Angry mourners at her funeral later protested at the National Palace, demanding that President René Préval do something about the kidnappings.

Maggy Dessources, who is unemployed, told the kidnappers in one of many phone calls negotiating a ransom that she had no money. After she dropped off what she managed to gather by begging family and friends, she was almost certain they would release the young woman, like other kidnappers had done with so many other victims before.

When Natacha's body was found, her eyes had been gouged, and she had been shot several times. Two of her fingers had been broken, her mother said in a telephone interview from Haiti, where she has been in hiding with her 15-year-old son.

OTHER CASES

Shortly afterward, police announced they had found the strangled body of 6-year-old Carl Rubens Francillon, kidnapped on Nov. 8 in Port-au-Prince. His family driver has been arrested. His parents also had paid a ransom. On Dec. 13, kidnappers hijacked a school bus with seven children on their way to school. It was one of four kidnapping incidents that day involving 22 kids, officials say. All were released unharmed after their parents paid ransoms.

''Children are in a state of panic,'' said Adriano González-Regueral, UNICEF's representative in Haiti. ``They are having their childhoods destroyed by the situation right now. They are shaken. If they are being educated in fear, we can expect the future will not be so brilliant.''

In a country where 49 percent of the 8.3 million people are under the age of 18, children already face daunting odds, according to UNICEF statistics: 1,000 are involved in armed gangs; 170,000 live in virtual slavery as household servants known as restavecs, and fewer than 50 percent attend school.

''They are more and more afraid to go to school,'' González-Regueral said.

As a result of the child kidnappings, schools closed early for Christmas vacation and some frustrated Haitians have been calling for kidnappers to be shot on sight. Some lawmakers have proposed a return of the death penalty, now forbidden by the constitution.

POLITICAL MOTIVE?

But the child kidnappings may be more than simple, yet horrific, crimes.

Both González-Regueral and Esperance say kidnappers are deliberately targeting kids to destabilize the government of Préval, elected in February after two years of rule by an interim government following the violent ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

''The concentration of children being kidnapped implies a kind of coordination, of some kind of plan,'' González-Regueral said.

`CLEAR SIGNAL'

Fred Blaise, spokesman for the foreign policemen deployed in Haiti as part of a U.N. peacekeeping force, said authorities have been unable to discern any pattern.

At the very least, the child kidnappings have highlighted the inability of the Haitian government and the 9,000-strong U.N. mission to control the country's daunting security problems -- despite ongoing government efforts to negotiate with the armed gangs to demobilize and surrender their weapons.

''There needs to be a clear signal from the government they have divorced themselves from the people who are terrorizing the population,'' said Esperance. ``There has to be a message they are going to reinforce the police and justice.''

Case in point: A report by Esperance's group shows that only 20 kidnappers have been tried and sentenced in two years.

The longest sentence: 10 years, despite a decree by the U.S.-backed interim government that kidnappers and accomplices are to be given life behind bars.

''There has to be a cleaning inside the justice system,'' said Esperance, accusing Haiti's dysfunctional and often corrupt judiciary of allowing the problem to grow.

ARRESTS

Haitian and U.N. police say they are making progress with an anti-kidnapping operation they launched earlier this month, going after the perpetrators in their hangouts. So far, there have been 25 arrests.

''We've tried to stop reading their minds on why they are going after kids,'' said Blaise. ``All we can do as police officers is ask the population to keep calling and we can try to put these people in jail.''

Last week, Haitian police announced they had arrested a suspect in Natacha Dessources' kidnapping. But that brought little comfort to her mother, who is trying to leave Haiti with her son.

''I see visions of her on the ground . . . I can't sleep at night,'' said Maggy Dessources, adding that she continued to get threatening phone calls from kidnappers even after Natacha's death. ``Every time I hear about another child being kidnapped, I don't feel good. I can't live. I can't eat.''