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File closed on Canadian soldiers' alleged misconduct in Haiti

Friday, February 02, 2007

MONTREAL - Canada's military briefly looked into allegations its peacekeeping troops threatened civilians in Haiti in 2004, but gave up because the claims were made anonymously, says the military police investigator assigned to the case.

''The file is closed, at least at my level,'' said Sgt. Stephane Gendron.

''Investigating is one thing, but you need something to go on,'' he said from his office at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier, near Quebec City.

''The problem is, it was all anonymous. That's why we couldn't do anything. You can't investigate ghosts.''

The allegations of death threats and sexual threats stem from a December 2005 survey of 5,720 Haitians by human rights researchers from Wayne State University in Detroit.

Published in August in the British medical journal the Lancet, the survey estimated 8,000 Haitians were killed and 35,000 women and girls were raped after the ouster of then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004.

The survey also detailed threats made against civilians, and said 20 per cent of those threats came from foreign soldiers who were part of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Haiti, especially Brazilian and Jordanian troops.

Not published in the survey, but detailed to The Montreal Gazette by one of the survey's authors after their report came out, was anecdotal evidence alleging Canadian troops were also involved. Canada had 450 soldiers in Haiti between March and August 2004.

Some were said to have made death threats during house raids and made sexual threats against women while drunk and off-duty. The allegations came from households in and around the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

In the wake of the bad publicity, Gendron contacted the survey's authors by phone and interviewed them for details. But essential questions went unanswered, such as who made the allegations, and could they be confirmed.

To protect them from reprisals, no records identifying the survey's respondents were kept, said the researchers, who had gathered their data in face-to-face interviews.

''Because of the sensitive nature of the questions we were asking, we purposely made it so that if one of us had been detained, anyone who'd get hold of the surveys wouldn't be able to identify the households'' the answers came from, co-author Royce Hutson said.

Lancet editor, Richard Horton, and executive editor, William Summerskill, said in an online clarification Thursday night that there was no problem with the veracity of the survey. An audit of 100 handwritten questionnaires from the original survey was done independently by Wayne State's interim director of research.