Maria’s story: The rape of Haiti

My name is Maria, and I’m a survivor of rape from the neighborhood of Martissant in Port-au-Prince. Right now I’m working with other women who have been victimized during this period of insecurity that began with the departure of President Aristide in 2004.

The situation the past year has been extraordinary. The repression against women has been taken to a new level, one that we did not experience in the last coup of 1991-1994. Twelve years ago, when the former military was in power, rape was used to terrorize. But today, today it is a whole different story. Today it is more horrible than anyone could have imagined.

During the last coup, a group of armed men would enter a woman’s house and, after raping her, they would leave. Today they enter a woman’s house and force her to have sex without her consent, but they just don’t stop at that. Now they humiliate her by forcing her to eat feces or they force her children to have sex with their family members.

Last week we had a case of a young woman, maybe 14 or 15 years old, who was raped in the zone of La Saline. After they violated her, the men spit on her vagina and the girl vomited. One man put a gun to her head. He forced her to eat her own vomit and then raped her again with a piece of wood.

Now when a woman is raped, the former military or the police, or whoever is repressing her, these armed men steal from her house and then, to top it off, they burn her house down too. If her husband or children or parents try to stop the rape, they are liable to be attacked or killed themselves.

Yesterday I spoke with a young mother of four children who was raped and when her husband intervened he was assassinated in front of the family. This is happening not only to the women from Martissant, but to women from all of the popular neighborhoods: Bel Air, Cite Soleil, La Saline and Delmas 2.

Sometimes the victims are targeted for political reasons and when the armed men come to her home looking for her husband, they take him away to be killed and then rape her and her children. But more often we are finding women are violated just because they live in the popular zones, the poor neighborhoods, and in those neighborhoods everyone is assumed to be Lavalas.

So when we see this situation, we are obliged to ask: Why are so many women and girls in the popular zones being violated? What do those who repress us want to get by violating these women?

The goal of the rapist is not to win with the elections or win in the monopoly game of world politics. His goal is not to have a real victory because he knows that that majority of Haitians don’t support his regime so he would never legitimately win an election.

No, his goal is to defeat the Haitian people’s morale. He wants to occupy our minds so that every second we are terrified by the thought that we could be the next victim, and then we are so busy moving from one zone to the next to escape repression that we have no time left to fight our enemy.

The goal of the rapist is not to take sex. The goal of the rapist is political. He wants to kill the memory of a different Haiti - he wants to kill the part of us that holds on to the demand that we had a few years ago for dignity.

The rapist does this by being invisible. He attacks at night or during the day - you don’t know when to expect him. He wears a mask and carries a gun. Even if you recognize his voice or if he is a police officer and does not bother to cover his face, you know that the person who is raping you is the very person who is charged with protecting you. So you know that you have nowhere to complain.

The goal of the rapist is to take over your mind so that you begin to believe his lie: That it is your fault you are being violated. The lie is that you are repressed because of who you are and if you would stop being a person from the popular zones, a person who has no money and no dignity, then you would not be violated. But you cannot change who you are.

It’s the fact that you are alive and breathe air that offends him. Eventually, you are so worn down by this war in your head that you begin to believe the lie and you hate yourself for being from the popular zones. You stop being able to remember who your enemy is. And that is when the rapist wins.

This war is between two ideas. One idea is that every one has dignity and is a child of God - that every person is somebody and has worth and deserves respect. The other is that the Haitian people cannot think for themselves, they should be controlled and repressed because the people from the popular zones are those who voted for Aristide and he is responsible for the small problems of the wealthy.

This is very important for us to share with foreigners because they need to know the situation of the women from the popular zones. And when a woman tells her story and hears that the foreigner is on her side, she remembers that being violated is not her fault.