1 Politics of Data: The Pretenders
COMING OF AGE
In 1994 a young woman named Lyn Duff came to Haiti. At the tender age of just 18, Duff knew what she wanted to do with her life. She already had a job working as a reporter with “Flashpoints,” a program of the politically far-left San Francisco Pacifica Radio KPFA, and she had come to Haiti to found what would become one of Haiti’s major radio stations, Radio Timoun (The Children’s Radio Station). While working on creating the radio station, Duff lived in a Port-au-Prince orphanage owned by then President Jean Bertrand Aristide, newly returned from exile. Duff would live in the orphanage and help with the children for the next three and a half years. While there she became an admirer of President Aristide. When Aristide was deposed for a second time in 2004, ostensibly with the support of U.S. Delta Force, Duff would recall that:
Over three and a half years I worked and often lived with the children of Lafanmi Selavi, a shelter for some of the nation’s quarter of a million homeless children [sic]. It was there that I came to know Jean Bertrand Aristide, not just as the president of the poorest country in the western hemisphere, but also as a father, teacher, a friend, and a surrogate dad for hundreds of parentless street kids.i
Duff left Haiti in 1997. In the next two years she would get posted in strife torn countries such as Israel, Croatia, Iraq, Vietnam as well as several African countries. When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, she found was posted at the front lines of the combat. But upon Aristides’ 2004 ouster, she returned to Haiti. Now, at 28 years of age, a seasoned international correspondent. Duff had come to set the record straight. Declaring that, “The Jean Bertrand Aristide I know is markedly different from the one that is being portrayed in the media,” Duff proceeded to defend the Aristide regime and assail the abuses of the UN and United States supported regime that succeeded him. Once again working for Radio KPFA, Duff issued blistering reports that included: ii iii iv
A report from Lyn Duff on a member of Lavalas in hiding from the death squads. Radio KPFA, March 29, 20041
Lyn Duff reports from Haiti on the continuing violence against pro-democracy activists and the arrest of high level Aristide Officials. Radio KPFA, April 26, 2004.
Lyn Duff in Haiti talks about the children who are targeted by the U.S.-supported death squads because of their work with the youth-run radio station. Radio KPFA, June 1, 2004v
ADAPTING
Duff’s reports had little to no impact. Aristide remained in exile and the UN proceeded to install an interim government highly sympathetic to Aristide’s right wing enemies. It was at this point, sometime in 2004, in the midst of writing the articles cited above, that Duff went to Michigan and enrolled in Wayne State University’s School of
1 Fanmi Lavalas (English: Lavalas Family, Lavalas is Haitian Creole for The flood), is a leftist political party in Haiti led by Aristide.
Social Work. She enrolled under the name, not of Lyn Duff, but Athena Kolbe.vi While matriculating as Athena Kolbe, she continued to publish articles as Lyn Duff, increasingly focusing on the topic that had proven so politically effective in toppling the 1991-1994 military junta: accusations of politically motivated rape. She issued reports such as:
“Rape as weapon of war: World cried out for Bosnia, why not Haiti?” by Wilma Eugene as told to Lyn Duffvii
“Haiti Rapes” by Lyn Duff, ZNET, February 24, 2005
“Flashpoints special correspondent Lyn Duff interviews a Haitian survivor of politically motivated mass rape as the international community fails to respond.” KPFA, March 2006
And then came the big bomb.
THE LANCET SURVEY
As seen in the previous chapter, in August 2006 Kolbe and her advisor at Wayne State, Roy Hutson, published the findings of a survey claiming that in the 22 months since Aristide had been overthrown—a time when the United Nations installed and supported an interim transition government that ruled the country—35,000 women had been raped and 8,000 people murdered in Port-au-Prince. The survey became known as the Lancet Survey, named after the prestigious British medical journal in which the results were published.viii
To put these findings in perspective, if the greater Port-au-Prince area in question had 1.5 million people, the estimate for that year, this was an annual homicide rate of, in the terms that demographers calculate such things, 291 homicides per 100,000 people per year. That’s 38 times the 7.6 international homicide rate at the time, and six times
the rate of violent death in Iraq for the years 2003 and 2013 (52.7 per 100,000). It was four times higher than the estimates from the UN for Port-au-Prince at the time, and three times the 2015 world leader, Honduras at 90.4 per 100,000 people per year.ix As for the rapes, as seen in the previous chapter, 35,000 rapes over a period of 22 months among a population of 1.5 million translated to 1,073 rapes per 100,000 people per year, 80 times the average 12.5 per 100,000 people per year documented by the UN in 2002 for 50 reporting countries and 9 times the highest rate in the world, that of South Africa at 115 per 100,000.x
All that’s pretty shocking. But what made the study even more shocking was that 46 percent of the killings and 28 percent of the sexual assaults were attributable to authorities, gangs, and paramilitaries that supported the new government. All the rest were attributable to non-aligned criminals. Putting it another way, none of the raping or killing was attributable to the deposed leftist Aristide government, the leader of which Duff was so fond. None of it. Not to the deposed government or to its supporters. And what that meant, if it were true, is that the situation was a repeat of the military junta that had ruled the country in 1991-1994. In fact, this time it was worse, far worse. The right-wing ruling elite was, as seen in the statistics above, engaged in a frenzy of raping and killing on a scale undocumented anywhere else on earth.xi
Fact or Fiction?
Aristide defenders were overjoyed with the Kolbe and Hutson findings. Aristide’s lawyer, Ira Kurzban, published an opinion piece in the Miami Herald, proclaiming that The Lancet, “the respected medical journal of the United Kingdom,” had “scientifically analyzed the brutality of the regime,” and confirmed “everyone’s worst suspicions.”xii
Forgetting for a moment about the radically high figures, the problem for most observers was that it didn’t make sense. Indeed, it flew in the face of what the
mainstream press and Haitian feminist organizations had been reporting. Even KOFAVIV had been claiming that it was Aristide paramilitary supporters who were behind the new wave of rapes. Moreover, the balance of power had changed radically in the 10 years since the 1991-1994 military junta. Yes, the interim government was repressing the opposition. But they no longer had an army. With UN support, Aristide had disbanded the army upon his return in 1994. And it wasn’t the same humbled masses of 1991-1994. This time the more radical elements among them were armed. The two years following the coup was a period when Port-au-Prince descended into a sim-mering civil war. On the one side was the new government and the traditional elite. But on the other side was the deposed and disgruntled Aristide partisans, with guns. And it was not just the press and feminist organizations accusing them of violence. The vast majority of people in Port-au-Prince at the time believed it was, in fact, the Aristide partisans who were most responsible for fomenting the violence. The largest urban slums were bastions of Aristide supporters ruled over by paramilitary groups. The neighborhoods were being ripped apart by turf wars. Neither the UN nor the Haitian Police could even get into the neighborhood of Cite Soleil, what they called at the time, “the most dangerous place on earth.” xiii It was the major bastion of pro-Aristide supporters. It had a population of 350,000 people and thirty armed paramilitary organizations. There was abundant evidence in the form of dead bodies and kidnapping ransoms that paramilitary organizations in these neighborhoods were using them as refuges from which they launched home invasions, kidnappings and killings. The violence and predation was so extreme that activist anthropologists and consultants whom I personally know became victims. Professor Mary Catherine Maternowska–formerly an ardent supporter of Aristide—was car jacked in 2005 as she passed Cite Soleil. She thought she would be killed and was so terrified by the incident—understandably so—that she left Haiti. Even before the coup, Ira Lowenthal and Alexis Gardella, two anthropologists who had helped dozens of high level Aristide partisans
escape persecution in 1991, both left Haiti after their best friend and co-worker, another consultant, was shot in the head during a robbery, and the executioner turned out to be 16-year old Aristide supporter who Lowenthal claims had been armed by other Aristide militants. Even Kolbe’s advocate-journalist peers had trouble reconciling Kolbe and Hutson’s findings. Journalist Amy Wilentz, who had befriended Aristide in the 1980s and written a widely-acclaimed book about him and the political movement he led, had by 2003 radically changed her opinion saying:xiv xv xvi xvii xviii xix
His government has repeatedly failed to apprehend perpetrators of the grossest human rights abuses, including assassinations of his former allies and friends and of journalists of all stripes. More repugnant, a man who embodied the movement against Duvalier and his Tontons Macoute, or secret police, now has numerous secret armed militias working on his behalf and spreading terror among the opposition… Aristide has been a bitter disappointment…xx
As for the Lancet Survey and its claims of one-sided violence, a British citizen named Charles Arthur recalled that, “Having read these articles and being puzzled by certain aspects of the survey’s findings, I did some searching on the Internet.” Arthur discovered that Kolbe was also the journalist Lyn Duff, supporter and associate of Aristide.xxi
The implication of using two names was that, at best, Duff did not want people to challenge her scholarly findings based on her political sympathies. At worst, the implication was that she had contrived the data and she did not want anyone to know that she had used the status of scholar to fraudulently gain sympathy for Aristide. Fearing the worst of the two scenarios, Charles Arthur wrote a letter to The Lancet revealing that Kolbe was really Duff. The Lancet responded with an internal investigation. In the meantime, the sparks began to fly.
Condemnation of Duff and The Lancet raged. Author Michael Deibert said the data, “flies in the face of the on-the-ground reporting of journalists who have worked in Haiti
for the last two years.” Gérard Latortue, then interim President of Haiti responded calling the study and The Lancet article, “part of a well-funded pro-Aristide campaign to distort news and repair Aristide’s reputation.”xxii It was right about then that Kolbe/Duff claimed she was herself becoming a victim.xxiii
“You are a dog … you should die. We are going to necklace you,” a voice whispered over the phone. Kolbe/Duff reported the threats to Jeb Sprague and Joe Emesberger, who like Duff, were two advocate-journalists who had devoted themselves to defending Aristide and his twice-toppled populist government. Sprague and Emesberger published Kolbe’s account in the online journal Counter Punch, entitling it, “Death Threats Against Lancet’s Haiti Human Rights Investigator.”
Suddenly it was eminently logical that Duff would have concealed her identity. She could die. The people who were after her were, rather obviously, precisely those who had outed her. The voice that had threatened her on the phone had a British accent. The Lancet was a British journal. The Haiti support group to which Charles Arthur had belonged was British. Charles Arthur was British. And now a British voice was whispering death threats over the phone. It did not take a genius to conclude that Charles Arthur might be part of a British conspiracy. There were other accusations of death threats from UK. According to Kolbe/Duff, a major investigation ensued. Scotland Yard got involved and tracked the calls to a British ex-con whom “someone” had hired to make the threats and who had been using disposable cell phones. Arthur, now on the defensive, denied having anything to do with pursuing Kolbe, saying that the accusations were, “totally, categorically and unequivocally untrue.”xxiv
In the end it was impossible to tell what was and what was not true. For whatever reason, Scotland Yard had, according to Kolbe/Duff, dropped the issue—if they had ever really been involved. The Lancet had an expert investigate Kolbe’s data and they concluded that Kolbe should not have concealed her double identity, but they could
otherwise detect no irregularities in the data. Critics noted that the person who reviewed the data for them was none other than Kolbe and Hutson’s Wayne State University colleague, Eileen Trzcinski—who would soon join them in mining Haiti for data and publishing refereed academic articles needed to get tenure. As for Wayne State University administrators, they were not so forgiving. They terminated Kolbe’s PhD program, sending her off with a Master’s degree.
Being an analyst and a surveyor, there is for me one flag more outstanding than any other that should have stopped Kolbe defenders dead in their tracks, something that no one seemed to have noticed at the time. And that is this: Kolbe and Hutson—two foreign, white scholars—were sending researchers into impoverished Port-au-Prince neighborhoods during an epidemic crime wave, having them knock on doors and ask perfect strangers if anyone in the house had been raped. If the respondent replied ‘yes,’ the researcher was supposed to ask what exactly the rapist used to perpetrate the crime: penis or another object? Then they were supposed to ask where the rapist put the penis or other object: was it in the victim’s mouth, anus, vagina? Kolbe and Hutson were quite frank about it:
The majority of sexual assaults perpetrated involved penetration of the victim’s mouth, anus, or vagina with the perpetrator’s genitalia or some other object (92·1%; 95% CI 86·6–97·6). The remainder of assaults involved sexual touching without penetration and the forced watching of sexual acts. [Lancet 2006 p 5] It’s stunning that the prestigious Lancet was not taken to task for this, or that no one even seemed to notice. First off, we are talking about a highly sensitive topic: traumatized victims who were still living in fear of the perpetrators. Indeed, Kolbe and Hutson’s point was that the government was doing this. But the same government was still in control when the findings were published. And everyone in each neighborhood would have known who was interviewed. It would not have been a secret. But even
without the obvious danger, even if the interim government and its thugs had by that point been removed—and they had not—it was highly questionable in terms of academic ethics. If Kolbe and Hutson had followed ethical guidelines from the World Health Organization, they would have had to conduct multistage interviews. They would have had consent forms and private interviews in safe spaces removed from the respondent’s home. And it would have been even more stringent given that half of the “victims” being grilled were children under 17 years of age. None of this was even mentioned in the Lancet article. xxv
Indeed, Kolbe and Hutson had apparently done the interviews without seeking approval or advice from anyone. In their acknowledgements, the researchers were affiliated with no Haitian research or educational institution. Nor did the Lancet editors make any mention of the Institutional Ethics Review Committee, considered obligatory for social researchers doing surveys, particularly surveys that touched on such sensitive topics as rape and murder, and particularly when children are involved.
But for those readers who are concerned, don’t be. It is highly unlikely that anyone ever asked those questions and, if they did, it is even more unlikely that Haitians who were political rape victims were telling perfect strangers the answers. They would have been no more welcoming than people in Kolbe’s then hometown of Detroit, Michigan. But then that’s the point: there were red flags associated with Kolbe and the research, red flags that went far beyond her having concealed her advocate-journalist identity.xxvi
THE CREDIBILITY GAP
A Suspect History
As will be seen, there were a lot more things to come that made no sense about Kolbe/Duff’s research and surveys. And what’s most interesting about all this is not so
much that Kolbe/Duff might be an academic fraudster, but what it tells us about the credibility of research in the humanitarian sector in Haiti. With the publicity and the publications in big time academic journals like the Lancet, other PhD’s were attracted to Kolbe. There were soon PhD’s and professors clambering aboard her research wagon. Although not a single one of them had ever before studied Haiti or spoke Kreyol, their academic credentials would bolster Kolbe’s credibility and, in turn, the access she gave them to original data would bolster their careers. I’ll get back to that in a moment. First, a closer look at Duff, her past and what she’s been up to since the earthquake suggests that if she invented the Lancet Survey data, it was likely not the first time she had done something like that.
According to Wikipedia, Lyn Duff began her life in the public eye as an eighth-grader in a South Pasadena Junior High School when she was kicked out of school for founding an underground newspaper called The Tiger Club. The American Civil Liberties Union came to her rescue, sued the school, and won. But instead of going back to South Pasadena Junior High, Duff went straight to California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). She soon declared herself gay, whereupon her mother committed her to a Utah mental institution and she became one of the last people in the U.S. to ever get shock therapy for being homosexual. After six months in the mental institution she escaped, got back to California where she lived homeless for a while, was then adopted by a gay couple, legally divorced her parents and became a hero of the gay community. She even made it into the pages of a book called Uncommon Heroes published in 1994 by Fletcher Press. And then in 1994, as recounted, at the tender age of 18, she began a journalist career with Pacifica Radio’s KPFA, first coming to Haiti to found Radio Timoun, and then going on to publish articles in the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, Salon online, the Utne Reader, Sassy Magazine, Washington Post, Seventeen, the Miami Herald and the National Catholic Reporter.xxvii
It’s quite a story. And if one reads the Wikipedia entry about Duff, born in 1976, she had, between the ages of 18 and 24 and with only one year of formal university education, accomplished what most journalists would hope to do in a lifetime. Quoting Wikipedia:
By the late 1990s, Duff was a well-established international journalist with postings in Haiti, Israel, Croatia, several African countries, and Vietnam. After the United States invaded Afghanistan, she traveled to the front lines as one of the few non-embedded Western journalists.
So that’s the Lyn Duff story. But there are some problems with it. The stories of her exploits only exist on Wikipedia, online biographies and chat records that Duff may very well have written herself. None of the references in Wikipedia are sources that can be traced to legitimate publications. With the exception of Haiti, there is not a single article written or referenced or remembered where a reporter by the name of Lyn Duff or Athena Kolbe wrote about any of the countries where she was supposedly a front-line war correspondent. Not even KPFA Radio in San Francisco published a report where Lyn Duff or Athena Kolbe is mentioned in association with any of the Wikipedia cited war-torn countries, other than Haiti. Nor was she the founder of Radio Timoun. She worked for Radio Timoun but was fired.xxviii And when I followed up on claims about the Civil Liberties Union and Pasadena Junior High School newspapers, I found nothing there either. The reporter I contacted at the school newspaper found no one who remembered her. As for The Tiger Club—the underground school newspaper the Wikipedia entry claims she was expelled for founding—it is Pasadena High’s school newspaper. It was founded in 1913, sixty-three years before Duff was born. Moreover, after changing her name to Kolbe she claimed in the interview published in Counterpunch that Kolbe had been her father’s surname, and that “in late 2004 Kolbe decided to go by her father’s surname rather than the hyphenated name she had been using previously.” The problem with that claim is that nowhere is there any evidence of
her ever having used a hyphenated last name. Ever. Not in published articles or online chat rooms or in her job with Radio Timoun. Not even on Wikipedia is there any evidence that she ever used a hyphenated last name. Indeed, to this day (12/6/2016) there are separate Wikipedia entries for Lyn Duff and Athena Kolbe; neither recognizes nor mentions the existence of the other.xxix xxx
So, if anyone had investigated Duff’s past—and apparently no one ever did, not even the journalists and activists who defended her—there were good reasons to suspect the legitimacy of Duff’s early legacy years. But what concerns us here is what she and those who work with her have been up to in Haiti more recently and what that tells us about the sources of data for the humanitarian sector in Haiti. The 2006 Lancet study appears to have been a case of questionable journalistic ethics if not outright fraud, but what happened in the years since is arguably far more revealing.
The Pot Calling the Kettle Black
Following the Lancet blowout and getting pushed out of Wayne State University, Kolbe/Duff enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work. Soon she and Hutson were back at it again. This time they joined forces with Rob Muggah. Muggah defines himself on LinkedIn as an Oxford University graduate and advisor to the International Development Bank, United Nations and World Bank who for two decades has “tracked gun smugglers from Russia to Somalia, counted cadavers in Colombia, Haiti and Sri Lanka, and researched warlords from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Papua New Guinea.” With Muggah’s support, Kolbe would soon become one of the most important sources of data in Haiti. In 2009-2010, Kolbe and Muggah joined Hutson on a University of Michigan and United Nations-funded, 1,800 respondent, pre- and post-earthquake survey discussed in the previous chapter. That survey, referred to by some as “The University of Michigan Study”, also just happened to touch on the earthquake death count, which is how I first came to know of
Kolbe and Muggah. When the BARR Survey and its low death count finding went viral, the two weighed in on the controversy. They published an opinion piece in the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times. They entitled it Haiti: Why an accurate count of civilian deaths matters and they gave it the powerful subtitle:
Numbers can influence the political response to a natural disaster such as the country’s earthquake. Social scientists must act responsibly in coming up with such life-and-death estimates.
Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2011, By Robert Muggah and Athena Kolbexxxi
In the article, Muggah and Kolbe criticized the BARR Survey and, singling me out by name (despite the presence of two other PhD authors), said that although I was correct when I had written, “the higher death toll estimates were not supported by research or other evidence” it amounted to the “the pot calling the kettle black.” They went on to say that it was “inconceivable” that the BARR Survey had been representative and touted their own survey that “had support from the United Nations and the International Development Research Center” and was overseen by “our North American-Haitian team of researchers.”xxxii With their study—the University of Michigan Survey—they were able to “carefully examine the costs and consequences of the unfolding crisis on the ground.” In the end, Kolbe and Muggah concluded that:
Establishing Haiti’s post-earthquake death count is not an academic exercise. Too often, spurious numbers are invoked to justify specific ideological viewpoints… It is vital that social scientists get their methods right when counting deaths and injuries after crisis. This is not just a matter of scholarly integrity. It has life-and-death implications for potential aid recipients. A vigorous discussion of estimates is to be encouraged, but these must be premised on good science and not on politics or other types of bias.
The irony of these declarations was that neither Kolbe, nor Muggah nor any of the other co-authors ever contacted me to discuss the survey. They never asked me about my methodology. And they never discussed with me theirs. I then sent to the authors of
the academic study—via Kolbe—an explanation of the BARR methodology along with a list of inconsistencies I had found with their survey findings. I requested a discussion. No “vigorous discussion of estimates” ever ensured. Not even an e-mail.
The point here is to illustrate the mechanisms that squash the truth in favor of activist agendas. Kolbe and Muggah were correct, surveys are indeed, “not just a matter of scholarly integrity”; and they do have, “life-and-death implications for potential aid recipients.” But the irony of Kolbe and Muggah themselves having written and published this proclamation in the LA Times–the largest metropolitan newspaper in the U.S. and the newspaper with the fourth largest circulation–is that they may very well never have even done the University of Michigan Survey, the very survey they were using to give themselves authority to write the article and criticize me and the work I participated in.xxxiii
A Suspect Survey
Kolbe, Muggah, Hutson and the other professors claimed that in conducting their survey they had, “tracked down more than 90% of the original sample, many of whom had spread across Haiti or relocated to the Dominican Republic, Canada and the United States.” This was six weeks after the earthquake, a time when 30 to 40 percent of the Port-au-Prince population was living in camps, the street, or homes of other families. Another 25 percent had fled the capital for the countryside. And 10 percent had left for Miami and the Dominican Republic. To illustrate how difficult it was to find people at this time, Tim Schwartz (a different Tim Schwartz than the author) had created an app that tracked the number of people in Haiti whose relatives in the U.S. reported as missing. Ten weeks after the earthquake, 50,000 people who otherwise had not been reported killed were still missing. Professor Mark Schuller offered an even more dramatic example of how hard it was to find people. In 2009, Schuller had co-directed a film of five Haitian women. The film was called Poto Mitan and it showed in some 30
universities and four different countries. The five women premiered in the film became aid superstars. They were all community organizers, well connected members of activist networks and with whom Schuller writes that he maintained close contact. Yet after the earthquake it took Schuller three months to find the women. Three of them he found in camps.xxxiv Yet Kolbe, Muggah and the professors claimed to have successfully located and interviewed 1,674 of 1,800 of their original survey respondents, people they didn’t even know, all in a space of 14 days. And given that the same researchers estimate that 120 of the original interviewees were dead, they had in fact contacted 99.6 percent of the original living sample.
I can attest from having done more than 100 surveys in Haiti that this wouldn’t be possible if the two surveys were done back to back during the best of times. It certainly did not happen six weeks after the earthquake. As for the findings:
• Kolbe, Muggah, Hutson and the professors claimed their findings revealed 0.37 percent of the population had been raped in six weeks. That’s a figure 20 times greater than Kolbe and Hutson had found in 2006—a figure that itself, as seen, was 80 times the 50-country UN reported average in 2002.
• They found that six times as many children 0 to 12 years of age had been killed in the earthquake as people over 12 years of age, something so peculiar that it would have made the earthquake demographically unique in the world. Specifically, based on the population structure, the expected proportion of dead was one child under 12 years of age to every 2 people killed over 12 years of age (30 percent of the population at the time of the earthquake was under 12 years of age and 70 percent were over 12 years of age). Moreover, Handicap International the opposite, “the proportion of children with severe injuries under the age of 18 is noticeably less than in the total population.” Specifically, in an assessment data for the age-specific population of people severely injured during the earthquake, the Handicap researchers found that the age group 0 to 17 made-up only 27 percent of the injured versus the expected 44 percent (expected based on the proportion of the population in that age group. That data came from emergency medical practitioners, hospitals and clinics.xxxv
• Similarly, Kolbe and Muggah et al., found that children 0 to 12 years of age were 11 times more likely to have ddiedied of injuries after the quake. Yet a CDC study of survival rates in improvised post-earthquake hospitals found more adults died from injuries.
And Handicap International—which sent people to hospitals and studied the issue—found that it was in fact adults over 18 years of age who most suffered injuries. And that’s exactly what would be expected. Drawing on a summary by pediatric surgeon and author S. K. Kochar:
…numerous observations have shown that patients from the pediatric population recover more frequently and more fully than similarly injured adults. Although this might be euphemistically ascribed to the “physiologic reserve” of the child, it suggests that injured children respond exceedingly well to preservation of cerebral oxygenation and perfusion. Principles and Practice of Trauma Care (Kochar 2013:445)xxxvi
• Kolbe and Muggah et al., claimed to have found that 25 percent of all people who died from the earthquake were not immediately killed but died in the month following the earthquake from injuries. But based on a study by CDC, we can expect that about 3 to 6 percent of the death total was from people who died in the five months following the earthquake. xxxvii xxxviii
• And if the survey had indeed occurred, Kolbe and Hutson, once again, had their surveyors ask perfect strangers—including children—about the details of rape. And apparently without following WHO or any other recommended guidelines respecting the privacy and impact on the respondents, they claimed to have found:
There was considerable variation in the types of sexual violence committed against women and girls. Of the 29 individuals in the sample who were sexually assaulted after the earthquake, 16 were subjected to rape with penetration, seven were forced to have oral sex, five reported unwanted sexual touching, and one was forced to witness sexual acts. These attacks were most often carried out in tents, on the street or in a public place. There were three reported cases of sexual assault in the home, one in the workplace and one in a car. Virtually all attacks against people under 18 took place in tents or on the street, while cases involving adults over 18 displayed more variation in relation to the location of assault…[AR Kolbe, 2010: 289]xxxix
In at least one respect, what Kolbe and the professors reported, or the likelihood that the survey even occurred, doesn’t matter. Few to no institutions or scholars cited the figures at the time. Nor did the media pounce on this particular study. One can only
conclude that, because the data was so out of whack with what we knew from other surveys, they simply dismissed it. But, those findings were accepted by one of the largest newspapers in the U.S.: the LA Times. Even more damning, they were published in at least two refereed academic journal (specifically Routledge’s Medicine, Conflict and Survival and Emerging Themes in Epidemiology). And far more ominous, the authors would go on to become the most dominant and recognized sources of data in post-earthquake Haiti.
THE REWARDS OF FEEDING THE BEAST
Kolbe/Duff and her former Wayne State University professor, Hutson, were soon directing post-earthquake surveys for the World Food Program; whereupon Eileen Trzcinski—the same scholar that the Lancet had tasked with evaluating the credibility of Kolbe and Hutson’s controversial 2006 survey—joined them and began publishing academic articles on child health and nutrition.xl With Rob Muggah’s support, Kolbe went on to become a master of security surveys and political opinion polls, pre-eminent expert on Haitian gangs, crime and arms. The two even engaged in rural impact evalua-tions as food security experts when, after the tropical storms Isaac and Sandy in 2012, they did a massive United Nations survey among rural farmers.
The reason for their success brings us back to the humanitarian aid organizations that hire them: despite the bizarre findings from the post-earthquake survey, Kolbe/Duff, Hutson and her new partners Muggah and Trzcinski were giving the humanitarian aid agencies and the press what they craved. All their surveys reported on disaster, violence, intensified suffering, and the need for more aid.
In March 2012, Kolbe and Muggah reported, “dramatic escalation in criminal violence with Haitians reporting declining confidence in police institutions during the last six months.” In the space of four months the murder rate in Port-au-Prince spiked
to 61 per 100,000, ten times the 7 homicides per 100,000 that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported for 2011, 40 times Port-au-Prince’s 3 homicides per 100,000 that Kolbe and Muggah themselves had reported to ever credulous Associated Press journalists in 2009, and 25 times what Kolbe and Muggah had found only months earlier in 2011. And once again, the Associated Press was all over it:xli xlii xliii
“Study: Violent crime has spiked in Haiti’s cities” By Trenton Daniel, Associated Press, March 4, 2012
Not satisfied with the Associated Press coverage and sensing opportunity, Kolbe and Muggah began publishing their own articles. Regarding their finding of skyrocketing violence they wrote in London’s The Guardian that:
Virtually everyone agrees that rates of violent crime have soared in recent months. This spike must be set against Haiti’s impressive gains in safety between 2007 and 2011. However, Port-au-Prince’s homicide rate spiraled to more than 60 homicides per 100,000 people by February 2012.
“Virtually everyone” did not agree. This was precisely an epoch when myself and those people I know who live in Port-au-Prince were breathing a great sigh of relief at violent crime being lower than we had remembered for decades. It was in fact the first year of the Martelly administration. But Kolbe and Muggah were not finished. Never letting on that they had in fact done the survey, they cited themselves:
Recent surveys conducted by the Igarape Institute [presided over by Muggah] reveal that despite some fluctuation, it has shifted upwards to roughly 72 per 100,000 by late July. By way of comparison, the global average homicide rate is closer to 7 per 100,000.xliv
This was exactly the kind of information and publicity the humanitarian agencies welcomed. Skyrocketing murder rates was good news for any member of the UN security forces or humanitarian agencies protecting the Haitian poor and getting paychecks 3 to 20 times what they made back home. It meant they were needed and
that they might be able to get more donations to continue their work. And indeed, Kolbe and Muggah not only bemoaned the violence, they promoted aid. In the short 658-word article just mentioned, they managed to hit the most important buzz words to do with those hyped donation-driving afflictions seen in earlier chapters: “victimized children,” “restavek” (child slaves), “sexual violence.” They even managed to plug for NGO aid with the most recent a la mode aid packages to the poor: low interest loans, more money for those working with the justice system and, of course, medical assistance and counseling so that children are not “traumatized for the rest of their lives.” With the earthquake fading into the background, Kolbe and Muggah were helping define new crises to deal with. They were becoming research superstars.
One couldn’t ignore that there still seemed to be a bit of activist agenda lurking behind some of Kolbe’s findings. The “impressive gains in safety between 2007 and 2011” that Kolbe and Muggah lamented had been lost, were precisely when Preval—once known as “Aristide’s twin”—was president. Their “spiraling” and “soaring” crime rates at a time when I and those I know were marveling at how safe Port-au-Prince seemed, occurred in the first months of the administration of the U.N. and U.S.-supported President Martelly, arch-nemesis of Aristide. Nevertheless, what seemed to most be driving Kolbe and her colleagues was the aid agencies who were funding them, and the attention that was accruing to them for telling the agencies and the press what they wanted to hear.xlv
Firsthand Account of a Brutal Rape
The extreme to which they exploited the press and to which the press latched onto their claims is evident in a second article Kolbe and Muggah published in 2012. In November, Kolbe and Muggah penned their own New York Times Sunday Edition article. It was a firsthand account of one of their surveyors who was “brutally raped.” It occurred while Kolbe and Muggah were conducting the post-hurricane surveys.
Dramatically entitling the article, “Haiti’s Silenced Victims,” Kolbe and Muggah recounted how they were “a three-hour drive over washed-out roads from the nearest town,” when one of their surveyors was raped. “We quickly located a doctor,” they related, and then detailed how they had to deal with callous justice officials and health care workers. The police asked Wendy—the fictitious name they gave the victim—“What did you do to make him violate you?” The doctor “refused to examine Wendy.” She was forced to remain unwashed for 16 hours. “Her clothes were ripped and dirty. Dried blood matted her hair where the rapist had slammed her head against a wall.”
It was powerful stuff and once in that role of witness and with all the authority of the most prestigious newspaper in the United States—the New York Times Sunday Edition, no less—Kolbe and Muggah did the same thing they had done in their article in The Guardian on skyrocketing homicide rates: they referenced their own work. This time it was Kolbe’s. Without ever letting on to readers that it was in fact her research, Kolbe and Muggah cited her earlier studies as evidence that there was indeed a massive rape epidemic in Haiti. Specifically:
Haiti’s brutal dictatorships used rape as a political tool to undermine the opposition. A 2006 study reported that some 35,000 women and girls in Port-au-Prince were sexually assaulted in a single year. In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, residents of the capital’s tent cities were 20 times more likely to report a sexual assault than other Haitians. Haiti’s Silenced Victims, by Athena Kolbe and Robert Muggah. The New York Times. December 8, 2012
In doing this, in using her credibility as scholar and UN researcher, Kolbe had done something that she apparently only fantasized about 12 years earlier: she transformed herself into a journalist for the world’s most important mainstream media outlets. Once in that role, she then validated her academic work, not least of all that which had gotten her terminated at Wayne State University. It was genius.
For skeptical readers, however, there were problems, even with the rape account. First off, if the rape ever occurred, Kolbe and Muggah were nowhere near it. Kolbe/Duff, the woman who claims to have been “on the front lines in Afghanistan”
and posted in Vietnam, Croatia, and Iraq, would not have been limited in terms of what she could accomplish in the field; obesity, a heart condition, and heavy dependence on medications preclude any strenuous hiking or psychological stress. Indeed, she might not survive the “3-hour drive” over Haiti’s bad roads, especially those where the rape occurred in the South of Haiti. And even had she been there, the fact that she speaks no French and very little Kreyol means she would not have understood much about what was going on and certainly would not have been doing the talking herself. As for Muggah, he speaks no Kreyol, but he does speak French and he could probably jog the 3-hour drive. But he wasn’t there either. He was in Brazil, where he lives with his family and runs his Igarape Institute, “a think and do tank devoted to evidence-based policy and action on complex security, justice and development challenges in Brazil, Latin America, and Africa.”xlvi xlvii
It’s fantastic to me that Robert Muggah, as well as all the cited professors would lie; that they would put their reputations and careers on the line and deliberately falsify data and even project themselves to places where they were not. So why did they do it? I suspect they only partially did it. I suspect that it was Kolbe/Duff who was doing most of the lying. And this brings us back to what so ails the aid industry, encourages the untruths we’ve seen over and over throughout this book and makes it possible for someone like Kolbe to dupe major newspapers of the world and prestigious academic journals: it was what everyone in a position to disseminate information wanted to hear. From her PhD colleagues who got academic publications and their names in the newspapers to the humanitarian organizations that thirst for data useful in donor drives to the headline hunting journalists and editors who thrive on the lurid stories and
doomsday images that their readers so crave, to academic journals that build reputations on cutting edge research, it was what they needed to keep their paychecks coming, to build their careers, get promoted, and get tenure. Slave children, rape, sky-high murder rates, impending famine, homicides, insecurity, this was news. And it was the type of news and data the humanitarian agencies needed to get more donations.
THE VERY SPECIAL PLACE WHERE NO ONE CAN CALL YOU A LIAR
For people who don’t know, Kolbe had stepped into a very special niche for people who like to make things up. No one did, could, or would check her data. Not even her colleagues, none of whom spoke Haitian Creole or even knew her surveyors. This is true for several reasons. First, it’s unethical. Human rights priorities mean researchers cannot divulge informants’ names. Every survey begins with a promise that the information and identity of the respondent will be kept secret. In cases such as surveys on crime, political opinions, and human rights abuses, the logic is obvious: to divulge the identity of respondents might open them up to retribution. No one checks the survey. No one knows what the original respondents really said or even if they really existed: prime turf for sloppy work, liars or activists bent on making a case for their cause.
So Kolbe might well have been fabricating it all. Or at least paying for data that she herself had not verified. And then she was publishing it and using it to make conclusions that satisfied the needs of her clients, the aid agencies and the United Nations and, not least of all, the press and overseas readers. But it gets worse. Kolbe/Duff’s use of social media, her transformation back to being a journalist and her publication of stellar articles based on what could only have been bogus or at least extremely shoddy and manipulated survey data was only part of her brilliance. Her
most brilliant move of all was to create a Haitian school of social work and social science called Enstitu de Travay Sosyal (ETS).
THE INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL WORK (ETS)
With Kolbe as sole owner and chancellor, ETS offered Haitian youth bachelor’s degrees, and even master’s degrees in social work. Fees were reasonable. Indeed, at $500 per semester it was a bargain basement deal on University education, something that lower middle-class Haitian youth is in desperate want of.
To encourage enrollment, Kolbe cleverly crafted the description of the school as an “Internationally supported degree-granting educational institution located in Haiti” that provides “a four-year course of study for the Bachelor in Social Work (BSW)/Bachelor of Arts (BA) or the Master in Social Work (MSW)/Master of Arts (MA) degree,” all prerequisites to becoming “licensed social workers.” She also associated the school with the University of Michigan. Indeed, for the first couple of years most students thought they were attending the University of Michigan. She offered all students 50 percent scholarships (the real fee was $1,000 per semester). But to get the scholarship, the hopeful young Haitian student had to sign a contract committing to several hundred hours of work-study each semester—without pay.
Through the University of Michigan, where she was still a graduate student working on her doctoral dissertation, Kolbe solicited other U.S. graduate students and professors, offering them accommodations and access to the ETS school research facilities at reasonable prices. The U.S. researchers were as fooled as the Haitian students. Most read the description of the “internationally supported degree-granting educational institution located in Haiti”; they saw the lists of courses offered, all of which were word for word descriptions of courses they themselves had taken back in the U.S.; they participated in registration of the students; and they saw the references
and Facebook pages from other graduate students and even professors such as Wayne State’s Eileen Trzcinski. They saw that Kolbe was an accomplished researcher allied with other accomplished researchers such as Muggah and the Igarapé Institute; and with scores of publications on blogs, major newspapers, and academically refereed journals. They saw all that and they simply assumed that Kolbe and the school were credible. U.S. researchers came to the school and paid Kolbe/Duff for room, board and Kreyol lessons given by the unpaid student teachers. Meanwhile, although the school was an “English language University,” the courses were run almost entirely by Haitians, none of whom had anything beyond a high school diploma and all of whom were instructing the students in Kreyol or translating English to Kreyol for Kolbe/Duff and the graduate students.xlviii
The school had no license. Not from the United States. Not from the Haitian government. In fact, despite claiming in her online introduction to the University that it was founded in association with, “only a handful of foreigners as well as several dozen Port-au-Prince based Haitian social workers,” neither the school nor Kolbe had any association with Haitian academics at all. Since transforming herself into a scholar, the one connection Kolbe had to a Haitian academic was before the earthquake when she allied with Haitian professor Sergio Balistra. Balistra had gotten his PhD from the State University of Haiti where, according to a biography of the authors for a paper he was to give with Kolbe at the American Public Health Association, he was a member of the faculty in the Department of Sociology. The problem with that is that the University of Haiti had no PhD program at the time. The Sociology Department never had a faculty member named Sergio Balistra. And none of Kolbe’s Haitian assistants ever met Sergio Balistra. Following the earthquake, Kolbe would report that Sergio had been tragically killed in the disaster. The University of Michigan commemorated his passing. Kolbe/Duff wrote the eulogy.xlix
Not unlike the situation with UNICEF and the orphans, or KOFAVIV with the rapes in camps, there came a point in time when it all looked like it would come crashing down around Kolbe. Sometime in late 2013 students began to realize that the school had no accreditation inside or outside of Haiti. In January 2014, the students wrote to a series of University of Michigan administrators, including then dean of the School of Social Work, Laura Lein, complaining that they thought they were studying under the auspices of the University of Michigan. They got no response.
When the students complained directly to Kolbe/Duff, she made them even angrier. In a move that many students interpreted as punishment, Kolbe retroactively increased tuition rates, telling students they now had to pay $600 per term—an extra $100 more than the standard $500 tuition. And they had to pay it, not only for the upcoming terms, but for every term they had ever attended the school. This meant that students who had been at the school for three years had to cough up US$900 or have their studies terminated and get no credit. l
The students, still hopeful that someone would honor their years at the Institute of Social Work, faced their first major dilemma: challenge Kolbe by not paying and, if they were wrong, lose the credits they had worked for; or pay and keep hoping.
Twenty-nine of them challenged her. They didn’t pay. They wrote a letter to the U.S. Embassy complaining that Kolbe had defrauded them.
The Embassy never responded to the students. But Kolbe did.
It was right about this point in time that another Balistra appeared. This Balistra wasn’t Haitian. She was from Agua Caliente, Peru. Her name was Jennifer and it just so happened that she was married to a member of the U.S. foreign service who worked at the U.S. Consulate in Haiti. Balistra intervened. She sent an e-mail to Kolbe and her partner in the school, Marie Puccio. The message explained how Balistra’s husband had
discussed the student’s complaints with his fellow consulate officials. The officials had assured Balistra’s husband that they knew all about Kolbe and ETS (the Haiti acronym for the school), they had “a great impression of you, Marie, Rob [Muggah], etc. and appreciate all the work you are doing in Haiti. They have no negative views on you or on your work.” The consulate was also aware of the “erratic behavior” of some students and if the students did not get together and recant the accusations of their disgruntled colleagues, “students from ETS will likely not be able to get visas to the U.S. at all.” Specifically, the person at the consulate explaining all this to Balistra‘s husband concluded that, and this is all a direct quote from the letter:
…the only way for them to resolve this would be to send a letter that clearly states:
The e-mail was sent in their name but was not authorized by them.
They don’t agree with the views expressed in the letter.
They are not being exploited at ETS or by the ETS administration.
Whatever concerns they have about their social work education can and are being resolved by the administration in Haiti. That they recognize that all social work students have problems with the unpaid internship requirements in social work education.
They are being treated with respect and are not accusing anyone Athena, Marie or anyone else at ETS of lying to them or abusing them. That they were not forced to sign papers or agreements by the ETS staff against their will.
That they are satisfied with the progress being made to get recognition from the Ministry of Education.
That they apologize for the unprofessional behavior of others however, the other individuals listed on the e-mail are not actually ETS students.
That the individual or individuals who sent the letter may have other reasons to send it; that students are sometimes upset when they obligated to leave school for financial reasons or for other reasons.
That they hope this does not tarnish the good reputation of ETS and the faculty, staff, and students of ETS.
The letter was inadvertently circulated to the entire student body.li lii
Many of the students, fearing they would lose their college credits and worse, be forever denied a visa to go to the U.S., did recant. But some of the more clever students asked Kolbe/Duff if they could have a face to face meeting with Jennifer Balistra. Kolbe told them Balistra was sick. When they persisted, Kolbe told them that Balistra was in fact a paraplegic introvert and couldn’t come to the school. Some of the students then went to Jennifer Balistra’s Facebook page where they found over one hundred pictures of themselves—the ETS students. There were no pictures of anyone but ETS students. None of Peru or Jennifer’s family or friends. There were not even any pictures of Jennifer Balistra herself. The only picture the students could find of Jennifer Balistra was on her Gmail account. In that picture Jennifer appeared healthy and she had a young Peruvian-looking child next to her. When one of the more tech-savvy students popped the picture into Tineye—a photo search engine—the picture turned up on over 15 sites. It was a cropped stock photo. When the students went back to Kolbe and said they didn’t believe that Balistra even existed, Balistra’s Facebook and Google accounts were gone the next day, as were any mention of her on ETS sites. Suddenly Balistra had never existed at all (except for the fact that much of these pages had been saved).
Apparently undaunted, but anticipating the imminent intervention of the Haitian Ministry of Education—to whom the students had also been complaining—Kolbe put together a board of American scholars and applied to the Haitian Ministry of Education for a license. On the board was herself, her partner, and several other University of
Michigan graduate students, none of whom had a PhD at the time. Kolbe would soon learn that foreigners could not get a license to open a private University in Haiti. Only Haitian citizens could do that. And to open a University someone had to be a Ph.D. Being a graduate student was not enough. According to a U.S. graduate student who worked with Kolbe, the next application was in the name of a Haitian PhD, a woman who had the first and rather suspicious, if humorous, name of Sophony (So-Phony).
THE SAD TRUTH
Kolbe/Duff’s story would not be anything more than that of one more foreign opportunist cranking out shoddy data and preying on impoverished Haitians in a country where there are few enforced administrative laws, if it were not for the impact she had. By 2012, Kolbe had become one of the most important sources of quantitative data on crime, political opinions, and even food security in Haiti. She was providing information to both the humanitarian sector such as the Red Cross and CARE International, and to the United Nations security forces. She had twice claimed and provided evidence for a Haitian rape epidemic more severe than any known on earth at the time, claims she had managed to get into the pages of one of the most respected academic journals on the planet and that had such an impact as to draw the personal attention of the president of Haiti. She had brought the post-earthquake rape epidemic to life in the Sunday edition of the New York Times in a detailed firsthand account of trying to help a rape victim for which she was not present. She was also making a play to position her School of Social Work (ETS) to the status of gatekeeper for all social science research in Haiti by means of a sitting ethical review board over which she presided and that would give her the power to filter the research of other scholars working in Haiti while approving research for herself, at least some of which would never have been allowed in the U.S. (such as the 2006, 2009, and 2010 studies of rape).
And perhaps as incredible as anything, she had not accomplished all this by charming people or baiting them with sweetness and sympathy. She had accomplished it by baiting them with promises of original research and publications and facilitating access to Haiti and to CV-building experiences at a fake University. She made a good first impression. But she had left in her wake scores of disgruntled Haitian students and staff, as well as foreign researchers and graduate students, at least four of whom had written letters of complaint to the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Chief among their complaints was that Kolbe was lying to students, financially exploiting them, and that the education they were getting was substandard. None ever got a response. In 2015 she was awarded her PhD from the University of Michigan and, with some 13 academic publications to her credit, became a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Social Work at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. As for the Institute of Social Work (Enstitu Travay Sosyal or ETS), her University lives on.liii
CONCLUSION: THE PSEUDO SCHOLAR INDUSTRY IN DEVELOPMENT
Although this chapter has focused almost entirely on Kolbe/Duff, and to lesser extent Professors Roy Hutson Robert Muggah, Ph.D., and the some four other University academicians who supported Kolbe/Duff and whose careers benefitted from the data she provided them and the publications they co-authored, what I’m recounting is not really about Kolbe/Duff. It’s about the whole aid and scholar industry and manufacturing of data that supports what the NGOs and UN agencies are doing in Haiti. It’s about how pseudo-scholars and the international media’s indiscriminate promotion of their data supplanted serious methodologists, making helping the poor in Haiti that much more difficult. This particular team of researchers is not an anomaly. The commonality of pseudo-scholarship and support of bogus and even fraudulently
based aid donor drives is even better illustrated by the work of Professor Mark Schuller and the many researchers he endorsed and helped to get published.
In the wake of the earthquake Mark Schuller Ph.D. became the most widely published academic spokesman for Haiti earthquake survivors, particularly those living in camps. Schuller is, like me, a cultural anthropologist. That means he studies society and, more specifically, the social behavior of people and institutions found in developing countries. An expert on cross-cultural understanding, at the time of this writing Schuller is a member of nine professional anthropology associations, has published two dozen chapters in anthologies and peer-reviewed articles, authored two books of his own, and co-edited five more. In 2006 he was a third-prize winner of an award from the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology. In 2015 he was winner of the American Anthropological Association’s prestigious Margaret Mead Award, one of the highest honors that can be bestowed on an anthropologist. He is currently on the faculty at Northern Illinois University where he identifies himself as a “Professor of NGOs.” There seemingly could have been no more accredited scholar than Mark Schuller to vet fact from fiction regarding what was going on in post- earthquake Haiti. But like Kolbe/Duff, Schuller did not just miserably fail in the endeavor, he too did the opposite and deliberately obscured the truth. In Schuller’s case he arguably went even further than Kolbe/Duff in that he tried to extend the prestige that came with his position as an academic to others.liv lv
In 2013 Schuller published a type of post-earthquake activist magnum opus entitled, Tectonic Shifts: Haiti since the Earthquake (Kumarian 2013).lvi It was an anthology composed of works, claims and data written by many of same experts seen in previous chapters, those who have egregiously misrepresented what is going on in Haiti and helped humanitarian agencies collect donations and fight human afflictions—many of which don’t even exist. The book begins immediately with the declaration that
316,000 people were killed in the earthquake and one in seven of all Haitians were left homeless. The same baseless statistics are repeated over and over throughout the book, indeed, taking it to even more absurd extremes with claims such as 86% of all Port-au-Prince homes built since 1990 were destroyed. But the book is far more than just another recitation of bad data. The book gives the authors of the bad data a level of academic credibility they never could have achieved without the assistance of being associated with a bona fide University “scholar” and all the credibility that supposedly comes with it.
The false pretenses begin on the very first page of the book when Schuller and his co-editor Pablo Morales quixotically proclaim that they are facilitating a new perspective, lamenting that “The points of view presented to date [ostensibly those put forth by the aid agencies] are dominated by white, foreign do-gooders, either volunteer missions or professional humanitarians.” Schuller and Morales—both white, non-Haitians working in the humanitarian aid sector—then go on to present the 46 “scholars, journalists, and activists”, 33 of whom are also foreign, white, and whom we can infer are “do-gooders” as well and who were some of the most prolific journalists and bloggers of post-earthquake Haiti. All either had an activist agenda or little to no experience in Haiti.
Among the authentic Haitian contributors are Mario Joseph, leader of the IJDH, that organization seen in previous chapters that was founded by Aristide’s lawyers and has been the fulcrum for activism against the political right and that has manufactured accusations of politically motivated rape for over 20 years. Another is Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique—anthropologist and self-defined vodou priestess who also happens to be the daughter of Max Beauvoir, the MIT chemist and Vodou priest who, as seen in Chapter 3, convinced Wade Davis that zombies exist. Indeed, Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique is the very person who, at sixteen years of age, acted as Wade Davis’s guide
and translator as he went around and collected what real scientists unanimously dismissed as bogus zombification powders. And there is Marie Eramithe Delva and Mayla Villard-Appolon, the founders of KOFAVIV, source of the post-earthquake rape epidemic. lvii
I want to make it clear that I do not object to activism. I don’t even object to zombie powders. There is nothing wrong with taking a stance for social justice—however one might define it—and nothing wrong with believing in the supernatural. Nor do I have anything personally against Schuller. What I object to is exploiting the role of scholar, usurping that role, and misleading those who work in NGOs—many of whom are genuinely searching for ways to effectively aid the poor. Those academics like Schuller and Kolbe/Duff who have done this, who have deliberately politicized their scholarship while trying to usurp the tools of science and replace them with their contrived data or intuition, have given credibility to voices of activists such as Marie Eramithe Delva and Mayla Villard-Appolon of KOFAVIV. In doing this, in co-authoring research with these activists and even using their data and repeating or supporting their claims, Schuller, Kolbe/Duff and her five co-authors –all professors at internationally accredited Universities–elevated those people to the status of experts and legitimate sources of data. These are people who, in a developed country, might well be imprisoned for fraud and embezzling funds meant for the poor. In the case of Kolbe/Duff, she may have deliberately manipulated data, but at best, she depended on shoddy data that she covered up and fudged over. In the case of Schuller and Morales, they either deliberately intended to dupe the public, journalists, and donors, or without the tools of science to guide them and by indiscriminately latching onto numbers that supported their arguments, they themselves were duped by people like Delva and Villard-Appolon. Either way, by consequence they participated in duping donors, NGOs and
the public who count on their scholarship and credibility to get us accurate information and help us to help the poor.
i Duff, Lyn. 2004. ‘Jean Bertrand Aristide: Humanist or Despot?’ published by Pacific News Service on 2 March 2004.
ii At a certain point, seemingly fed up with the lack of sympathy from the international community, Duff issued what sounded like a threat that Aristide’s supporters were now justified in launching violent reprisals entitling an article, “We Won’t Be Peaceful and Let Them Kill Us Any Longer” (Interview with Haitian Activist Rosean Baptiste, interviewed by Lyn Duff, 4 November 2005).
iii During the first coup years, from 1991 to 1994 when, as seen in Chapter 8 with the history of rape accusations, a right wing military Junta ruled Haiti, the organization FRAPH evolved into what U.S. Embassy’s Military Attaché had called “a sort of Mafia.” They organized and recruited members throughout neighborhoods and these organizations became accustomed to using “force to intimidate and coerce.” The military protected them and derived “political and especially material benefits from their relationship.” When U.S. government and the UN returned Aristide to power his government began to plan for them to never experience the humiliating ease with which they had been ousted in and persecuted in 1991. They urged people in the popular neighborhoods to form defense groups, called brigad vigilan. They were essentially different political ends of the same phenomenon. Indeed, they were the same people. According to U.S. memo entitled MO Overlapping Membership, whether right wing like FRAPH of the 1991 to 1994 era, or left wing Aristide, the men were the often the same members FRAPH and the brigad as “development” organizations, not unlike CARE, or CRS, or UNICEF. Neighborhood toughs and thugs turned the opportunity into a profession.
iv Another difference this time was that there was no army. With U.S. and UN support It had been disbanded by Aristide in 1994 when he returned. And this time Aristide supporters were armed. And what we know is that all of urban Haiti was experiencing a crime wave unprecedented in Haitian history. Both sides—right and left—had armed brigad in impoverished urban neighborhoods. People at all levels of Haitian society had been complaining since the late 1990s about what they called “chimere,” left-leaning bogey men associated with the deposed Aristide regime.
v Some more reports Duff wrote for Radio KPFA and the San Francisco Bay View:
“Lyn Duff in Haiti visits a penitentiary where journalists are being detained.” Radio KPFA, June 4, 2004.
“Lyn Duff interviews a Haitian woman whose son was shot in the back by a Haitian military death squad.” Radio KPFA, December 23, 2004.
“‘Why would I trust this fake election?’ Haitians sound off on elections, rescheduled for January by Lyn Duff.” San Francisco Bay View, December 6 2005.
Ex-soldiers in Haiti get back pay, refuse to disarm by Lyn Duff. San Francisco Bay View, December 7, 2005.
“Haitian mother: ‘Just because a child lives in the poor neighborhood, the police assume he is a criminal’ ” Story told to Lyn Duff.” San Francisco Bay View ,February 15, 2006. www.sfbayview.com/021506/haitianmother021506.shtml
vi Sprague, Jeb And Joe Emesberger. 2006. “Authors of Lancet Medical Journal Study On Haiti Claim To Be Targets Of Intimidation Campaign,” Counter Punch, September 11. http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/09/11/death-threats-against-lancet-s-haiti-human-rights-investigator/
vii Haiti Action Committee, March 29, 2006. http://haitisolidarity.net/article.php?id=120
viii Kolbe, Athena R and Royce A Hutson. 2006. “Human rights abuse and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: a random survey of households.” Published Online August 31, 2006DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69211-8. Wayne State University, School of Social Work, Thompson Home, 4756 Cass Avenue, Detroit, MI 4802, USA (R A Hutson Ph.D., A R Kolbe MSW)
ix For Iraq homicides, see:
Staff writer. 2010. ”Iraq War Logs: What the Numbers Reveal.” Iraq Body Count. October 23. https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/warlogs/ Retrieved 5/4/16
Staff writer. 2012 . “Civilian deaths from violence in 2003–2011.” Iraq Body Count. January 2. https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2011/ Retrieved 5/4/16
Staff writer. 2012. “Civilian deaths from violence in 2012.” Iraq Body Count. https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2012/ Retrieved 5/4/16
Staff writer “The War in Iraq: 10 years and counting.” Iraq Body Count. https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/ten-years/Retrieved 5/4/16
https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/
x For the United Nation homicide rate that was one-fourth of the that in Kolbe and Hutson’s Lancet article, see: Duncan Campbell. 2006. “Lancet caught up in row over Haiti murders.” The Guardian. September 8.
xi United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. 2003. “The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (2001 – 2002).” http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/ Eighth-United-Nations-Survey-on-Crime-Trends-and-the-Operations-of-Criminal-Justice-Systems.html Accessed 8/19/2016
xii Kurzban used it as the evidence of a Miami Herald Opinion piece, claiming in a short preface to his article that, “A recent study in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, confirms the worst suspicions about the Interim Government’s police and paramilitary allies.”
xiii For most dangerous place on earthquake, see: http://www.globalcommunities.org/node/33795. November 24th, 2009. Building the Road out of Poverty for the Community of “The most dangerous place on earth”
xiv It was an epoch when, by all accounts of everyone I know living in Port-au-Prince—rich, poor and middle class—levels of crime and violence were indeed at their worse (I am referring to the 2004 to 2006 years).
xv For two years before the coup, the opposition had been claiming that the government and its supporters were killing and using rape as a means to punish political opponents. This government had now been overthrown. And since the coup there was abundant evidence that those paramilitaries, angry at being kicked out of power, had gotten worse.
As seen in Chapter 8, in a May 16th 2004, three months after the coup, an article in the Miami Herald claimed that:
Hundreds of women and girls—some younger than 6—were raped, often by police and pro-Aristide gunmen called chimeres, with impunity, according to human rights observers and local women’s shelters.
They say the situation for the last two years had already rivaled the terror that the military regimes and death squads of the early 1990s inflicted on women.
See: The Miami Herald. 2004. “In Haiti’s chaos, unpunished rape was norm,” May. 16, http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/haiti/rape.htm
But Kolbe and Hutson’s Lancet Study turned these claims on their head and placed the blame for the new wage killing and politically motivated rape entirely on the new government.
xvi It may be—just maybe—that the government and its supporters were more abusive than the former government and their thugs. Personally, I’m inclined to believe they were. They set about
hunting down and arresting democratically elected government officials, including the former Prime Minister and the Interior Minister who they locked in prison for two years. But the idea that the former government was so clean that the sample could not detect them having committed a single rape or murder while the government was responsible for one-third to one-half of all of them was tough to swallow. By the very logic Duff had used in her reporting—that Aristide government had been unfairly overthrown and his partisans were now being viscously repressed—we should have expected retaliation from the more militant elements among them, of which there were many. And they did retaliate.
xvii Even before the coup that deposed Aristide in 2004, Olga Benoit, head of SOFA, the largest feminist organization in Haiti would refer to military rule in the early 1990s saying that ‘‘rape was used as a form of political repression,’’ and then add that that, “We can see now that the situation was repeated during Aristide.” And the Miami Herald, citing both Olga Benoit of SOFA and Yolette Jeanty of Kay Fanm (the other major mainstream feminist organization in Haiti), reported that, “women’s advocates have received reports of political rapes by only pro-Aristide groups…”
And elsewhere, “We have seen around 1,000 cases of rape,” said Anne Sosin, of Haiti Rights Vision. “What our evidence overwhelmingly suggests is that all groups are implicated in abuse against women. It’s important that scientific journals such as the Lancet are used to hold all perpetrators to account for human rights violations and abuses.”
See: Campbell, Duncan. 2006. “Lancet caught up in row over Haiti murders.” The Guardian, September 8. http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1867372,00.html
xviii Maternowska, Catherine. 2005. “Haiti Eyes,” New York Times Magazine, July 24. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/magazine/haiti-eyes.html?_r=0
xix The UN wouldn’t be able to enter Cite Soleil until year 2007 when UN tanks rolled in at 2 a.m. and fired some 20,000 rounds of 55 mm ammunition into the walls of Port-au-Prince’s poorest homes.
xx Wilentz, Amy. 2003. “Haiti: A Savior Short on Miracles,” LA Times. October 12. http://articles.latimes.com/print/2003/oct/12/opinion/op-wilentz12)
xxi On September 4, 2006, the UK-based daily newspaper, The Independent, published a piece about The Lancet article entitled, “Police and political groups linked to Haiti sex attacks.”
xxii For Diebert’s critique, see: Deibert, Michael. 2006. “Debate: Human rights, not politics, should be priority for Haiti.” AlterPresse, September 12. http://www.alterpresse.org/spip.php?article5133#.V-uG5fkrLX4
xxiii Sprague, Jeb And Joe Emesberger. 2006. “Authors of Lancet Medical Journal Study On Haiti Claim To Be Targets Of Intimidation Campaign,” Counter Punch, September 11.

xxiv It seems rather bizarre that the British were suddenly battling each other over Haitian politics and reaching across the Atlantic to menace American scholars who didn’t agree with them. The last British ambassador to Haiti, Gerard Corley-Smith, was expelled in 1962 because he complained about treatment of foreign nationals. The British have not seemed to care much about Haiti since. Nor are there many Haitian immigrants in Britain. At the time of the Lancet report there were 164 of them. It’s unlikely that there is British immigrant in all of Haiti. And the British government never reopened an embassy. Today, Haiti doesn’t have an embassy in Britain and Britain does not have one in Haiti. The Haiti Support Group for which Arthur was associated is a non-partisan British organization that supports civil sector organizations and is itself supported by British NGOs like OXFAM, Christian Aid and Amnesty International and members. It has not taken sides with either the right or the left: not in the near civil war that was brewing at the time, nor in their presentation today of who did what and was more at fault for Haiti’s underdevelopment. Indeed, putting aside Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians, it was probably the first time in at least 100 years that anyone or anything British had been mixed up in Haiti politics. It was all about an article written in a medical journal. Suddenly you had Brits making death threats and, ostensibly, sending fake bombs and dead rats to the U.S. And they were sophisticated enough not to get caught by Scotland Yard.
xxv For ethical issues and trauma victims see, for example: Seedat, Soraya (MBChB, FCPsych, MMed), Willem P. Pienaar (MD, MPhil), David Williams (Ph.D., MPH), and Daniel J. Stein (MD, Ph.D.). 2004. “Ethics of Research on Survivors of Trauma.” In Current Psychiatry Reports: 6:262–267 Current Science Inc. ISSN 1523-3812.
Zimmerman, Cathy and Charlotte Watts. 2003. “Ethical and Safety Recommendations for Interviewing Trafficked Women.” WHO Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. WHO. http://www.who.int/mip/2003/other_documents/en/Ethical_Safety-GWH.pdf
xxvi In the subsequent surveys, that of 2009 and 2010, the 10 authors claimed that “This study was approved by the University of Michigan Institutional Review Board.” If it’s true, shame on the University of Michigan. But it’s hard to believe it could possibly true. More likely is that they told the review board one thing and then did another.
xxvii Phillip Sherman & Samuel Bernstein (1994), ”Uncommon heroes: a celebration of heroes and role models for gay and lesbian Americans”, page 150. Fletcher Press
xxviii In fact, technically, Duff had resigned from KPFA, the San Francisco radio station that came to Haiti to found Radio Timoun in 1997. She claimed in her resignation letter that management had mistreated her. Specifically, in a confrontation over the release of Aristide interviews—Duff had refused to turn them over to management—the director of KPFA in Haiti had screamed at her,
“I’m management, don’t you understand that? You’re so stupid you can’t understand that? …. fuck you…you’re through at KPFA…. get out of the movement… you’re too stupid and out of it to know what’s going on.”
And so Duff resigned. She finished her resignation letter by saying that
“As far as my personal plans, I’ve started doing regular commentaries for KQED and Monitor Radio, and I’ll start doing them occasionally for NPR as well. I’m working full time at Pacifica News Service as an editor,”
This resignation letter from whence I’ve gotten the above information was posted on Google Groups on 4/21/97 by someone named Lyn Gerry. There was also an interesting commentary accusing the woman who had pressured Duff and apparently fired her of exploiting the fact that Duff had been “tortured”, apparently a reference to her shock treatments when institutionalized in Utah. Here are the comments:
From: m…@netcom.com (Mark S. Bilk)
Message-Id: <1997041812…@netcom12.netcom.com>
Subject: Lyn Duff’s History and Resignation
To: progress…@tango.rahul.net
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 05:46:38 -0700 (PDT)
This is Lyn Duff’s resignation letter. She was a reporter with ”Flashpoints” on KPFA.
Thanks for posting this, Lyn!
It is worthwhile to look up Lyn Duff in DejaNews and AltaVista.
For example, at this Web page is an interview she did with Jean-Bertrand Aristide:
http://www.pacificnews.org/yo/issues/1996/6.2/duff-aristide.html, “This is the Family of God”: An Interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide by Lyn Duff
Regarding the reason she left KPFA, Lyn has described on Flashpoints and on national TV, how, as a 15 (I think) year old lesbian, she was kidnapped by thugs hired by her parents, and imprisoned in a mental hospital in Utah (ironically called Rivendell) run by extremely homophobic Mormons.
She and hundreds of other homosexual kids were variously subjected to drugs, electroshock, solitary confinement for days on end, sometimes in the dark, “four-point restraints” (hand cuffs and leg irons), “aversion therapy” (being forced to breathe ammonia while looking at pictures of people of the same gender), and were held down and sat on by strong adults and screamed at violently for hours at a time. They were told that they were mentally ill perverts and child-molesters and would never be able to live happy lives unless they changed.
All this was done to them solely to force them to stop being homosexual, which was the only reason they were put in the facility. Of course it failed, and several of those
whom Lyn knew personally committed suicide as a result of this treatment, which is *still* being used there on gay and lesbian teenagers.
Lyn is in fact a survivor of prolonged torture, and has told her story in public in various forums, including KPFA. It seems extremely likely that (certainly by last Fall) Amina Hassan knew Lyn’s history, and, consciously or unconsciously, subjected her to the same kind of prolonged authoritarian screaming, threats, and verbal degradation that she knew Lyn had experienced before, and that would reawaken in her the same feelings of terror.
This is unforgivable.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/misc.activism.progressive/PtHsc0Tsg-E Accessed on 9/3/2016
xxix As if all this is not enough, the name Athena Kolbe also just happens to be a combination of nomenclature for the Greek goddess of wisdom, useful arts, and prudent warfare—Athena—and the Catholic patron saint of journalism—Saint Maximilian Kolbe.
xxx The exact hyphenated name that Duff claimed to have been using is “Athena Lyn Duff-Kolbe.” But prior to 2006 that name never appears in any of her Haiti reports, nor anywhere else.
xxxi Muggah, Robert and Athena Kolbe. 2011 “Haiti: Why an accurate count of civilian deaths matters,” L.A. Times, July 12. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/12
xxxii I can only understand the reference to their “team of North American researchers” as a kind of self-promotion and academic slight of my team. My team was composed of me, a Haitian Ph.D. and one from Martinique. But for those who care about degrees and pedigrees—I don’t—the Haitian was Yves Francois who got his Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in NYC and from Martinique, Eric Calpas, who got his Ph.D. in Sociology from Sorbonne in Paris.
xxxiii As for why Kolbe had published Opinion pages of the LA Times, of all places, as it turns out that editor of the LA Opinion pages is none other than the husband of Amy Wilentz, author of the Rainy Season, the major work defending the rise of Aristide. Wilentz and Lyn Duff were both advocate-journalists working with Aristide in the mid-1990s. Wilentz was unhappy with the death toll controversy and the negative impact that many thought it had on Haiti recovery effort.
xxxiv Pyles, Loretta. 2009. Progressive Community Organizing: A Critical Approach for a Globalizing World. Routledge: New York. Page 194.
xxxv For the Handicap International Report see, O’Connell, Colleen, Aleema Shivji, and Thomas Calvot Earthquake of 12th January, 2010 – Haiti Preliminary findings about persons with injuries Greater Port au Prince Area 15-26 January, 2010. See page 5 of the report.
xxxvi Kochar. S.K. 2013. Principles and Practice of Trauma Care. Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers (P) Ltd: New Delhi. pp. 445
xxxvii Using data from the first field hospital established in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake–University of Miami Global Institute/Project Medishare (UMGI/PM) established on the 13th of January—the CDC found that 2.9 percent of those injured in the earthquake died in the five months following the quake. If we use this as a proxy figure for all the hospitals, and we multiple it by the 300,000 people estimated to have been injured in the earthquake, that yields 8,700 who died after the earthquake. I give more details on the validity of these figure below, but to get to the main point first, if we use the same estimate of 222,570 dead that the CDC used, the suggestion is that it is about 4 percent of the death toll. If we use Kolbe and Muggah’s estimate of 158,000 dead, then the suggestion is 6 percent. If we use the BARR midpoint estimate of 65,575, its 13 percent. In short, while there is reason to expect that not all people who died made it to a hospital—as seen in chapter 5– the figures are radically different—especially using Kolbe and Muggah’s 158,000 death toll estimate–making it one more among many findings in the Kolbe and Muggah data that is inconsistent with what we expect from other data.
To elaborate on some of the figures above: we know, as discussed in chapter 5, that a death toll of 222,570 is way too high. But the CDC cited figure of 300,000 people injured not only has not been challenged by any experts, it is easier to accept. The medical staff kept records. It also consistent with killed/injured ratio from earthquakes. If we take a worse-case-scenario of killed/injured ratio—based on past earthquakes in developing countries—the expected estimate is 62.500, remarkably close to the 65,575 mid-point estimate in the BARR survey (see endnote xxxvii in chapter 5).
Regarding extrapolating the CDC’s 2.9 percent estimate for those who died in five months after the earthquake: The CDC found that 28 percent of all patients treated at the University of Miami Global Institute/Project Medishare (UMGI/PM) hospital in the 5 months following the earthquake (January to May 2010) were injured in the earthquake. Of those, 12 percent were transferred to other facilities, 2.9 percent died, and the rest were released. Mind you, we do not know how many of the 12 percent who were transferred died. Presumably most lived. Nevertheless, we can expect some died and that would increase the 8,700. However, we are also talking about a five-month period whereas Kolbe and Muggah’s 25 percent was referring only to those who died in the single month after the earthquake. In summary, any way you cut it, the suggestion is that 25 percent of earthquake victims having died in the month after the earthquake excessive. (For the CDC study see, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/wk/mm5951.pdf)
xxxviii If one had followed the surveys of Duff/Kolbe, Muggah, Hutson, et al., they would have found even more inconsistencies. Their WFP survey of Cash-for-Work participant turned up only 3 of 5,000 individuals in the earthquake strike zone who had lost a fellow household member in the earthquake. If they had used that as a sample to estimate the number of people killed, they would have gotten 9,000 dead. That should have been enough to shut the show down. But perhaps stranger than anything, and the reason all of this is important, is that the aid community and UN either remained silent on findings or, more often, accepted them. No one was vetting the process. No one was questioning the findings. Perhaps they simply assumed that being academics from no
fewer than five U.S. and Northern European institutions the co-authors of the study must be credible.
xxxix Kolbe, Athena R., Royce A. Hutson , Harry Shannon , Eileen Trzcinski, Bart Miles, Naomi Levitz, Marie Puccio , Leah James , Jean Roger Noel and Robert Muggah. 2010. “Mortality, crime and access to basic needs before and after the Haiti earthquake: a random survey of Port-au-Prince households.” In Medicine, Conflict and Survival.
xl Hutson, Royce A, Eileen Trzcinski, and Athena R. Kolbe. 2010. “Features of Child Food Insecurity after the 2010 Haiti Earthquake: Results from Longitudinal Random Survey of Households.” PLOS Published: September 10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0104497
xli Athena Kolbe and Robert Muggah. 2012. “The economic costs of violent crime in Haiti.” The Guardian, 22 August. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/22/haiti-violent-crime-economic-costs
xlii GLOBAL STUDY ON HOMICIDE. The 2011 Global Study on Homicide was prepared by the Statistics and Surveys Section under the supervision of Sandeep Chawla, Director, Division for Policy Analysis and Public Affairs. Core team Research coordination and study preparation Angela Me, Enrico Bisogno, Steven Malby. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime/ UNITED NATIONS OFFICE ON DRUGS AND CRIME. Vienna. 2011 GLOBAL STUDY ON HOMICIDE TRENDS, CONTEXTS, DATA
xliii Daniel, Trenton (Associated Press). 2011. “Recent study shows significant homicide drop in Port-au-Prince.“ Boston Herald, November 18. http://www.bostonhaitian.com/2011/recent-study-shows-significant-homicide-drop-port-au-prince
xliv Kolbe, Athena and Robert Muggah. 2012. “The economic costs of violent crime in Haiti.” The Guardian, August 22. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/22/haiti-violent-crime-economic-costs
xlv See, Kolbe, Athena R., Royce A. Hutson , Harry Shannon , Eileen Trzcinski, Bart Miles, Naomi Levitz, Marie Puccio , Leah James , Jean Roger Noel and Robert Muggah. 2010. “Mortality, crime and access to basic needs before and after the Haiti earthquake: a random survey of Port-au-Prince households.” In Medicine, Conflict and Survival.
xlvi Kolbe, Athena and Robert Muggah. 2012. “Haiti’s Silenced Victims,” The New York Times, December 8.
As if evidence of rape, the article provides a picture of a camp under which is written the caption,
“A tent city in Port-au-Prince in July. After the 2010 earthquake, residents of the capital’s tent cities were 20 times more likely to report a sexual assault than other Haitians.”
xlvii To be exact, Duff/Kolbe, speaks no French, a smattering of Kreyol and she understands even less than she speaks. I would estimate her Kreyol at the linguistic capacity of a 3- year-old, an observation corroborated by the many students I know who have worked with her and by Glen Smucker, another U.S. Ph.D. fluent in Kreyol who was baffled by how she has accomplished so much in Haiti while so linguistically limited. Indeed, I was rather stunned to learn this myself when I first met her. This is a person, a scholar no less, who has been working and intermittently lived in Haiti for 27 years. Yet, she is not functional in the common language. Nor does she make any pretense otherwise. She uses translators with her students and she does not participate in teaching Kreyol to foreigners in the courses she offers. Indeed, to my knowledge Duff/Kolbe has never made an effort to systematically learn Kreyol or French.
xlviii From Duff/Kolbe’s LinkedIn account:
Scholarship for Haitian students to study Social Work and Social Science – deadline quickly approaching!
Athena Kolbe Joint Ph.D. program in Social Work & Political Science at University of Michigan
Dear Friends on LinkedIn:
I’m hoping you will all help me get the word out regarding two important – but time sensitive – scholarship application deadlines. The scholarships are partial and do not include room/board; they are for either undergraduate or graduate study at Enstiti Travay Sosyal ak Syans Sosyal (Institute of Social Work & Social Science) in Petionville.
A generous end of the year gift has enabled us to offer three scholarships to promising female students and two work/study scholarships to students of either gender. The details are below. Applications are being accepted beginning last week (!) and will continue to be accepted until a decision has been made. Since the scholarship review committee meets weekly it’s best for the student to apply sooner rather than later. The next term begins in less than two weeks and these scholarships are for the January 2013 term.
Students are required to complete a degree program in Social Work (BSW or MSW) as well as a second degree in a Social Science (BA or MA in psychology, political science, economics, sociology, or anthropology). The program includes extensive English language and research methods classes as all graduates are required to demonstrate fluency in English, French (and written Creole) as well as the ability to conduct original qualitative or quantitative social science research. Academic classes are taught by professors who hold a graduate degree in their discipline. The
language of instruction is Creole although visiting professors may also teach in French or English (with Creole translation).
More information on the institute and our classes can be found at www.travaysosyal.com. If you’d like to refer a student for one of these scholarships please send an e-mail to jean.almathe.ets@gmail.com and cc me at Athena@ travaysosyal.com with “Scholarship referral 2013” followed by the student’s full name in the subject line. A description of the scholarships and their requirements can be found online at http://www.travaysosyal.com/student.handbook.html. Please note that we also have several less urgent, but more competitive, scholarships available for students of both genders which provide partial tuition to ETS. You can always make a general referral for a student to attend our program and we can try to match them with available scholarships (the cost of tuition is USD $1800 annually though students are rarely obligated to pay this much as we can usually find some support for them).Best wishes for the holiday season and the New Year!
Athena Kolbe
Director of Social Work Education
Enstiti Travay Sosyal ak Syans Sosyal
Petionville, Ouest, Haiti
www.travaysosyal.com
xlix I know far more about Duff/Kolbe’s work than fits appropriately into the main text. But it should be documented somewhere, hence this endnote. I had in fact worked with Duff/Kolbe on the WFP survey mentioned earlier. After Muggah and Kolbe published the Op/Ed in the LA Times criticizing me, Kolbe contacted me. I took the opportunity to plug for the “vigorous discussion of estimates” but she was evasive, promised to pursue the issue with the other professors and never got back to me. Not on that anyway. What she did was pay me to run one of the WFP surveys. In effect, they had slammed me and my credibility in a major U.S. Newspaper and then called and offered me $10,000 cash to do a 1-week survey. At this point I had been black-listed by USAID and was out of work. I took the job. One of the first things I did was asked to see the questionnaire they had already applied to 5,000 respondents. The questionnaire was incoherent, both grammatically and linguistically. There was no way that a Haiti speaker could have had any idea what they were asking about. Roger Noel, co-author of the earlier Michigan Study was responsible for the questionnaire. When I insisted I could not be associated with the survey questionnaire and that my surveyors could not apply it, Kolbe called Noel and told him to come back with his survey team to the United Nations “log base” (logistics base) in Port-au-Prince. He subsequently had “car problems.” We wouldn’t see him again for several months. This meant a lot of things. This was November 2011, they’d already done 5,000 surveys, and the instrument is incoherent. This also meant that Duff/Kolbe who had been working in Haiti at this point for 17 years, and doing surveys for 6 years, had no idea what was on the survey instrument. She was not literate in Kreyol and neither, apparently, was Noel very literate. That particular survey subsequently melted down when Duff/Kolbe discovered a case of a
World Vision employee who had been using food to induce a 14-year old girl to have sex with him. Suddenly the survey was not so important. More pressing was the 14-year-old, something, whether true or not, Duff/Kolbe recounted to me had reduced the assistant WFP country director, Stephen Kearney, to tears. Whatever the motivations behind the discovery and the reactions, it was the type of development we see over and over in Kolbe’s history, an appeal to emotional and politically charged events that distract everyone from the credibility of research. One more thing all this meant, apparently WFP had never had anyone literate check the survey instrument. Not before nor after the surveys were done. Nor apparently, did they ever detect that the questionnaire had been radically modified after I was hired.
One interesting aside to all this is that while I was basically kept in the eaves, I became friendly at the time with the new WFP director responsible for surveys, Byron Poncesegura, who had read and appreciated another book I had written, Travesty in Haiti. At some point Royce Hutson who was apparently a principal consultant flew to Haiti to meet with WFP about the surveys. But he never met with Byron, who was furious about the incident, i.e., about being avoided. Nor did I get to meet Hutson. After Hutson left, Kolbe mentioned that Hutson was so upset about the surveys that he had hung up the telephone on her. Again, I was nothing more than a very highly paid field director for a very small part of the overall survey and I was largely kept in the dark, but what all this suggested to me was that, a) Hutson and the University professors must have realized the survey was a mess, if not bogus, and b) WFP never really followed up on anything to do with the survey, not the data, nor the questionnaires. No even after Byron had been shirked by the Principal Consultant.
One last relevant word on all this, I wrote to Royce Hutson on April 13, 2016, told him I was publishing this book, that it included my suspicions about Kolbe and evidence that the surveys they conducted were either bogus or extremely shoddy. I concluded saying, “I don’t want to drag your name through the mud without giving you a chance to clarify your role in all that.” He never responded. I sent the same e-mail with slight modifications right before publishing this book, on October 29, 2016. Hutson did not respond to that one either.
l Three semesters per year, 3 years (3 x9 = 9); $100 back pay per semester; 9 x $100 = $900
li So not to overwhelm the reader, I’ve omitted some facts regarding Balistra. She first appeared as a new administrator in e-mails to the students when Kolbe’s head of staff—a 27-year-old high-school educated Haitian woman—accused her of unwanted sexual advances (from Kolbe). Still thinking the school was somehow more than Kolbe’s own concoction, the woman complained to a US Doctoral student from the University of Michigan and newly signed on administrator for ETS. Balistra introduced herself in an e-mail to the U.S. doctoral student:
From: Jennifer Balistra[mailto:balistra.jennifer.ets@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, February 07, 2014 11:41 AM
To: Athena Kolbe; Erica.Childs.ETS@gmail.com
Subject: Re: sexual harassment complaint
Dear Erica:
My name is Jennifer and I teach some of the Anthropology classes. We haven’t met yet since I was at ETS before you came.
I’ve been asked to investigate a sexual harassment report that was made to you. This is the fifth Code of Conduct violation report I have investigated at ETS, so I have done this a number of times already. The process is designed to minimize the number of times that the complainant is required to retell their story.
The first step is for the reporter (you) to create a written record of what was alleged. Please be as detailed as possible and include dates or times (e.g., the afternoon after a particular class) that the incident took place. Please also include the circumstances in which you were told of the sexual harassment and the approximate date and time you were made aware of the allegation. Send this report to me and please do not share the report, store it on a common drive, or discuss it with anyone.
I will review your report to assure that it meets the definition of sexual harassment. I will then review the existing records of investigations to assure that this is not a repeat report (e.g., a second or third report of something we have already investigated). If it meets the definition of sexual harassment and has not yet been reported and investigated, I will contact the complainant to see if she wants to pursue an investigation. If she does then I make need to ask you some additional follow up questions.
Please let me know of any questions or concerns.
Best wishes,
Jennifer
lii
From: Jennifer Balistra <balistra.jennifer.ets@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 3:17 PM
Subject: LO visa situation
To: Athena Kolbe <kolbe.athena.ets@gmail.com>, Marie Puccio <puccio.marie.ets@gmail.com> Good afternoon. Sorry for the delay in responding and for calling you ten times like a stalker this morning.
As I said earlier, I asked my husband to intervene regarding the LO visa situation …..
I spoke this morning with Suzanne who explained a few things:
1) The embassy in PAP as a great impression of you, Marie, Rob, etc. and appreciate all the work you are doing in Haiti. They have no negative views on you or on your work.
2) ETS has developed a poor reputation at the consulate because of the erratic behavior of your students, the constant e-mails and phone calls from students claiming to be mistreated, etc. The fact that students have called and e-mailed to say that there’s no international support for ETS when the consulate knows about the support ETS receives and the fact that they make false claims regarding the University of Michigan, CSWE [United States Council of Social Work Education], and the ministry of education makes the ETS students appear to be malicious or dishonest.
3) The letter claims that Athena went to court and testified to a judge regarding ETS at the hearing of a woman accused of stealing from her. The consulate attended the criminal hearing …. Since the consulate was involved in this case and knew the facts, it was clear that that part of the letter was false.
4) All social work students in the U.S. are required to do unpaid internships, this is not exploitation. Claiming that it is makes it appear that your students or former students are trying to make a legal claim or unjust complaint so that they can immigrate to the U.S. or get monetary compensation from ETS or the U.S. government. This makes the students appear erratic.
At this point, she says that students from ETS will likely not be able to get visas to the U.S. at all. The students just have a very bad reputation. I think the only way for them to resolve this would be to send a letter that clearly states:
1) The e-mail was sent in their name but was not authorized by them.
2) They don’t agree with the views expressed in the letter.
3) They are not being exploited at ETS or by the ETS administration.
4) Whatever concerns they have about their social work education can and are being resolved by the administration in Haiti. That they recognize that all social work students have problems with the unpaid internship requirements in social work education.
5) They are being treated respect and are not accusing anyone Athena, Marie or anyone else at ETS of lying to them or abusing them. That they were not forced to sign papers or agreements by the ETS staff against their will.
6) That they are satisfied with the progress being made to get recognition from the Ministry of Education.
7) That they apologize for the unprofessional behavior of others however, the other individuals listed on the e-mail are not actually ETS students.
8) That the individual or individuals who sent the letter may have other reasons to send it; that students are sometimes upset when they obligated to leave school for financial reasons or for other reasons.
9) That they hope this does not tarnish the good reputation of ETS and the faculty, staff, and students of ETS.
The students should only write this if it is true for them. IF they do have problems with ETS, the problems should be resolved. And I don’t know if they can write it given the misinformation spread by some people. And I don’t know if this will resolve the problem either.
JB
liii But through her position as ostensibly longstanding eminent scholarly authority on Haiti and chancellor of ETS she cowed the foreign academics. Her apparent support from the University and her seeming omniscient knowledge of Haitian ‘viktim’ got her a long way.
The students had complained. Graduate students had complained. Many had written to University of Michigan and gotten no response. Not even remotely fluent in Haitian Kreyol, she none the less became an expert on Haitian security and crime. Even United Nations Intelligence agents were listening to her and following her research (I know this from the fact that the UN was hiring her to do surveys and personal discussions with two directors of the UN intelligence unit in Haiti, once in 2013 and another in 2015). She weighed in on wildly disparate subjects as far afield from her own supposed expertise as food security. Indeed, she would weigh in at a critical moment with supposedly valid survey data—that was never vetted—to encourage a flooding of Haiti with food aid in 2012, something anathema to those interested in revitalizing the Haitian economy, but lucrative to the NGOs and UN agencies that thrived off the aid.
liv For a summary of Schuller’s accomplishments and publications, see: Northern Illinois University Website, http://www.niu.edu/anthro/faculty_staff/faculty/schuller.shtml
lv Schuller is a quintessential expression of the repudiation of science and embracing of activism. For him, as with most activist-anthropologists, Schuller came to anthropology, not as means for learning and understanding the world, so much as a mechanism to further his activism:
I became an anthropologist because of my experience as a grassroots organizer. Anthropology seemed to me then as it does now the academic discipline most capable of supporting long-lasting, grassroots social change.
(Schuller, Mark. 2010. “From Activist to Applied Anthropologist to Anthropologist? On the Politics of Collaboration,” In Practicing Anthropology. Winter. Vol. 32, No. 1. Page 43)
The methods that Schuller and activists choose are not tools the scientific anthropologist uses to achieve some measurable degree of objectivity. Schuller’s interpretation of anthropological methods leaves them out altogether. In the words of Schuller, “Our core methodologies most resemble that of grassroots activism: participation, holistic listening, and a humanistic approach to caring, understanding, and working with real people.” The priority for Schuller is “engaging” and “empowering” the poor. The extremity of the point is made by Schuller himself. He describes the transition from community organizer to scholar and the prestige that becoming a scholar brought with it:
… I learned an important lesson. Because of the scholarly tone and its independence from activist groups, it [an article Schuller had written] was used by a wider audience than this union’s European solidarity partner….Had it been authored by the union, or the same group that publicized their efforts, or had it been written more like the activist action alerts that I cut my teeth on, it would have been easier to discredit, to marginalize, or to ignore. In the meantime, I was becoming an anthropologist. As it turned out, it was more useful than being an organizer or activist to some NGOs and particular causes… I offered legitimacy that an “activist” would not have.[See, Schuller, Mark. 2010. “From Activist to Applied Anthropologist to Anthropologist? On the Politics of Collaboration,” Practicing Anthropology. Winter. Vol. 32, No. 1.] And indeed, lest there be any mistake that Schuller is deliberately trying to use his prestige as a scholar to achieve credibility for an activist agenda, Schuller states elsewhere,
All of my professional energy, my time, my Ph.D., my resources that I can bring to the table, the credibility that the doctorate brings and that the professorship brings, all of it is in the service of the people that I work with and the social justice vision that we share.lv [Interview with Mark Schuller, Anthropology of Contemporary Issues April 2012] Lest the absurdity of what Schuller is saying be missed, who are “the people” and how is it that Schuller comes to decide that he will work with them? And how do anthropologists like Schuller know that they “share” their “social justice vision”? Do they tell them so? A scientist would answer those questions by citing statistical tools for identifying the underprivileged, powerless and the poor. But without those tools, and without understanding how to apply these tools, anyone can claim to be “the people” and anyone can solicit money for social justice and anyone, as seen in this and earlier chapters, can make up claims of rampant child slavery, rape, violence, and massive orphan crisis. Indeed, for anyone wanting to collect money in the name of the poor, the activist anthropologist is a perfect broker as their mission does not separate truth from fiction, but is precisely to represent those who want to get media attention and donations.
lvi Schuller, Mark and Pablo Morales, eds. 2013. Tectonic Shifts: Haiti since the Earthquake. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press. Haitian Creole edition.
lvii The most scientifically reputable of all the scholars in Schuller and Morales’ anthology is Anthony Oliver-Smith, who happens to be former professor of mine when I studied at the University of
Florida. Oliver-Smith never mentioned Haiti in any of the three classes I took with him, and prior to being invited to contribute to Schuller’s anthology, Professor Oliver-Smith had never studied nor written anything at all about Haiti. Indeed, to my knowledge he has never even visited Haiti. View publication stats