Foreign Affairs confirms 14 Canadian citizens kidnapped in Haiti in 2012
By Lee Berthiaume, Postmedia News August 1, 2013
OTTAWA — A refugee whose daughter was abducted and murdered in Haiti earlier this year isn’t the only person in Canada to have suffered because of kidnappers in the Caribbean nation.
Nearly two-dozen kidnapping cases involving Canadian citizens have been reported in Haiti over the past three years, including 14 in 2012, Foreign Affairs has confirmed. The department did not say how many victims remain in captivity, if any.
And there may be even more cases that have gone unreported as internal documents indicate many families do not involve the authorities for fear the kidnappers will find out their victims are Canadian and jack up their ransom demands.
“The situation continues to deteriorate as families of kidnapping victims often choose to pay the ransom and not involve the authorities,” reads the documents prepared for then-minister of state for the Americas Diane Ablonczy last October and obtained by Postmedia News. “An important factor to keeping ransom demands low is to ensure that the kidnappers not find out that their victims are Canadian.”
The issue of kidnapping in Haiti has received some attention in Canada over the past few months after the daughter of Marie Yvena Senatus-Prince, a Haitian refugee who now lives in Ottawa, was abducted and murdered in May.
The kidnappers had demanded a $200,000 ransom — money Senatus-Prince said she did not have.
While Senatus-Prince’s daughter was not a Canadian, Timothy Donais, an expert on Haiti at Wilfrid Laurier University, said the majority of kidnapping cases with a Canadian connection would likely involve Haitian-Canadians.
Kidnapping is a sensitive issue for the Caribbean nation, which is trying to turn the page on its troubled history and present a new image to the world.
Haitians expressed anger in January when the United States revised its travel advisory by warning that “no one is safe from kidnapping, regardless of occupation, nationality, race, gender or age.”
Canada’s own travel advisory on Haiti warns that “although rare, there have been kidnappings involving Canadians and other foreign nationals, including missionaries, aid workers and children.”
“Most victims have been released after a ransom was paid,” it adds. “In some exceptional cases, however, victims have disappeared or have been killed.”
Haitian Ambassador to Canada Frantz Liautaud acknowledged in an interview that abductions do happen in his country, “but it is an issue that’s been improving in Haiti.”
Statistics provided by Foreign Affairs on Thursday appear to confirm that; while there were 14 abductions involving Canadians in 2012, there has been only one so far this year.
“Canada has been working over the years to strengthen the overall capacity of the Haitian National Police,” Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Emma Welford said in an email. “The police, in turn, have taken more aggressive and effective actions which have led, lately, to a decrease in total number of kidnappings, including of Canadians.”
Welford did not say how many Canadians remain in captivity, if any.
Liautaud noted kidnapping is also a problem in other countries in the Americas such as Jamaica and Brazil. “It’s not a Haitian problem,” Liautaud said. “It’s a poverty problem.”
The briefing notes say abductions in Haiti “have evolved into an industry” and that incidents involving Canadians “are strictly commercial in nature.”
Union of Haitians in Ottawa president Darlene Lozis said she was not surprised by the number of kidnappings involving Canadians, even though she said many Haitian-Canadians are loathe to talk about the subject.
“That gives that difficult, nasty, ugly face of Haiti,” she said. “For us it’s very important for us to talk about the positive stuff. And having Haiti in the international media as a bad country is very difficult for us.”
Lozis said not all abduction cases in Haiti are straightforward either; for example, she said she knew of one instance where a family member arranged to be kidnapped in an attempt to squeeze money from her relatives.
The briefing note indicates that when there have been instances of Canadians being abducted, Haitian authorities have responded quickly, though it does not say how often their efforts are met with success.
While many abduction cases in Haiti involve street gangs, there have been instances of high-ranking government officials, businessmen and even police officers running kidnapping rings.
One of the more notorious incidents involved a prominent Haitian businessman kidnapping the children of one of his rivals.
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