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April 1995-January 1996
In early May 1995, Francoise Bouchard, President of the Haitian
National Commission for Truth and Justice (La commission nationale
pour la vérité et justice, CNVJ), invited the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to advise the
commission on how to develop a large-scale interviewing project to
take the testimonies of a several thousand witnesses of human rights
violations. The AAAS team met with the CNVJ commissioners and planned
a project to include 40 interviewer teams, ten data processors, and
five data entry specialists. The interviewing was to be done in July
and August 1995, and the report produced by mid-December 1995. The
commission’s final report was given to President Aristide in February
1996, but because of policy disagreements in the Haitian government,
it was not published until September 1996.
The CNVJ team took 5,453 interviews. In all, they identified 8,667
victims who suffered 18,629 violations. The CNVJ interviewing was
quite good by scientific standards. A data processing group composed
of eleven of the interviewers applied standard definitions to the raw
interview data and produced detailed regional analyses, incorporating
qualitative material from the interviews, as well as historical,
economic and demographic analysis. Unfortunately, in the last stages
of the process, the commissioners discarded almost all the work done by
the field investigators and substituted a chronology of the de
facto regime. The commissioners never informed the AAAS of their
reasons for not using the regional data; although the statistical
analyses were presented, the tables omitted most of the content and
the translations into French were inadequate. Thus, observers should
not judge the quality of the field research by the AAAS team for the
CNVJ on the basis of the published official report.
CNVJ report
Methodological
reflections on work at the CNVJ
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