| Haitians face human rights abuses and repression in the Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic: Haitian migrants denied basic rights - Amnesty International, 21 March 2007
Dionisio Jerez, president of the Human Rights Commission in the country's northern region, called on authorities Saturday to make a thorough investigation of the report. At the same time, Elias Dominguez, president of the Brigade for the Defense of Human Rights, also in the north, called the report "serious" and demanded that authorities prosecute the case to its ultimate consequences in order to bring to light what really happened. The violence started building last weekend after the death of a Dominican, supposedly at the hands of a group of Haitian immigrants in the Villa Trina area, in the north. In retaliation, a number of Dominicans torched at least 35 immigrant homes so that the families had to flee the community. Next day, Dominican authorities found a Haitian murdered in the same municipality. ___________________________________________________________________
Since May this year, another round of forced deportations has been underway, but this time, human rights organizations are raising the alarm about a noticeable increase in anti-Haitian attitudes, often encouraged by official statements, and most worrying of all, accompanied by a series of violent attacks on Haitians and Dominico-Haitians that have left many dead and injured. The attacks are raising concerns about the possibility of a repeat of the notorious 1937 massacre, when the Dominican dictator, General Rafael Trujillo, ordered his troops to drive out Haitians living on the Dominican side of the border. More than 25,000 people are believed to have died. Today between 500,000 and one million Haitians live in the Dominican Republic, having crossed over the 243-mile (391-kilometer) border in recent decades. Many of them are undocumented - living in the Dominican Republic without residency permits. They find work in the host country's tourism, construction, and agricultural sectors. Nobody knows for sure how many Haitians or Dominicans of Haitian descent have been killed in recent months. Haitian human rights organizations say the murderous attacks that began in May are claiming scores of victims. The Dominican authorities deny that anything out of the ordinary is occurring, and claim that non-governmental organizations are exaggerating the situation. In September, Dominican president Leonel Fernandez told reporters that if murders were taking place, then it was an inevitable consequence of poverty in the border regions, and nothing to do with race. But frequent Dominican media reports, and alerts issued by Haitian and Dominican human rights organizations, suggest that worsening racial tensions in the Dominican Republic are continuing to claim lives. Two recent reports in Dominican newspapers provide an example of the incidents that have been occurring with increasing frequency over the last six months. On 6 November, Yan Luis, a 28-year old Haitian living in Bàvaro, Higuey, a town in north-western Dominican Republic, was shot dead by the owner of a bar. Eyewitnesses told El Nacional newspaper, Luis had ignored the proprietor's demand that he leave the premises. Three days later, Fineló Pie was killed when he and a group of eight other Haitians were attacked by a crowd of Dominicans near the community of Agua Santa, in the Dominican province of Dajabón, also in the north-west. Reporting the murder, El Caribe newspaper provided scant detail about the attack, but stated that the group of Haitians from the hamlet of Dosmó, near the Haitian town of Fort Liberté, had recently crossed the border on foot. Earlier, in late August, more than 13 Haitian and Dominico-Haitian people were killed in just two weeks, including three young Haitian men who were tied up, doused with flammable liquid and then set on fire. They died from their wounds a few days later. The current situation began to worsen following the murder - allegedly by Haitian immigrants - of a Dominican merchant in the town of Hatillo Palma in the north-western department of Montecristi on 9 May. In response, groups armed with machetes and sticks began attacking people believed to be Haitians. Properties were looted and set on fire in a number of localities. During the pogroms, Dominicans attacked a group of Haitians sleeping in a small house, beheading two of them and seriously wounding two more. In the days that followed, hundreds of Haitian immigrants fled the persecution, and crossed the border into Haiti at Dajabón-Ouanaminthe. Then in subsequent weeks, the Dominican Army started rounding up people believed to be Haitians and forcibly deported them. During May and June as many as 4,000 people were forced out of the Dominican Republic into Haiti, and thousands more have been deported since then. The Dominican authorities say they need to carry out the deportations because the country is being overwhelmed by immigrants. Human rights organizations respond that the mass deportations do nothing to resolve the social or econonomic tensions connected to immigration, and in fact only make the situation worse. They also charge that the deportations involve serious violations of people's rights. Commenting on the recent deportations, the Dominican Advisory and Legal Research Center (CEDAIL) - an organization established by the Dominican Catholic Church to help protect immigrants' rights - criticized the "indiscriminate and anti-democratic" repatriations of Haitians. In a 27 May press release, CEDAIL noted that Haitian immigrants do jobs that most Dominicans refuse to consider, stressing that while the Dominican State has every right to regulate its borders and take measures against immigration, it also owes "a great social debt to the Haitian migrant population, which makes important contributions to the Dominican economy...working under conditions that citizens reject." Human rights activists say the recent wave of deportations are all the more worrying, because they have been accompanied by statements by public officials that are encouraging a climate of xenophobia against Haitians and Dominico-Haitians. For example, in mid-May, José Ramón Fadúl, the Dominican Secretary of State for Labour, stated that he supported "cleansing the area of foreign workers in conformity with the law". Then, in August, Armed Forces Minister, Sigfrido Pared, stated that the continual immigration of Haitians is "an attack" on the Dominican Republic's sovereignty. In September, a Dominican organization known as the National Committee for Migrations, composed of a number of civil society organizations, responded by accusing some politicians and journalists of "stoking" and "inciting" racial hatred against Haitians. Colette Lespinasse, the coordinator of the Haitian platform to support refugees and repatriated people (GARR), denounced the recent forced deportations and attacks, saying the situation amounted to "ethnic cleansing."
Note Also available in Spanish: Noticias Aliadas. ___________________________________________________________________
The troubles in this farm town in the country's northwest started in late September, with allegations that a Dominican worker had been killed by two black men. Too angry to wait for a trial, local Dominicans armed themselves with machetes and went out for vengeance. "Where there are two Haitians, kill one; where there are three Haitians, kill two," said leaders of the mobs that descended on the immigrants' camps, the Haitians here recalled. "But always let one go so that he can run back to his country and tell them what happened." Several Haitian workers were beaten by the Dominican mobs, said Jacobo Martínez Jiménez, an immigrant organizer. One Haitian, Mr. Martínez said, drowned when he fell into a river as he tried to get away. At least half of the town's 2,000 Haitian workers fled, as they said they had been warned to do, back across the border to Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Hundreds of others hid in the hills to the east, hoping that Dominican tempers would cool so that they could return to their jobs. The attacks on Haitians here provide the most recent example of what international human rights groups describe as the Dominican Republic's systematic abuse of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. In recent years, those organizations report, tens of thousands of Haitians have been summarily expelled from the country by individuals and the government, forcing them to abandon loved ones, work and whatever money or possessions they might have. "We do all the work, but we have no rights," said Victor Beltran, one of about 150 Haitian immigrants, most of them barefoot and dressed in rags, who had taken refuge in a rickety old barn. "We do all the work, but our children cannot go to school. We do all the work, but our women cannot go to the hospital. "We do all the work," he said, "but we have to stay hidden in the shadows." Among those who have been deported, said Roxanna Altholz, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, are Spanish-speaking Dominicans who were born to Haitian parents but have never visited Haiti, much less lived there. At the root of the problem, Ms. Altholz said, is that Haitian immigrants and their Dominican-born children live in a state of "permanent illegality," unable to acquire documents that prove they have jobs or attend schools or even that they were born in this country. In October, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued an opinion that the Dominican Republic was illegally denying birth certificates to babies born here to Haitian parents, and ordered the government to end the practice. Human Rights Watch has also published extensive investigations of the mass expulsions, and the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has expressed concerns about Haitian children being denied access to education and medical care. "Snatched off the street, dragged from their homes, or picked up from their workplaces, 'Haitian-looking' people are rarely given a fair opportunity to challenge their expulsion during these wholesale sweeps," Human Rights Watch reported in 2002. "The arbitrary nature of such actions, which myriad international human rights bodies have condemned, is glaringly obvious." Several Roman Catholic priests here have been threatened with legal action, including expulsion from the country, after the authorities found that they had illegally obtained birth certificates for dozens of Dominican-Haitian babies by falsely declaring them to be their own. One of the priests has also been receiving death threats, prompting the church to move him out of the country temporarily for his safety. "By keeping Haitians in a limbo of illegality, the government can do whatever they want with them," said the Rev. Regino Martínez Bretón of the Jesuit-run agency Solidaridad Fronteriza, in Dajabón, a city on the Dominican border. "The government can bring as many Haitians here as they want and then throw them away when they don't want them anymore." Racism helps fuel the anti-immigrant sentiment, human rights groups say, since Haitians tend to have darker skin than Dominicans and are therefore often assumed to hold a lower social status. The two countries have been volatile neighbors for most of the last two centuries, beginning with Haiti's domination of the Dominican Republic after its independence from Spain in the early 1800's. A century later, Rafael Trujillo, then the Dominican dictator, ordered the executions of some 37,000 Haitians in what many historians have called a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing. Indeed, the river that separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic is called Massacre River because of the slaughter. Although anti-Haiti talk has since become a standard part of Dominican politics, the police and the military have made fortunes trafficking Haitians into the country to supply labor for agriculture and construction. Haitians here, desperate to escape the poverty and upheaval in their country, often say they have little choice but to accept Dominican exploitation. Meanwhile, Dominican workers have been slowly pushed out of work by Haitian immigrants who will work for less, and so they are leaving their homeland in droves on rickety boats headed toward Puerto Rico, even though the Dominican Republic is one of the fastest growing economies in the Caribbean. Nationalist talk by the elite and frustration among unemployed Dominicans drive most attacks on Haitians, human rights groups say. And while one Dominican government after another has promised change, human rights investigators charge that they have all failed to guarantee Haitian immigrants and their Dominican-born descendants basic protections. Guatapanal is not the only place where immigrants have experienced the Dominican Republic's version of mob justice. In August, on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, the capital, four Haitian men were gagged, doused with flammable liquids and set on fire. Three of the men, from 19 to 22 years old, died of their injuries. Soon after, Haiti temporarily recalled the leader of its diplomatic mission in the Dominican Republic to protest what it described as a "growing wave of racist violence" against its people. After a Dominican woman was stabbed to death in May not far from here, Dominican mobs went on a rampage, beating Haitian migrants and setting fire to their houses. Before the next dawn, police officers and soldiers went door to door pulling some 2,000 Haitian migrants from their beds and loading them onto buses bound for the border. At least 500 of those deported, Father Martínez said, were legal guest workers and Dominican citizens. "It was a disaster," said Andrés Carlitos Benson, a Dominican-born university student who lives in Libertad. "We showed them our university identification cards, and they tore them up in front of us and told us to shut up, or they were going to beat us. "They took parents away and left their children," he added. "They took old people out of their beds without any clothes." Stung by mounting international criticism, President Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Republic has publicly expressed concern that some of his government's deportations of Haitians have violated international standards on human rights. Still, his government rejected the ruling by the Inter-American Court. Other Dominican officials have said that their government was struggling with scant resources to secure its porous border and stop the surging flow of Haitians, which they blame for rising crime rates and overburdened schools, hospitals and housing. A statement in late October by the Roman Catholic Bishops Conference of the Dominican Republic also said, "Our nation has a limited capacity to absorb excessive immigration," and pleaded for help. "This is a very sensitive subject," said Ambassador Inocencio García, who is in charge of Dominican-Haitian relations at the Foreign Ministry. "I can tell you with all sincerity. We have institutional problems. We are making efforts to correct them. But in no way can the government of the Dominican Republic be characterized as one that does not respect basic rights." Ambassador García said in an interview that a majority of poor Dominican children did not have birth certificates. But he did not respond to charges that Haitian children were routinely denied such documents. The mayor here in Guatapanal, José Francisco Pérez, described the Haitians coming into this town as "an invasion." He said Guatapanal had 2,000 Haitians and only 500 Dominicans. Area landowners stopped hiring Dominican workers for $10 a day because Haitians accepted less than half that, he said. "Now instead of hiring 40 Dominican workers for a field, they hire 400 Haitians, and the Dominicans are left with nothing," Mr. Pérez said. "There's too many Haitians. If the government is not going to help us get rid of them, then we will do it ourselves." Some landowners criticized the attacks by the Dominicans, and they have brought back many of the workers who fled. "The problem is that there is no real justice," said Francisco Cabrera, who rents a few dozen acres of tobacco land here and uses Haitian laborers. He said the police rarely tried to stop attacks on them. "So people take justice into their own hands." Polivio Pérez Colon, 36, one of the Dominican overseers who led the mobs against the Haitians, said they did not mean the immigrants any real harm. But he agreed that the Dominicans here felt outnumbered. "They are people who do not use bathrooms," he said, referring to Haitians, many of whom live in shacks without running water and electricity. "They walk around drinking and making a lot of noise at night. Sometimes the men dance with each other. "It's not that they are all bad. But they have to submit to our way of life. If not, these problems will keep happening." ___________________________________________________________________
“I’ve always wanted to live in the Dominican Republic,” says Mimi, a generously-shaped Haitian woman with a dazzling smile. Her husband, Charles, a slender Dominican, is sitting in the patio of their sheetmetal house in the new quarter of Dajabon, a Dominican border town. “I don’t feel any racism here,” she says. “We decided to get married just 11 days after we met,” says Charles. Ten years ago, Mimi spotted him while she was doing her laundry in the river at Ouanaminthe, a neighboring Haitian town. That day, he crossed the border to visit some aunts who had moved back to Haiti after the 1937 massacre in which 10,000 to 20,000 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic lost their lives. Sharing the same island, formerly called Hispaniola, Dominicans and Haitians do their best to live with a long history of conflict. In 1937, the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered the slaughter of Haitians living in his country. Much earlier, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture and, in 1855, Emperor Soulouque occupied their neighbor’s land. Those events have left bitter memories on the island. In 1777, the Europeans split Hispaniola in half. The French populated the western part (which later became Haiti) with African slaves, while the Spanish brought farmers over from their homeland to settle the eastern part (the presentday Dominican Republic). Half-Gods and Godesses Haiti and its African population forged their identity by overthrowing the French in 1794,” says sociologist Laënnec Hurbon, director of research at the Centre National Français de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and holder of the UNESCO Chair on the slave trade and slavery in Port-au- Prince. “In contrast, the Dominican Republic was built in opposition to Haiti and the threat of the island’s ‘Africanization’, especially embodied by Voodoo worship, which the Dominicans called cannibalism and witchcraft.” During election campaigns some politicians make no bones about advocating the “whitening” of the Dominican population, boasting about their descent from the indios, as the island’s earliest occupants are called. But Dominican history and culture definitely bear the stamp of African influence. For example, there is a Dominican brand of Voodoo with its “half-gods and goddesses”. Likewise, raras – Haitian music groups with ties to the voodoo spirits – are highly popular on Dominican streets during Lent. People near the border on both sides often live as though they are citizens of the same country. Mixed godparents, spiritual ties, mixed marriages and semi-bilingualism are common, as the example of Mimi and Charles shows. On the feast days of patron saints, parishioners think nothing of crossing the border to go to mass and dance. “We eat and sleep together here,” says Antonio Vixima, a member of Ouanaminthe’s Sant pon Ayiti, an organization that brings the two peoples together. That group and its Dominican counterpart, Centro Puente, are campaigning to end violence. But stereotypes die hard. Some Haitians say Dominicans are sneaky, bloodthirsty thieves. Dominicans consider newly arrived Haitians illiterate menial laborers, immediately saddling them with nicknames like kongo, brujo (witch) or rayano – because of the rays or stripes that the fence separating the island’s two states supposedly leaves on their clothes. A severely lopsided economic situation provides fertile ground for those clichés. Racist stereotypes Drawn by the prospects of a job and a better life, an estimated 500,000 to one million Haitians are living on Dominican soil. Many are seasonal agricultural workers who never went home. Those who entered the country illegally are sometimes forcibly repatriated in unacceptable conditions, says an organization called Kadret. The people running the Welcoming Committee in the southern town of Thiotte say that mothers have been sent back to Haiti before they had time to fetch their children. Compounded by racist stereotypes, those irregular situations weaken the migrants and engender a state violence that human rights organizations like the Refugee and Repatriated Citizens Support Group often condemn. “When my Dominican husband, who has since left me ransacked the house and hurt me in front of the children, I went to the police to file a complaint and was discriminated against because of the colour of my skin and my nationality,” says Siléna, showing her mutilated ear. Estaban Sanchez, a lawyer from the Education and Legal Assistance Center in Barahona (southern Dominican Republic) says, “Justice does not apply to the bateyes,” the villages without plumbing or electricity built by Haitian workers. He is working on around 40 cases of blatant violations of human and labour rights. However, Mr. Sanchez points out that the campaign against injustice is starting to pick up steam. People have formed committees to fight the impunity that perpetrators enjoy. Those groups are usually named after Haitians who died while crossing the border. In Ouanaminthe, the memory of the deadly machine-gun attack on a truck of illegal immigrants that occurred 80 kilometers away is still fresh in everybody’s mind. That town’s committee is named after Elie Jean Baptiste, a young Haitian who was shot to death two years ago because he did not have five pesos to bribe the border guard. Groups promoting harmony between the two nations have recently scored some points. “Guilty soldiers stationed at the border might be dismissed or transferred,” says the Haitian consul in Dajabon. Several years ago, a joint governmental commission on migration issues was set up, also raising hopes. But with growing numbers of young Haitians attending Dominican high schools and universities, it may be necessary to wait until the next generation to see a genuine improvement in relations between the two parts of the island.
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