Another Haitian-Dominican CrisisGuy S. Antoine
November 1999What should Haitians do in response to the deportation by the Dominican Republic of thousands of migrant workers back to our territory ? Before we expend all of our energies in protest of this unjust situation, let us begin by welcoming our rejected brothers, and deal earnestly with our national responsibility to meet their most basic level of necessities.
Certainly we know that Dominican society in general has horror of the "black" and desperately would like to increase the whitening stock among their gene pool. But neither you nor I can change that, and we can only hope that future generations of Dominicans will get over their great national anguish and evolve to a more humane concept of race. But in the meantime what practical steps can we take to help our rejected brothers on the Dominican side, when we have utterly failed to protect those within our own borders?
No government of Haiti, since Stenio Vincent who accepted a shameful settlement brokered by the United States of a few dollars per head of Haitians killed in the genocidal act of 1937, has done anything of significance to help improve the plight of Haitians crossing the border to find work in the "bitter cane" fields, or to guarantee their physical security against serial and arbitrary actions taken against them by the Dominican armed forces. In the diplomacy field, this has been the one area of "benign neglect", which History will no doubt identify as one of criminal negligence and total irresponsibility from the part of Haitian governments across time.
Who are the advocates or monitors of migrant workers' rights appointed by the Government of Haiti? We want to know who they are and what they have been up to.
We sent an official government delegation to the Dominican Republic, and we received the Dominican President Leonel Fernández in Haiti... What guarantees did we extract from them? What programs were initiated to put a stop to the sort of debacle we are witnessing today?
Once again, we are faced with what to do, while we are in a situation of extreme weakness, extreme unpreparedness. We have to devise an emergency solution, perhaps to prevent History from repeating itself, and bearing witness to another massacre, ironically in the year of publication of Edwidge Danticat's "The Farming of Bones" and Michelle Wucker's "Why the Cocks Fight". Haitians and Dominicans need to sit at a negotiating table and begin to address our great historical and humanitarian conflicts, and not react only when there is an urgent crisis.
Let's hear from the Haitian Government. In due time, our leaders should present grievances to the Organization of American States, the United Nations, and the World Court. They must too present their case forcefully to the Court of Public Opinion, which includes most importantly Dominicans residing in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. We need to develop a dialogue and strong ties between our two people. We need to develop strong and effective diplomatic relations. We need all Haitian Rights groups to focus attention to this problem and to maintain a level of discourse on this subject all of the time while the problem persists, and not just when the Dominicans start rounding up Haitian people like ordinary cattle.
Certainly we need to respond to the great danger of the moment. We should press our demands for the Dominicans to respect the migrant workers' basic human rights which are being grievously violated according to recent reports. One cannot lose sight of that. However we should think also about establishing the Haiti-D.R. conflict resolution as a long-term priority for the Haitian Government, for Haitian Rights groups, for all Haitian and Dominican citizens.
It is the Haitians' primary responsability to find a solution to this problem. We need not rely on our neighbors to behave in an ethical manner. After all, we are getting kicked out not only from the Dominican Republic but from the United States, and from every Caribbean country, small and large. The list of countries expelling Haitians grows longer and longer every year as we become the pariahs of the world. Our less privileged Haitian brothers are being treated like dogs, without due process, just about everywhere, the United States being no exception. The main reason for that is abject poverty (to which of course other countries have contributed greatly through sheer exploitation, a situation which should prompt us to work harder with the cards we have been dealt to overcome such injustices and historical handicaps).
There are other reasons, of course, like racism and cultural orientation, but the Dominicans for example have never rejected rich Haitian blacks from their midst, not even those who earned their millions in a wrongful exercise of political power. Similarly, the United States have seized boatloads of refugees from international waters, and returned them to Haiti without verifying their claims, though they at once facilitated the entry of the titular head of FRAPH, the repressive paramilitary unit, in the country, providing him political, economic, and judicial cover. Same state of affairs in France and various Latin-American countries with respect to Michèle Bennett, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Raoul Cedras, Michel François, etc. etc.
While we must be vigilant about the policies of the Dominican Republic and the well documented racism that is entrenched in Dominican society, we should remember that our greatest enemy resides in our midst. We should take steps to resolve our internal problems, and even expect, based on all historical and contemporary evidence, that other countries are not going to tolerate high levels of Haitian migration to their shores, or in this case, across their borders. Let's not rely solely on other people's good will, lest we be vexed again and again. Let's anticipate the worst from the Dominican Republic, the United States and others, and ready ourselves accordingly.
Let us help our brothers repair their disrupted lives, and work to prevent this crisis from occurring again every few years.
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