19969: Durban: Wucker Op-Ed from Wash Post (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com>

LPD

Haiti Has Company In This Crisis

By Michele Wucker
Sunday, March 7, 2004; Page B01


As U.S. Marines and international troops moved into
Port-au-Prince last week, there was great relief that a
bloodbath had been averted. Now the international community must
help Haiti rebuild a government and get back on the path to
democracy. How smoothly that will go depends on many factors:
whether the rebels make good on their promise to disarm; whether
Aristide's polarizing claims of a White House-ordered
"kidnapping" have any consequences; and how quickly aid can be
restored, to alleviate the nation's wrenching poverty.



But whatever policy is pursued in Haiti, it cannot ignore the
country's conjoined twin on the island of Hispaniola: the
Dominican Republic.

Policymakers too often view the Spanish-speaking Dominican
Republic only in the light of its turbulent, more densely
populated and much poorer neighbor to the west. Yet even as
order is restored in Haiti, the Dominican Republic is struggling
with a political and economic crisis of its own, the outcome of
which will be crucial to both nations. Failure to avert a
democratic breakdown there could not only undermine any Haiti
policy, but also increase the flow of boat people to the United
States.

As Haiti's crisis escalated last month, U.S. officials were
preparing 50,000 new beds at our Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba to
accommodate a feared wave of Haitians. Yet a steady stream of
boat people was already leaving the Dominican Republic, in
numbers dramatically higher than in previous years and larger
than the number of Haitians. In January and February, the U.S.
Coast Guard intercepted 1,977 Dominicans, compared with 717
Haitians. Over the past three years, 300 Dominicans have gone
missing while attempting the dangerous 75-mile journey to Puerto
Rico across the shark-infested Mona Passage aboard rickety
wooden motorboats called yolas.

As the country heads toward presidential elections in May,
Dominican democracy, barely a decade old, is in a tenuous state.
The administration of President Hipolito Mejia has more than
doubled the country's foreign debt in less than four years --
from $3.7 billion to $7.6 billion -- and is already having
trouble keeping up with interest payments. The country's
second-biggest bank collapsed last year, a $2.2 billion disaster
that sideswiped the economy and devalued the peso from 17 to
more than 50 to the U.S. dollar. The bank's demise uncovered a
vast network of corruption and payoffs; though Mejia's Dominican
Revolutionary Party (PRD) was not the only one implicated,
Dominicans blame the ruling party.

In a poll last October of Latin American public opinion on their
leaders' performance, Mejia had the lowest approval rating in
the hemisphere; even Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, often
cited as the lowest at 7 percent, edged out Mejia, who scored
only 6 percent. The PRD has fractured over who its candidate
should be in May, but concerns have arisen that Mejia may try to
steal the election. Recently, a local newspaper revealed that
voter rolls authorized one man to vote at three different
stations, only one small example of the kind of high jinks
Dominicans fear could smear their recently won democracy.

An election crisis could jeopardize not only the country's
stability, but also international efforts to help Haiti at a
time when Dominican support has been crucial. As Haiti's crisis
played out, the Dominican military helped evacuate foreigners.
The Dominican Red Cross helped get needed aid to Haiti. Though
it closed the border and doubled the number of troops posted
there to prevent an influx of refugees, the Dominican government
did allow Haitians in on market days twice a week to shop --
very important for humanitarian reasons.

Before Aristide flew into exile last week, he was fond of saying
that Haiti and the Dominican Republic were like two wings of the
same bird. Similarly, Mejia likes to say the two are in a
marriage with no possibility of divorce. These words bespeak a
fragile, and now threatened, truce that has held for the past
decade. In that period, Dominicans have taken the lead in
pursuing joint border development projects and warming the tone
between the two countries. Dominicans have worked with the
Haitian government to legalize the status of several hundred
thousand Haitian migrants living in the Dominican Republic, a
long-standing sore point.

After international criticism of the mass deportations of
Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans it had periodically carried
out, the Dominican Republic took steps to reduce abuses and
signed an agreement with the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights. Dominican investors even opened an industrial park in
Ouanaminthe, on the Haitian side of the northern border, to
employ Haitian workers.

The new crises in both countries have put this progress at risk,
and Haiti's uprising has stirred old animosities. Until former
dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier gave an interview from
France saying he wanted to return to Haiti, rumors swirled in
Haitian cyberspace that he was living in the Dominican Republic.
When Haitian rebel leaders Guy Philippe and Louis Jodel
Chamblain returned to Haiti from Dominican exile last month,
Aristide denounced the Dominicans for allowing them to cross
back into Haiti. Rumors in late February, strenuously denied,
insinuated that Dominican military officials had known of and
condoned rebels training within their borders. The Dominicans,
for their part, suspect Haitian rebels of killing two Dominican
soldiers at the border. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic is
bracing for a potentially destabilizing flow of refugees.

Turmoil on either end of the island has always spilled over to
the other. After Haiti expelled France in 1804, Haitian
President Jean-Pierre Boyer encouraged Dominican independence
from Spain, but then occupied the Dominican Republic for 22
years. In the 1940s, longtime Dominican dictator Gen. Rafael
Trujillo, a master of meddling in Haitian politics, sent his spy
chief to Port-au-Prince to root out Dominican political
opponents. This tradition continued through Dominican support
for the Haitian military leaders who deposed Aristide in a 1991
coup.

In 1994, after octogenarian strongman Joaquin Balaguer pulled
off a massive election fraud in the Dominican Republic, the
international response to that crisis was muted because of the
need for Santo Domingo's cooperation on Haiti. Balaguer agreed
to help police the Haitian border and was allowed to stay in
office for half his term. When he stepped down in 1996, a
concerted Dominican effort with international support carried
off the country's first-ever clean elections.

Not surprisingly, suspicions between Haitians and Dominicans
remain. In 2000, a popular Haitian Carnival song warned that
Dominicans wanted to take over Haiti. When Chamblain and
Philippe returned to Haiti, a young Haitian reporter asked me
whether I thought rumors that the Dominicans were using the
crisis as a pretext to take over her country were true. No, I
told her, laughing. For a long time, many Dominicans would have
preferred exactly the opposite: that Haiti not share the same
island. (Indeed, a Dominican reviewer of my book about the two
countries complained on Amazon.com that I was wrong to include
both in the same volume.)

Accusations that the Haitian exiles trained openly and received
arms in the Dominican Republic could undermine recent
improvements in the countries' relations, as could Aristide's
claims that the United States forced him out. In the unlikely
event that Aristide's accusations take hold -- they died down
somewhat after the Central African Republic asked Aristide to
put a lid on it -- the Dominican Republic could come under
scrutiny due to the accusation by Aristide's Miami lawyer, Ira
Kurzban, that the United States armed the Haitian rebels with
some of the 20,000 M-16s supplied to the Dominicans in 2002 for
narco-policing and border patrol efforts -- a charge the State
Department denied to me as "absurd."

Though an all-out military conflict has been averted in Haiti,
the prospect of an exodus to the Dominican Republic will persist
until a modicum of political and economic stability is
established. A refugee processing center in Haiti or at the
border to identify legitimate political asylum cases would
reduce the number of Haitians trying to flee to the Dominican
Republic. Restoring aid to Haiti quickly will ease the pressure
on its neighbor from economic refugees. In addition,
humanitarian aid plans should not neglect the border and other
areas of the Dominican Republic with large Haitian populations.
And the international community should offer support immediately
to ensure clean elections in May, including financing for an
independent audit of voter rolls as well as international
observers.

The success of our Caribbean policy is often measured in the
numbers fleeing its island nations. By that measure,
Hispaniola's tally is discouraging: The Dominican Republic and
Haiti have each sent more than 1 million migrants to the United
States. In recent months, desperate Haitians and Dominicans have
often been found, quite literally, in the same boat: not the
most encouraging metaphor for their two nations, but an apt
description of the mutual challenges that lie ahead.

Author's e-mail:michele@wucker.com

Michele Wucker is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute
and the author of "Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians,
and the Struggle for Hispaniola" (Hill & Wang).