20372: Lemieux: Scotland on Sunday: Haiti crisis spills over the border (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

Haiti crisis spills over the border
March 14, 2004
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=294632004

MICHELE WUCKER


HAITI’S ousted leader Jean- Betrand Aristide has often said
neighbouring states are like "two wings of the same bird",
mutually dependent on each other for economic and political
stability.

The Dominican Republic is usually Haiti’s quiet neighbour
on the island of Hispaniola, known mostly as a pleasant
stop-off on a Caribbean cruise.

Yet even as order begins to be restored in Haiti after the
ousting of Aristide by rebel forces and the arrival of
foreign troops, there is a fear that its neighbour is
heading for a destabilising crisis all of its own, the
outcome of which will be crucial to both nations and which
is already preoccupying the United States.

As the country heads toward presidential elections in May,
Dominican democracy, barely a decade old, is in a fragile
state, suffering from many of the same problems which led
to the current turmoil in Haiti. The administration of
President Hipolito Mejia has more than doubled the
country’s foreign debt in less than four years to around
£4.2bn and is already having trouble keeping up with
interest payments.

The Spanish-speaking country’s second-biggest bank
collapsed last year, a £1.2bn disaster that crippled the
economy and devalued the peso from 17 to more than 50 to
the US dollar. The bank’s demise also uncovered a vast
network of corruption and payoffs, and although Mejia’s
Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) was not the only one
implicated, Dominicans blame the ruling party.



‘US Coastguard picked up 1,977 Dominicans against 717
Haitians’


In a poll of Latin American public opinion on their
leaders’ performance last October, Mejia had the lowest
approval rating - even the deeply unpopular Peruvian
President Alejandro Toledo, at 7%, edged out Mejia, who
scored only 6%. 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 authorised one man to
vote at three different stations, only one example of the
kind of corruption Dominicans fear could tarnish their
recently-won democracy.

An election crisis could jeopardise 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 also helped get aid to
Haiti, and although 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, a significant
humanitarian gesture.

The US also has a vested interest in a stable Dominican
Republic, not only because of its presence in Haiti - where
in the last few days its troops have come under fire from
suspected Aristide loyalists - but because of an increase
in the flow of boat people seeking a life elsewhere.

As Haiti’s crisis escalated last month, the US prepared
50,000 new beds at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba
to accommodate a feared wave of Haitians. But instead it
was a steady stream of people already leaving the Dominican
Republic, in numbers dramatically higher than in previous
years and larger than those leaving Haiti, that have kept
them busy.

In the first two months of this year, the US Coastguard
picked up 1,977 Dominicans, against only 717 Haitians. And
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.

Mejia himself has said that the Dominican Republic and
Haiti are in a marriage with no possibility of divorce,
words that reflect a fragile and now threatened peace 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 legalise the status of several
hundred thousand Haitian migrants living in the Dominican
Republic, a long-standing source of division.

After international criticism of the mass deportations of
Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans it had periodically
carried out, the Dominican Republic also 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.

But crisis in both countries has 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 earlier this month saying he wanted
to return to Haiti, rumours swirled that he was living in
the Dominican Republic.

And 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.

Rumours in late February, strenuously denied, also
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 itself preparing for a
potentially destabilising flow of refugees.

The US measures the success of its Caribbean policy 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 one million migrants to
the US, some arriving, quite literally, in the same boat.


This article:


http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=294632004



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