25148: grassrootshaiti: (comment) Protest Ethnic Cleasing of Haitians in Dominican Republic (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: grassrootshaiti@yahoo.com

Urgent Appeal to Stop Ethnic Cleasing of Haitians in
Dominican Republic

An anti-Haitian pogrom is underway in the Dominican
Republic.  It began with the May 9, 2005 killing of a
Dominican woman, attributed to one or several
Haitians, in the Northern Montecristi region. Three
Haitians have been lynched and several others severely
beaten.  Hundred more were forced to flee the area to
escape Dominican mobs armed with guns, machetes and
clubs.  Other Haitians sought refuge in police and
military compounds, but instead of protection the
authorities arbitrarily began rounding up people who
appear to be Haitians and summarily deported them
without any of their belongings or notice to their
families.  Meanwhile in southern Enriquillo, mobs of
hooded men have been ransacking Haitian homes and
dragging helpless people across the border.  A
majority of the estimated 4,000 people deported in
less than a week are women and children, many of them
legal residents or people born in the Dominican
Republic.  Dominican president Leonel Fernandez calls
the mass deportations “the right move.”

The Haiti Grassroots Solidarity Committee is urgently
calling on concerned people and organizations, and on
the Dominican community in particular, to join with
us, or under their own initiative, to request an
immediate end to this absolutely unacceptable
situation.  We are calling for an emergency rally on
Monday, May 23, between 4 and 7 pm, in front of the
Dominican Consulate in Manhattan, to protest these
unjust and illegal deportations.  The Dominican
Consulate is located at 1501 New Broadway Ave (at 43rd
Street).

Father Jose Nunez, of Jesuit Refugee Service that
operates an emergency relief program alongside the
border, characterizes the aggressions and forced
repatriations against Haitians in the Dominican
Republic as “the product of a racist and anti-Haitian
campaign orchestrated by sectors from the ruling
elite.... On the one hand they see the Haitian
presence as a danger, but on the other hand those same
sectors utilize the Haitian presence in various
branches of the economy, which would be paralyzed
without this Haitian input.” The Jesuit Refugee
Service calls on the Dominican State to “immediately
halt all military operations of deporting Haitians and
Dominicans of Haitian origin...which are in violation
of national and international human rights law.”

In 1937, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo
orchestrated the massacre of over 30,000 Haitians, in
an effort to flush out the Haitians living in the
Montecristi region that the Dominican state had
recently acquired from Haiti through US and Vatican
mediation.  Anti-Haitian sentiment is a fact of life
in the Dominican Republic, and is often whipped into a
frenzy against the best interests of both peoples.
Lately there has been a sustained effort to flush out
the Haitian laborers from the Dominican sugar
plantations, where mechanization and a relative
decline in the sugar economy have made them redundant,
and to redeploy them in service industries and in
free-trade zones across the border, in an effort to
circumvent the Dominican minimum wage.

The Haiti Grassroots Solidarity Committee is a
recently reconstituted group of Haitian and North
American solidarity activists active in the New York
area.  They can be reached at 718.284.0889 or by
writing to grassrootshaiti@yahoo.com.





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