27206: (news) Chamberlain: Angry Haitians clash with UN over dead migrants (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

     By Joseph Guyler Delva

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Jan 12 (Reuters) - U.N. peacekeepers fired at a
crowd of enraged Haitians on Thursday trying to cross into the Dominican
Republic to protest the deaths of two dozen Haitian migrants who suffocated
while being smuggled in a van, police said.
     At least one Haitian was killed when Spanish peacekeepers opened fire
to stop the angry mob from crossing the border, said Ernst Dorfeuille, a
Haitian police commissioner in the impoverished and chaotic Caribbean
country's northeast.
     Maj. Gen. Rafael Radhames Ramirez, head of intelligence for the
Dominican Armed Forces, told Reuters he believed two Haitians were killed
and several U.N. troops wounded in the confrontation on the border near
Dajabon, 200 miles (320 km) northwest of Santo Domingo.
     U.N. spokesmen in Port-au-Prince could not immediately be reached for
comment.
     Ramirez said the incident occurred as Dominican officials were burying
24 dead Haitians in a mass grave in Dajabon.
     "It was decided to bury them in a mass grave because of their advanced
state of decomposition," Ramirez said.
     The number of dead Haitian illegal immigrants rose to 25 on Thursday
after a survivor died in a hospital.
     Dominican police say the victims suffocated in the back of a van on
Tuesday and their bodies were jettisoned by the side of the road while the
vehicle was still in motion.
     Several people have been arrested and Dominican authorities have vowed
to crack down on people smugglers.
     Up to 1 million Haitians, most of them illegal immigrants, are
believed to be living in the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean
island of Hispaniola with Haiti.
     Most work on cattle ranches and sugar plantations, or as domestic
servants and construction workers in conditions that human rights groups
say frequently approach slavery.
     Relations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti have long been
tinged by accusations of racism, and by the massacre in 1937 of up to
30,000 Haitian migrants in a campaign ordered by then-Dominican dictator
Rafael Trujillo.
     But conditions in the Dominican Republic are often better than in
Haiti, where 55 percent of the population lives on $1 a day. Haitians pay
Dominican smugglers between $40 and $60 to take them across the
176-mile-long (286-km-long) border.

  (Additional reporting by Manuel Jimenez in Santo Domingo)