Exhibit Reveals a Bitter Harvest
By Michael Deibert
Inter-Press Service
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36905
PARIS, Mar 13, 2007 (IPS) - A month-long programme
in France this spring hopes to shine a spotlight on
the working conditions of Haitians labouring in the
sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic, a state
of affairs which human rights groups have charged in
recent years is little better than slavery.
"Esclaves au Paradis: L'esclavage contemporain en
République Dominicaine" (Slaves in Paradise:
Contemporary Slavery in the Dominican Republic) will
take place this May under the sponsorship of a host
of local and international institutions, including
Amnesty International, the office of Paris mayor
Bertrand Delanoe and the artistic group Collectif
2004 Images.
The event comes at a time when the Dominican
Republic is under growing criticism for its
treatment of the estimated one million Haitians
living within its borders, as well as Dominican
citizens of Haitian descent. In addition to
criticisms of labour practices and working
conditions, local and international human rights
groups have charged that the Dominican government
has sought to deprive such individuals of due
process under Dominican and international law, and
conducted sweeps and expulsions of suspected
illegals with unnecessary brutality and means of
questionable legality.
For its part, the Dominican government has said that
its country cannot handle the waves of immigrants
continually arriving within its borders from
neighbouring Haiti, a country that has been beset by
decades of often-bloody political unrest and
economic stagnation.
In making its point, Esclaves au Paradis will
include among its offerings an exhibit of photos
taken in the bateys, as the camps where sugarcane
workers are known, by the French-Peruvian
photographer Céline Anaya Gautier, as well as
screenings of films tackling the subject of the
Dominican sugar industry and the workers toiling
away in it.
A historical colloquium including such noted
international and local commentators as Camille
Chalmers (director of Haiti's Plateforme haïtienne
de Plaidoyer pour un Développement Alternatif or
PAPDA), the Groupe d'Appui aux Rapatries et Refugies
(GARR) director Colette Lespinasse, Amnesty
International's Geneviève Sevrin and Dominican
anthropologist Soraya Aracena will also be held.
"Wherever there are people being exploited, who have
no rights, it is important to speak out when we have
the opportunity," says Anne Lescot, the coordinator
of the cinema portion of the agenda. "We're very
aware that this question is subtle and complex and
that only showing the pictures could lead to some
misunderstanding, so we also wanted to explain
what's behind the pictures, and that's why we
organised this colloquium, as an occasion to truly
understand the whole process of how, for 200 years
now, Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been in a
relationship of love and hate."
Haitian-Dominican relations have often been tense
because of economic and cultural differences between
the two countries, which share the island of
Hispaniola. Although they are close in population,
with 8.1 million Haitians and nine million
Dominicans, Haiti is 95 percent black, and 80
percent of the population lives in poverty. The
Dominican population is 89 percent white or mixed,
with 25 percent impoverished.
In the fall of 1937, the Dominican dictator Rafael
Trujillo, motivated by factors that have never been
fully explained, instigated a pogrom in which
Dominican soldiers and police massacred 15,000 to
20,000 Haitians throughout the country.
At a recent press conference announcing the Esclaves
au Paradis colloquium at the Hôtel de Ville in
Paris, one of the subjects of a film to be screened
seemed to agree about the pressing need to inform
the public about conditions in the bateys.
"When I arrived (in the Dominican Republic), I knew
absolutely nothing about nationality or race
problems, about the sugarcane fields or the sugar
industry," says Father Christopher Hartley, a
Catholic priest and the main protagonist of the film
"The Price of Sugar".
Hartley, born of a Spanish mother and a British
father, arrived in the Dominican Republic parish of
San Jose de Los Lanos in September 1997 after
spending a decade ministering to congregations in
the South Bronx and Soho areas of New York City. The
parish encompasses the Batey dos Hermanos
sugar-growing territory controlled by the wealthy
Vicini family.
"I was absolutely ignorant of everything I was going
to confront, and I was not sent to try to help or
solve or denounce these issues, but just to be a
regular parish priest," Hartley says. "It was a
gradual realisation of the living and working
conditions of my parishioners, going about my
regular pastoral duties, that made me aware."
Hartley was forced to leave the Dominican Republic
under what he says was pressure from the Dominican
government and the politically powerful Vicinis in
late 2006. Another priest who had advocated on
behalf of Haitian workers in the country, the
Belgian Father Pedro Ruquoy, fled after death
threats were leveled against him in November 2005.
Hartley and Ruquoy have not been alone in their
critiques. Human rights groups say that the
situation in the Dominican Republic has grown more
dire since the May 2005 expulsion of an estimated
3,500 people at the border towns of
Dajabon-Ounaminthe along the northern frontier, an
episode which resulted in a formal protest to the
Dominican government by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees.
In a May 2006 open letter to Dominian President
Leonel Fernandez, Amnesty International Secretary
General Irene Khan wrote that "since May 2005
Haitian and Dominicans of Haitian descent have been
subjected to collective and arbitrary expulsions by
the Dominican authorities in violation of the
Dominican Republic's obligations under international
standards including the American Convention on Human
Rights and the International Covenant of Civil and
Political Rights."
Amnesty's statement was echoed in an October 2006
release by the British-based charity Christian Aid,
which wrote of Dominican deportation practices that
"numerous cases have been documented in which
immigration officials have broken into homes and
forced people at gunpoint onto buses giving them no
chance to collect documents or inform relatives.
When they reach the Haitian side of the border, many
have been able to prove that they were in the
Dominican Republic legally."
Previously, a September 2005 decision by the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the
Organisation of American States (OAS) found that, in
denying Dominican citizenship to two girls, Dilcia
Yean and Violeta Bosico Cofi, born within the
territory of the Dominican Republic, the Dominican
state had violated the right to nationality and the
right to equality before the law, as well as
articles 3, 5, 19, 20 and 24 of the American
Convention on Human Right Pact of San Jose.
The Fernandez government has repeatedly denied that
any policy of human rights abuses exists with
regards to Haitians and Dominicans of
Haitian-descent within the country.
Recently, the Dominican Republic's foreign minister,
Carlos Morales Troncoso, bitterly lashed out at the
U.S.-based Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Centre for
Human Rights for recognising Dominican-Haitian
activist Sonia Pierre for her work with Haitian
migrants in the country, saying that those bestowing
the prize were "divorced from the realities on the
island of Hispaniola." Pierre, who grew up in a
migrant worker camp much like those depicted in the
exhibition, has fought on behalf of Haitians and
Dominicans of Haitian decent for three decades.
As if to underline the importance of the sugar
industry in Dominican politics, Foreign Minister
Morales Troncoso himself has a long-standing
relationship as an executive and major shareholder
of the Central Romana sugar concern, along with
Cuban-American sugar barons Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul.
Three-quarters of the Dominican Republic's
agricultural exports go to the United States, and
the country has a U.S. sugar quota of 180,000
tonnes,