30198: Roebling (news) Article on Haitian - DR by Michael Diebert

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Elizabeth Roebling <lizieames@yahoo.com>

                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, the 
largest of any U.S. trading partner.

*Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle 
for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His blog of journalism and opinion can be read 
at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com. (END/2007)


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