30526: Durban (Pub): Deibert on Sugar Plantation Film Controversy (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Lance Durban <Lpdurban@yahoo.com> posts this item....

HAITI-DOMINICAN REPUBLIC:
Film on Plantations Spurs Backlash
By Michael Deibert
Inter Press Serice


NEW YORK, Jun 4 (IPS) - When a man stood up at the Paris screening of
director Amy Serrano's "The Sugar Babies", demanding to know how one of
the film's subjects, the Belgian priest Pedro Ruquoy, could afford such
a large car on his priestly salary, Ruquoy was nonplussed.

Ruquoy, who had ministered to Haitian workers in the sugarcane fields
of the Dominican Republic for 30 years before being driven from the
country amidst death threats in 2005, replied that, for the first
several years of his time in the country, he rode a mule, and from then
on, a motorcycle.

The mysterious protestor was apparently attempting to criticise another
film, "The Price of Sugar" by Bill Haney, which traces the similar
struggles of the Anglo-Spanish priest Father Christopher Hartley. In
the film, Hartley is seen driving a 4x4 over the roads of the eastern
Dominican Republic.

Due to technical problems at the Esclaves au Paradis (Slaves in
Paradise) conference in Paris, which sought to explore what organisers
say are the appalling conditions of Haitian workers in the Dominican
Republic, the screening times of the two films had been reversed under
short notice.

"It was strange that the questions were totally unrelated to film we
had just screened," says Anne Lescot, the coordinator of the colloquium
and its film programmer. "They had obviously been prepared for the
other film."

However disjointed, the mysterious man's interjections appeared of a
piece with similar interruptions and protests that have greeted events
attempting to discuss the ever-more contentious issue of the treatment
of the estimated 650,000 to one million Haitians living in the
Dominican Republic, fleeing the political violence and economic
stagnation of their often-tumultuous homeland.

Though these immigrants have traditionally laboured in the sugarcane
fields, known as bateys, controlled by individuals such as the
Cuban-American sugar barons Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul, and the wealthy
Dominican Vicini family (owners of the Grupo Vicini collection of
companies and of the Diario Libre newspaper), recently Haitians have
also taken jobs in such urban endeavors as construction, auto repair
and working in the country's booming resorts.

In a recent cease-and-desist order sent to the makers of "The Price of
Sugar", the Washington law firm Patton Boggs (which had previously
represented the government of ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide), acting on behalf of the Grupo Vicini -- subjects of scathing
criticism in the film -- outlined what it claimed were 45 defamatory
statements against the corporation in the movie. The objections ranged
from the Grupo Vicini's contention that its workers were not under
armed guard, to allegations that some of those depicted in the film as
living in sub-standard conditions on the bateys were not in fact batey
employees.

"I don't know why these people are going after not only the sugar
operations of the Vicini family but sugar operations in the Dominican
Republic in general," Read McCaffrey, the lead counsel at Paton Boggs
representing the company, told IPS. "I've gone through the bateys and
seen conditions that are significantly better than those in this
documentary. It is unfortunate that the film is being shown as
something accurate when it is propaganda."

In response to some of the charges, Father Christopher Hartley, the
priest portrayed in the film, produced to IPS over a dozen still
photographs from 2003-2004 of armed men that he says were taken in and
around Vicini-controlled sugar operations. In many of the photos, the
men carrying pump-action shotguns are wearing baseball caps bearing the
logo of the Ingenio Cristóbal Colón, a Grupo Vicini-controlled sugar
complex on the outskirts of the Dominican city of San Pedro de Macorís.


"I believe that it is unworthy of the human person to exist in the
living and working conditions that were present within the boundaries
of my parish," Hartley, who has been the object of great vilification
in some quarters of the Dominican media, told IPS from his home in
Spain, where he has lived since being forced out of his community deep
in sugar territory on 2006. "It is an intrinsic aspect of my pastoral
mission to do the utmost to help these people defend their dignity, and
their human rights."

Supporting Hartley's position, a prize-winning reporter for a major
South Florida daily newspaper, present during the filming of scenes in
"The Price of Sugar" and speaking on the condition of anonymity, has
confirmed the general conditions it depicts of life in the bateys as
accurate. Though the reporter feels that certain elements of the film
might have been exaggerated for dramatic effect, the reporter said that
the abysmal living and working conditions of Haitians working in Grupo
Vicini-controlled bateys are largely true.

"Everything (Hartley) said about those conditions, he didn't need to
say it," the reporter told IPS. "When you walked around in the bateys,
you could see that people were living in bad conditions, were defeated,
it was a miserable life. You didn't need words to explain it, it was
there."

"The Price of Sugar" is not the only target of controversy.

To help shape its public image, the Grupo Vicini has also retained the
services of Newlink, a Miami-based public relations and consulting firm
founded and run by former television journalist Sergio Roitberg. In
addition to the Grupo Vicini, Newlink's clients include the Policia
National of the Dominican Republic and the Partido de la Liberación
Dominicana, (PLD), the political party of Dominican president Leonel
Fernández .

At the Paris symposium, several witnesses charge that Roitberg, in
addition to vociferously interrupting a question-and-answer session
following an address by Father Hartley, used strong language to
threaten a French-Peruvian photographer, Céline Anaya Gautier, who
spent two years documenting the lives of Haitians in the bateys and
whose photographs form a large part of the exhibition.

"We know who you are, we know where you live," Roitberg is alleged to
have said to Gautier, an account that she confirms. "Be very careful."

Newlink and Roitberg did not respond to IPS requests for comment.

The road for those agitating on behalf of Haitians and Dominicans of
Haitian descent has never been an easy one.

Sonia Pierre, a Dominican of Haitian descent who leads the Movimiento
De Mujeres Dominico Haitiana (MUDHA), was part of a legal team that, in
September 2005, successfully argued before the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights that the Dominican Republic was in violation
of five articles of the American Convention on Human Rights Pact of San
Jose, Costa Rica in denying citizenship to two young girls, Dilcia Yean
and Violeta Bosico, born in the Dominican Republic.

That decision reinforced that, in its denial of citizenship to persons
born within its borders, the Dominican Republic was in violation of
Article 11 of its own constitution, which guarantees Dominican
citizenship to the all those born within its territory save for those
"in transit" and the children of foreign diplomats.

For her efforts, Pierre, a 2006 recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy
Human Rights Award, has been the subject of attempts by members of the
Dominican congress to revoke her citizenship, despite the fact that she
was born and raised in the country.

Dominican Foreign Minister Carlos Morales Troncoso, one of the
bitterest critics of the newly-assertive Haitian presence in the
Dominican Republic and of Pierre in particular, has a long-standing
relationship as an executive and major shareholder of the Central
Romana sugar concern, along with the aforementioned Fanjuls.