Fear grows over social ‘cleansing’
Government to ‘repatriate’ anyone who even looks Haitian
There is an artificial line that splits the island of Hispaniola in two. On one side is Haiti, and on the other is the Dominican Republic.
There was a time when that split between the two countries was drawn with blood; the 1937 Parsley Massacre is widely regarded as a turning point in Haitian-Dominican relations.
The slaughter, carried out by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, targeted Haitians along with Dominicans who looked dark enough to be Haitian — or whose inability to roll the “r” in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley, gave them away.
“The massacre cemented Haitians into a long-term subversive outsider incompatible with what it means to be Dominicans,” according to Border of Lights, an organization that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the massacre in 2012.
Today, things are as tense on the island as they have been in years. Within days, the Dominican government is expected to round up Haitians — or, really, anyone black enough to be Haitian — and ship them to the border, where they will likely be expelled.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that the head of the Dominican Republic’s immigration agency, Army Gen. Ruben Paulino, said his agency will begin patrolling neighbourhoods with large numbers of migrants on Thursday.
“If they aren’t registered, they will be repatriated,” Paulino said, according to the AP.
The government has described it, in terms chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust, as a “cleansing” of the country’s immigration rolls.
Cassandre Theano, a legal officer at the New York-based Open Society Foundations, said the comparisons between the Dominican government’s actions and the denationalization of Jews in Nazi Germany are justified.
“We’ve called it as such because there are definitely linkages,” she said this week. “You don’t want to look a few years back and say, ‘This is what was happening and I didn’t call it.’”
In other words, 78 years later, these are the fruits of Trujillo’s bloody campaign to sow anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic.
“The root cause is discrimination; it’s really a long-standing discrimination against those of Haitian descent,” said Marselha Goncalves Margerin, advocacy director for the Americas at Amnesty International. “The Dominican Republic has not been able to establish a strong policy to combat it.”
The discrimination starts with the long-standing practice of not recognizing as Dominican people of Haitian descent who were born in the Dominican Republic. Instead, they are lumped in with a second group: Haitian migrants who came to the country — sometimes by force — to work in the sugarcane fields.
Then, in 2013, the country’s constitutional court ruled that no longer would people born in the Dominican Republic automatically be considered citizens. The rule, the court decided, would retroactively apply to anyone born after 1929.
The change overwhelmingly affects Haitians and people of Haitian descent. And its impact reaches back generations.
In reality, Theano said, “cleaning” the Dominican registration rolls to root out fraud and non-citizens entails identifying Haitian-sounding names, then forcing Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent to prove that they are citizens.
The deadline for procuring the documents necessary to prove citizenship if you were born in the Dominican Republic lapsed in February. And on Wednesday, the deadline for migrants to “regularize” their statuses was also set to expire.
“People are concerned that they will be indiscriminately targeting people who are darker skinned, black Dominicans, Dominican Haitians and Haitian migrants,” said Theano. “There is no science behind how they pick people.”
“The root cause is discrimination; it’s really a long-standing discrimination against those of Haitian descent.
MARSELHA GONCALVES MARGERIN AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL