Deportation and Discrimination by law in vacation paradise
Thousands of Dominicans with Haitian descent are facing deprivation of citizenship – Racism in the 20th century
By Ondra Menzel
Santo Domingo. It is another ordinary working day at the Gabi Beach Bar at Bavaro Beach in the south-easterly Dominican Republic. It is noon and the employees hide in the shadows to avoid the blazing heat, waiting for the next order. One of them is Santo Marrero – he is one of half a million Dominicans with Haitian descent.
His real name is Stephane Doliscat, a Haitian name. Marrero’s family was forced to leave the Dominican Republic. He stayed to work and had to be adopted by a Dominican family and change his name, because he would not be allowed to work with his Haitian name. Many comparable family tragedies happened during the last month. The reason is a new law that passed in September 2013. According to this law, Haitians who entered the country after 1929 and all their descendants are considered to be in transit and do not have a full citizenship, even if they were born on Dominican territory and never lived in Haiti.
Hispaniola – one Island, two worlds
Sweeping westwards from beautiful Bavaro Beach, over the country’s farmlands and its capital Santo Domingo, lays the border between rich and poor. It divides Hispaniola, the second-largest island in the Caribbean. On one side the Dominican Republic, which has a medium human development index with an upward trend, Haiti on the other side has a low human development index with a downward trend, according to UN data from 2012.
This is why many Haitians cross the border every day to sell and buy at the Dominican markets or to work. Some of them want to stay forever, even though they are not welcome in the Dominican Republic. After the harrowing earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010, a disaster that claimed at least 180.000 victims, thousands of Haitians escaped the poor country. Today, around 500.000 out of the ten million inhabitants of the Dominican Republic are of Haitian descent. The majority were born in the Dominican Republic; the new law could make tens of thousands of these Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless.
In 2010 the Dominican Republic passed a new law in its constitution, saying that only those children born in the country whose parents are ‘legal residents’ have a right to Dominican citizenship. But a controversial new bill from September 26 2013 legally de-nationalises all those Haitians who entered the country after 1929 and all their descendants. They are considered to be in transit and do not have full citizenship, even if they were born on Dominican territory and have never lived in Haiti. According to recent information by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, this court decision relates explicitly to the children of immigrated Haitians. Those who have at least one ‘legal parent of Dominican descent’ are not affected.
Discrimination by law leaves thousands stateless
Bridget Wooding is the director of the think-tank Observatory Caribbean Migrants based in Santo Domingo. Together with Kare Kristensen, the director of the Centre for Intercultural Communication in Stavanger, Norway, she recently published a study on the rights of Haitian immigrants and their descendants in the Dominican Republic. Talking about the consequences of this controversial judgement, Wooding says: “Dominican authorities assume that all people of Haitian descent can automatically gain Haitian nationality, which is not the case, and many people are in fact left functionally stateless.”
As The Economist reported recently, “the Dominican government insists that the decision’s reach has been exaggerated. Its audit of the birth register found 24.392 people whose citizenship is now invalid. Campaigners question the reliability of this count, conducted in just eight days. They claim that 10 times as many people could be affected, and that thousands of those affected do not have birth certificates and are thus excluded from the figure.”
But the impression on location renders a different picture. The Dominican town of Santiago had been home to a dozen Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent until the migration police came and destroyed everything, reported Weltspiegel. Paul Unick looks at the ruins, stunned. He has a wife and children in Haiti. “If the Dominican police knew I would talk about the discrimination to foreign media, my life would be endangered.” According to human-rights groups, over 200.000 people of Haitian descent will be left stateless. As the Washington Post points out: “Many of the fearful affected have never set foot in Haiti and speak no Creole, Haiti’s main language.”
The Dominican migration police searches for illegal immigrants and deports them. But even those who have official documents are being discriminated against. According to Weltspiegel coverage, Padre Regino Martinez Bretonis works as a contact person for Haitians in the Dominican Republic and knows the reasons for the racist behaviour of his fellow countrymen. "It is because us Dominicans are likely to think we were Europeans, Spanish people, and the Haitians are Africans, slaves. We do not see that we profit from their labour on the fields and they buy our goods on the markets.”
Ezequiel Herrera is Dominican and works as a hotel manager in the tourism area of Punta Cana. He enjoys working with his colleagues with Haitian roots and does not agree with the criticism. He says: “The Dominican Republic is always the first country to help Haiti. In 2010 after the earthquake we opened the border to help the people.” The ‘open-border’ policy on the part of the Dominican authorities in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake was indeed a humanitarian response that “marked a positive turn in relations between the two countries,” as Wooding and Kristensen phrase it in their study. Herrera’s colleagues are part of the small group of those who got a good job in an upper position despite their derivation.
Education is a key to a better life and good jobs – Haitian kids are being barred from Dominican schools
Herreira is sure that if his country would lower restrictions on immigration from Haiti, Haitians would come in scores and endanger the economic situation of his home country. Thus, he is sure: “The law is necessary to keep a balance, we do not discriminate them.” Nevertheless, Haitians in the Dominican Republic need more support, as a recent study shows. A further supporter of the new law is Dr. Virgilio Rodriguez, a Dominican research scientist at the University of Paderborn in Germany. Haitian immigrants and their Dominican-born children are the gravest threat to his country, says Rodriguez. Thus he describes the new law as ‘non-racial.’
A study undertaken by the Human Rights institute at Georgetown University Law Centre in the United States has found that children of Haitian nationals born in the Dominican Republic are increasingly being barred from attending school in the Spanish–speaking Caribbean country. As outlined in this study, published in April 2014, this unequal education causes an unequal distribution of jobs, which means most people of Haitian descent work in low budget jobs.
Even though Santo Marrero has accepted a Dominican name, his outward appearance marks him as Haitian. His skin is darker than the Dominicans and he is taller than average. He is happy to work at the Beach Bar in Bavaro to send some money home to his deported family. He quickly runs across the burning sand to collect used towels and empty cans and glasses, while his Dominican colleagues rest in the shade. “I am used to not being fully accepted in this country, but it’s sad. Very sad,” he says silently, and throws a dirty cocktail glass into a garbage bag.
Most Haitians do the bottom-most jobs in the Dominican Republic, which is also because they hardly have access to education. According to the United Nations, only half of the Haitians are able to read and write, compared to 90 percent of the Dominicans. Moreover, the infant mortality in Haiti is almost three times higher than in the Dominican Republic. Another factor that hits Haiti harder than its neighbour country is climate change. Hurricanes and earthquakes aggravate life in Haiti, and “Haiti never recovered from this disastrous earthquake in 2010,” says Santo Marrero.
To escape the miserable living conditions in the undeveloped country, many Haitians try to enter Dominican Republic illegally. Even though they are being discriminated against and deported, they have no other chance to feed their children. The discrimination of Haitians has been existent for centuries. But at this point the international society no longer turns a blind eye.
The heat is on: reactions by international society
Most of the four million tourists visiting the luxurious all-inclusive resorts at the Dominican coast every year do not know about the conflict between the two countries. But other Caribbean countries, whose mostly black populations see Haitian-descended Dominicans as victims of racism, are concerned.
As Amnesty International reports, Caricom, a club of countries that the Dominican Republic has tried to join since 2005, suspended its membership application due to the discrimination against Haitians. Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, demanded that it be ejected from Cariforum, which represents the region in talks with the European Union. The same counts for Petrocaribe, Venezuela’s subsidised-oil programme.
According to a recent coverage by Associated Press, UN resident commissioner Lorenzo Jimenez told reporters in the Dominican Republic that the court decision "greatly concerns" the United Nations. In a speech, Haitian president Michel Martelly complained of “civil genocide.” That prompted Dominican officials to cancel a meeting with their Haitian counterparts to discuss the issue.
Peter Flegel is the former Special Advisor to the 27th Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of Canada. He is an ardent advocate for human emancipation and social justice and argues against the new law. According to Flegel, “the regional human rights body revealed that since at least 1939, Dominican law has defined people in transit as foreigners entering the country principally to travel elsewhere, as tourists, as members of foreign forces, or as temporary workers and their families. Based on that very definition, the Inter-American Court reasoned that Dominican-born people of Haitian descent, and those Haitians who have resided in the country for several years, cannot be considered ‘in transit’.”
Successful revolts: Juliana Dequis Pierre, the face of Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic
The court’s decision affects 30-year-old Juliana Dequis Pierre directly. The young mother was born in the Dominican Republic as the daughter of Haitian guest workers, who immigrated legally to work on the sugar cane fields. Due to their official working passport she was registered with Dominican citizenship. When she wanted to extend her passport, authorities took away her documents and birth certificate. Now she is stateless, she cannot travel, nor work. She cannot even prove she is the mother of her little daughter, Nairobi.
In an Interview in April 2014 she told the Weltspiegel about her situation. “They told me I was no Dominican, because my parents are foreigners. But that does not mean that I am a foreigner, I don’t know anything else, I feel Dominican. I had a birth certificate, I was born here.” Juliana Dequis Pierre is the first Dominican of Haitian parentage who went to court in the Dominican Republic to fight for her right of citizenship.
Her brave legal action became the face of the discrimination of Haitians and their descendants. In addition to the pressure by UN and US officials this led to a new debate about the law. According to the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, on May 21, 2014, the country’s senate “gave final legislative approval to a bill that will set up a system for granting naturalized citizenship and permanent residency to people of Haitian parentage born in this Caribbean country.”
The law must now be officially published by Dominican President Danilo Medina, as the Haitian Institute further outlined on May 22, 2014. Under the new legislation, people without the proper documents but who are able to prove they were born in the Dominican Republic will have a window of 90 days to register for regular immigration status. They can then apply for full citizenship after two years of residency.
Juliana Deguis Pierre is still suspicious and said in an official interview that she hopes the measure achieves what it promises. Critics of Medina's bill have noted that many people do not possess those documents or have had them seized by government officials. For Santo Marrero this positive development in the immigration policy is good news, but he already gave up his name and family and this cannot be revoked. Photo by Alex Proimos via Wikicommons
