When Haiti was devastated by the 2010 earthquake, T&T responded with financial, material and human aid. Disregarding the $750,000 Fifa donated, which was deposited in a local Concacaf account only to disappear (Haiti has to date only received $60,000), T&T joined the wider Caribbean community in the effort first to clean up and then rebuild and stabilise the region’s first independent black nation.
Religious and community groups augmented government contributions, several hundred Haitian tertiary students, unable to complete their studies at home, were accommodated at UWI and the sweet cadences of Haitian Kreyol can still occasionally be heard on the streets of T&T.
But amid the gathering crescendo of bacchanal and badtalk which passes as our pre-election fanfare, the latest disaster facing Haiti and its unwilling neighbour the Dominican Republic, who have shared Hispaniola in a tense and often violent relationship for the past couple of hundred years, has been unfolding with commentaries from America and Europe but a blanket of silence in T&T, only broken by an editorial in this newspaper, last weekend.
In our ten-day culture, where local scandals and disasters get buried under the constant roll of the incoming tide, this obliviousness is normal—is dem tuh ketch—but as celebrated Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat remarked during a recent panel discussion about the deportations of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent from the DR, “If you’re not concerned, you should be,” a sentiment echoed by the equally celebrated Dominican writer Junot Diaz.
A 2013 ruling of the DR’s Constitutional Court retroactively stripped citizenship from anyone born in the DR since 1929, who did not have one Dominican parent. All migrant workers (of which Haitians make up 85 per cent and number upwards of 500,000) and their descendants (previously recognised as citizens by birth) were required to declare themselves “foreigners” who were to be classified as “in transit” and apply first for residency and then for citizenship.
The February 1 deadline for registering came and went with very few applications, to be followed by another deadline—June 17, for undocumented “immigrants” to adjust their status. Already more than 14,000 have crossed the Haiti/DR border, although an estimated 290,000 have applied for registration, so far only 300 have successfully completed the process.
While DR Foreign Minister Andres Navarro guaranteed there would be no mass deportations, army General Ruben Dario Paulino, spearheading Operation Shield has announced that the military and the Immigration Department will launch neighborhood patrols searching for those without documents. Enforced deportations, including dark-skinned Dominicans mistaken for Haitians, have already occurred.
So far 40,000 have been refused identity cards, which makes it impossible to access healthcare or education. That still leaves anything between 100,000 and 400,000 at risk of becoming stateless, of being deported to a country whose language they do not speak, a country many have never visited although their grandparents and great grandparents may have migrated from there in the now long distant past.
This is not simply a statistical problem, or one of demographics. Haiti faces yet another potential humanitarian crisis. It has not recuperated from the earthquake, much of the aid sent never reached those who needed it most desperately, its infrastructure is still in tatters and faced with its own upcoming general election, an already fragile state is ill-equipped to handle a massive influx of what will basically be refugees.
That is the situation west of the Massacre River, where at least 20,000 Haitians were slaughtered in the infamous El Corte (The Cutting) ethnic cleansing, ordered by the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo back in 1937. The situation in Hispaniola today recalls this earlier stain on human rights and cannot be divorced from the racial tensions and the racism which have characterised relations between these neighbours since the early nineteenth century.
The partitioning of Hispaniola during colonialism resulted in the western third being ceded to France and the balance to Spain. During the Haitian war of Independence, Toussaint defeated first the French and then the Spanish and until 1844 Hispaniola was nominally Haiti, at which point the Dominican Republic was established. With its Spanish heritage the DR like many Hispanic territories in the New World has opted to “whiten the race” encouraging European immigration.
This “blancismo” mindset has determined antagonistic relations with its doubly reviled black/African neighbor, although in labour terms the majority of migrant workers drafted in for sugarcane harvests have been impoverished Haitians.
Many Haitians remained in the bateys of the DR from the 19th century onwards. Their Dominican-born descendants are now faced with the prospect of becoming zombies-non-people. Many have been unable to access the required registration process, many don’t have the necessary birth certificate to initiate it. But even for those 290,000 who have registered, the deadline has passed and Operation Shield is already in progress.
The reality is that thousands who have no real connection to Haiti, and who can’t speak Kreyol, will soon be without status in what for them is a strange country, which is also entirely unequipped to deal with them. But then—is dem tuh ketch ent?