Boston - July 1, 2015 - On the steps of the Massachusetts State House, State Senator Linda Dorcena Forry opened the media conference 'speak out' by protesting sharply the mass round up of people of Haitian background in Dominican Republic in 'police state' style raids targetting people who simply look like black Haitians.
Forry said to the assembled crowd on the State House steps, “I stand here today with our allies, calling on the government of the Dominican Republic to end the humanitarian crisis which it has created. The prospect of large-volume deportations is troubling, especially given the historic mistreatment of fellow Dominicans of Haitian ancestry. In addition to disrupting the lives of hundreds of thousands of hardworking people in the Dominican Republic, it is also creating hardship for many more in Haiti, which is not well equipped to handle the influx of refugees along its borders." Forry called on people to boycott vacation travel to the Dominican Republic as a way to put economic pressure on the government. Also standing on the steps and adding their voices of support for victimized Haitians and Dominicans were State Representative Dan Cullinane and State Representative Russell Holmes, former State Representative Marie St. Fleur.
United States Congressman Michael Capuano said, "Mass Deportations are wrong!" The congressman said Washington officials were putting some pressure on the Dominican government, but more must be done. “If things don’t get better, there are other levers that I’ll be calling on to deal with the Dominican Government. We aren’t there yet, my hope is that they hear the pleas of reasonable people, and that we don’t have to get into a fight, because the DR is also a place we have been proud to call our friend and our cooperating country,” said Capuano. “This particular action is wrong, it needs to be stopped, and my hope is that the government of the Dominican Republic comes to their senses.”
Mayor Walsh sent a representative: “The City of Boston does not support the Dominican government actions that are resulting in statelessness, deportation, and departure of Dominicans of Haitian descent,” said Alejandra St. Guillen reading from a statement. She joined Representative Forry in calling for a boycott of Dominican vacation travel.
The Dominican descent Cambridge City Councillor Dennis Bensan spoke in opposition to the Dominican government policies and pointed to historic examples of friendship among all the people of the island. “In the Dominican Republic, we have fought hard for democratic institutions, but the political nonsense that took place during the denationalization of the Haitian people is not democratic. I believe, and the Dominican people believe in strong, democratic institutions with strong values, strong ideals. But under those ideals, denationalization should not happen,” said Benson. Councilor Benso did not support a boycott yet, hoping pressure now could reverse the short sighted policy that will hurt the Dominican Republic. “The ones who would be most affected by a boycott are the hardworking poor people of the DR. We have to be in conversation with everyone, including government officials, the State Department, our congressmen and women, so that we can figure out what is going to be in the best benefit for both the Dominican people and the Haitian people,” said Benson. “We don’t want to execute the prisoner, without finishing the case,” he added.
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Background
June 17, 2j015 was the deadline for registration under the Dominican Republic’s Program of Identification and Documentation of Immigrants from Haiti (PIDIH) and the National Program of Regularization of Foreigners (PNRE, according to its Spanish acronym). These two programs were set up to implement the September 2013 Dominican Constitutional Tribunal sentence (TC168-13) and subsequent Law No. 169-14 that decreed that any person born in the Dominican Republic whose parents, grandparents, great-grandparents or earlier progenitors migrated to the country without immigration documents since 1929 be stripped of their citizenship. In practice, this racist legal battery applies exclusively to Dominicans of Haitian descent.
In contravention of norms throughout the Americas providing the right of citizenship to all those born in the country (jus soli), the Dominican Republic joins with Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship in basing it on “blood law” (jus sanguinis), excluding the children of “foreigners.” And it joins Hitler’s Third Reich, whose infamous Nuremberg Laws canceled the citizenship of Jews, in excluding a particular group. These Nazi-like laws and decrees “denationalize” upwards of half a million Dominicans in addition to persecuting another half million immigrants born in Haiti who are a key component of the workforce. Any defender of democratic rights must demand the immediate abrogation of the Dominican Republic’s racist nationality law.
Under these grotesque laws and decrees, any “foreigner” without the required papers will be subject to immediate deportation. There should be no doubt that the Dominican government is preparing for mass deportations, on an industrial scale. Already it has requisitioned a fleet of buses sufficient to deport 2,000 people a day. A formal agreement has been signed with the Dominican Army to carry this out, and detention facilities have been set up along to border.
The general who heads the immigration department announced that “beginning Thursday” (June 18) teams including soldiers “will comb urban areas with large numbers of immigrants to detain and deport those who have not registered” (El Nacional, 16 June). Agents have been “trained to pick up in the street those who, by their appearance, could be foreigners without residence permits.” El Nacional adds that while 250,000 people have registered to legalize their status, only a few hundred have received a temporary residency permit, and “many of the immigrants, especially those who have lived in the Dominican Republic for decades, have no identity papers at all” and thus cannot register.1
Dominican authorities have carried out mass expulsions in the past. In 1999, tens of thousands were deported to Haiti in just two weeks. Buses cruised the streets of the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo snatching anyone who “looked Haitian,” including hundreds of dark-skinned Dominicans. Although Dominican authorities claim that deportations have been suspended for the last year, they have soared at the main border crossing point in the north, reaching 6,700 in the first four months of this year, triple the rate of 2014. So far, some 53,000 Dominicans have had their citizenship canceled, and while this was later supposedly reversed, they have not received identity cards and thus could be picked up and expelled.
Meanwhile, as always when the Dominican authorities step up anti-Haitian repression, this has been accompanied by an escalation of anti-Haitian bigotry and gruesome attacks, lynchings and pogroms. On February 10, a Haitian man, Henry Claude Jean (known as “Tulile”), 35, a shoe shine worker, was found hanging from a tree in Santiago Park. The day before, a machete-wielding band of masked Dominican nationalists gathered in Santiago to trample on and burn a Haitian flag while calling for mass deportations. Videos have circulated on the Internet of a mob attack on April 8 in the city of Moca that drove out 300 Haitians. Images show young men beating women, breaking into homes and smashing everything in sight with the complicity of the National Police.