Exhibit
Reveals A Bitter Harvest
By Michael Deibert
16 March, 2007
Inter-Press
Service
PARIS, Mar 13, 2007 (IPS) - A month-long programme
in France this spring hopes to shine a spotlight on the working conditions
of Haitians labouring in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic,
a state of affairs which human rights groups have charged in recent
years is little better than slavery.
"Esclaves au Paradis:
L'esclavage contemporain en République Dominicaine" (Slaves
in Paradise: Contemporary Slavery in the Dominican Republic) will take
place this May under the sponsorship of a host of local and international
institutions, including Amnesty International, the office of Paris mayor
Bertrand Delanoe and the artistic group Collectif 2004 Images.
The event comes at a time
when the Dominican Republic is under growing criticism for its treatment
of the estimated one million Haitians living within its borders, as
well as Dominican citizens of Haitian descent. In addition to criticisms
of labour practices and working conditions, local and international
human rights groups have charged that the Dominican government has sought
to deprive such individuals of due process under Dominican and international
law, and conducted sweeps and expulsions of suspected illegals with
unnecessary brutality and means of questionable legality.
For its part, the Dominican
government has said that its country cannot handle the waves of immigrants
continually arriving within its borders from neighbouring Haiti, a country
that has been beset by decades of often-bloody political unrest and
economic stagnation.
In making its point, Esclaves
au Paradis will include among its offerings an exhibit of photos taken
in the bateys, as the camps where sugarcane workers are known, by the
French-Peruvian photographer Céline Anaya Gautier, as well as
screenings of films tackling the subject of the Dominican sugar industry
and the workers toiling away in it.
A historical colloquium including
such noted international and local commentators as Camille Chalmers
(director of Haiti's Plateforme haïtienne de Plaidoyer pour un
Développement Alternatif or PAPDA), the Groupe d'Appui aux Rapatries
et Refugies (GARR) director Colette Lespinasse, Amnesty International's
Geneviève Sevrin and Dominican anthropologist Soraya Aracena
will also be held.
"Wherever there are
people being exploited, who have no rights, it is important to speak
out when we have the opportunity," says Anne Lescot, the coordinator
of the cinema portion of the agenda. "We're very aware that this
question is subtle and complex and that only showing the pictures could
lead to some misunderstanding, so we also wanted to explain what's behind
the pictures, and that's why we organised this colloquium, as an occasion
to truly understand the whole process of how, for 200 years now, Haiti
and the Dominican Republic have been in a relationship of love and hate."
Haitian-Dominican relations
have often been tense because of economic and cultural differences between
the two countries, which share the island of Hispaniola. Although they
are close in population, with 8.1 million Haitians and nine million
Dominicans, Haiti is 95 percent black, and 80 percent of the population
lives in poverty. The Dominican population is 89 percent white or mixed,
with 25 percent impoverished.
In the fall of 1937, the
Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, motivated by factors that have never
been fully explained, instigated a pogrom in which Dominican soldiers
and police massacred 15,000 to 20,000 Haitians throughout the country.
At a recent press conference
announcing the Esclaves au Paradis colloquium at the Hôtel de
Ville in Paris, one of the subjects of a film to be screened seemed
to agree about the pressing need to inform the public about conditions
in the bateys.
"When I arrived (in
the Dominican Republic), I knew absolutely nothing about nationality
or race problems, about the sugarcane fields or the sugar industry,"
says Father Christopher Hartley, a Catholic priest and the main protagonist
of the film "The Price of Sugar".
Hartley, born of a Spanish
mother and a British father, arrived in the Dominican Republic parish
of San Jose de Los Lanos in September 1997 after spending a decade ministering
to congregations in the South Bronx and Soho areas of New York City.
The parish encompasses the Batey dos Hermanos sugar-growing territory
controlled by the wealthy Vicini family.
"I was absolutely ignorant
of everything I was going to confront, and I was not sent to try to
help or solve or denounce these issues, but just to be a regular parish
priest," Hartley says. "It was a gradual realisation of the
living and working conditions of my parishioners, going about my regular
pastoral duties, that made me aware."
Hartley was forced to leave
the Dominican Republic under what he says was pressure from the Dominican
government and the politically powerful Vicinis in late 2006. Another
priest who had advocated on behalf of Haitian workers in the country,
the Belgian Father Pedro Ruquoy, fled after death threats were leveled
against him in November 2005.
Hartley and Ruquoy have not
been alone in their critiques. Human rights groups say that the situation
in the Dominican Republic has grown more dire since the May 2005 expulsion
of an estimated 3,500 people at the border towns of Dajabon-Ounaminthe
along the northern frontier, an episode which resulted in a formal protest
to the Dominican government by the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees.
In a May 2006 open letter
to Dominian President Leonel Fernandez, Amnesty International Secretary
General Irene Khan wrote that "since May 2005 Haitian and Dominicans
of Haitian descent have been subjected to collective and arbitrary expulsions
by the Dominican authorities in violation of the Dominican Republic's
obligations under international standards including the American Convention
on Human Rights and the International Covenant of Civil and Political
Rights."
Amnesty's statement was echoed
in an October 2006 release by the British-based charity Christian Aid,
which wrote of Dominican deportation practices that "numerous cases
have been documented in which immigration officials have broken into
homes and forced people at gunpoint onto buses giving them no chance
to collect documents or inform relatives. When they reach the Haitian
side of the border, many have been able to prove that they were in the
Dominican Republic legally."
Previously, a September 2005
decision by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organisation
of American States (OAS) found that, in denying Dominican citizenship
to two girls, Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico Cofi, born within the territory
of the Dominican Republic, the Dominican state had violated the right
to nationality and the right to equality before the law, as well as
articles 3, 5, 19, 20 and 24 of the American Convention on Human Right
Pact of San Jose.
The Fernandez government
has repeatedly denied that any policy of human rights abuses exists
with regards to Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian-descent within the
country.
Recently, the Dominican Republic's
foreign minister, Carlos Morales Troncoso, bitterly lashed out at the
U.S.-based Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Centre for Human Rights for recognising
Dominican-Haitian activist Sonia Pierre for her work with Haitian migrants
in the country, saying that those bestowing the prize were "divorced
from the realities on the island of Hispaniola." Pierre, who grew
up in a migrant worker camp much like those depicted in the exhibition,
has fought on behalf of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian decent for
three decades.
As if to underline the importance
of the sugar industry in Dominican politics, Foreign Minister Morales
Troncoso himself has a long-standing relationship as an executive and
major shareholder of the Central Romana sugar concern, along with Cuban-American
sugar barons Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul.
Three-quarters of the Dominican
Republic's agricultural exports go to the United States, and the country
has a U.S. sugar quota of 180,000 tonnes, the largest of any U.S. trading
partner.
Michael Deibert
is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti
(Seven Stories Press). His blog of journalism and opinion can be read
at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.