Exhibit Reveals a Bitter Harvest

HAITI/DOMINICAN REPUBLIC:

Exhibit Reveals a Bitter Harvest

By Michael Deibert

Inter-Press Service

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36905


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.

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