In this
case, yes. Because the supreme court of the Dominican Republic
has just directed
the authorities to examine birth certificates all the way back to 1929—and I
seriously want to know how they chose that year—in order to find out who
is of Haitian descent. Why?
Because children born in the Dominican Republic of Haitian parents will no
longer be considered citizens.
Both
Dominican Republic and Haiti share the same island—Hispaniola—but it sort of
stops there. There’s the language difference—the Haitians speak Creole, Dominicans speak
Spanish. There’s the cultural difference—the Haitians had the only successful
slave revolt in the
Western Hemisphere, and are proud of their black heritage. The Dominicans?
Time to
confess—I had thought they roughly followed our own history: Spanish up until
the time of the Spanish-American
War, and then independent. But no—they have a history that very much
defines the animosity between them. Because seven years after the slave revolt
of 1801, a group of people from Dominican Republic attempted
to take over Haiti for the Spanish. In fact, the tables turned, and it was
Haiti who, in 1822, took
over the entire island. And when the Dominican Republic finally achieved independence
in 1844, it was from Haiti, not Spain.
Then came
the massacre.
Haitians had been crossing the border for years, and worked in the sugar cane
fields—which is a job you don’t want to have: it’s blazingly hot, and cane has
spines that can cause serious injury. So the Dominicans had been happy to have
someone else do the work. So what was the problem? For mostly political
reasons, a scapegoat had to be found. And the Haitians, it was said, were
taking jobs.
Sound
familiar?
Right—so Rafael Trujillo, the
dictator of Dominican Republic, decided in 1937 to send the boys over to the
border and ask every dark skinned guy to say the word perejil (parsley). Easy for Spanish speakers—not
so easy for Creole tongues. And the price for a badly spoken r? Well, the boys had machetes. Was it
10,000 or 25,000? We’ll never know.
The whole
question of race is super charged in the Dominican Republic, so much so that
Trujillo used to wear white makeup. And as a student once told me, to be rich
and white in Santo Domingo is to live with absolute freedom to do as you like.
Yes, you can get away with murder.
Or get away
with denying about 200,000 people citizenship, which is what the supreme court
decided to do. And that’s no mean thing—well, mean in the sense of small—because without citizenship, kids can’t
go to school, people can’t work. So what’s the alternative? Go to Haiti, where
they don’t speak the language, and where there’s no work?
I once
argued that I believed in cities but not nations. Why? Well, consider this
comment from an article
in The Guardian:
“I am
Anglo-American and my wife is Haitian. We have a daughter of five whose
biological father was Haitian (died in earthquake in 2010), but whose
registered father is a Dominican of Haitian descent. She has a Dominican
passport, though whether she will now lose it, I don't know. I don't think the
DR government is efficient enough to investigate everyone of Haitian descent to
revoke their citizenship, carry out DNA testing, etc.
Our
younger daughter was born in the DR and thus became a stateless person at
birth. I was able to get a UK birth certificate for her and perhaps one day she
will come to the UK. Thus I have a family in which four different nationalities
are represented: Myself British and US, my wife Haitian, my daughter British,
and my stepdaughter Dominican.”
Well, I
hope that daughter manages to stay in the Dominican Republic, because if she
gets sent to Haiti? According to one source,
she has a 10% chance of becoming a slave.
The
Caribbean is a strange region—an archipelago of islands very close and yet very
far from each other. We typically know little of each other and care less. But
here’s what P J Patterson,
former Prime Minister of Jamaica, said:
No one can be
hoodwinked as to the reason and the purpose for this kind of discriminatory
legislation. Within the region we have an obligation to speak and we cannot
allow such inequities to go without our strongest condemnations.”
Sadly, our “strongest
condemnations” may not be enough….
