CSMS Magazine
Just when we thought we had this ugly past behind us, los blancos de la mierda in the Dominican Republic want to remind us they are still here. Who could have believed after 76 years of the Parsley Massacre, when Dominican President Rafael Leonidas Trujillo ordered the killings of thousands of Haitians—a crime that still remains unpunished—that DR officials could be so shameless, so heartless towards their most vulnerable citizens?
On September 23rd, 2013, the Dominican Supreme Court issued an ordinance to strip an estimated 600,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent of their citizenships. The practice of systematically denying Haitian children of basic human rights in the DR is nothing new, especially to those who were born in the bateys—dehumanized farming communities where Haitians are treated like modern-day slaves.
The ruling stipulates that anyone born after 1929 must have his citizenship revoked. That decision affected more than half a million Dominicans of Haitian decent, including other ethnic groups. The latter clause regarding “other ethnic groups” is just to camouflage the grotesque form of the ruling, which is directed solely at Haitians, not at some other obscure ethnic groups.
Countless human rights organizations across the world have worked in the past with Dominican lawyers to reverse this ugly trend. It never produces any positive result, for marginalizing Haitians is a policy designed to forever keep all Haitiano-Dominicans in the fringe of society. Children can only earn an elementary level of education. They are not allowed to attend Higher-Ed, for they are not recognized as duly citizens. Therefore, they are ineligible for government grants to pay for college tuitions. They have become children from the no-man’s land. Not Haitians, not Dominicans, they are doomed to enter the dark hole of society.
Drawn from their shared history, the Dominican elite have built their nationalism on a perverted form of anti-Haitianism as a vivid and constant reminder to their citizens that Haitians are dirt worms that one must smash with his bootstrap. To many from the Dominican upper-class, Haitians are untrustworthy, good to nothing, and a nuisance to the Dominican Hispanic heritage.
The September 23rd decision set the tone for a dangerous precedence. It must be rescinded immediately to avert another ethnic cleansing against people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. It is a gross violation of the Geneva Convention of which the Dominican Republic is a signatory.
It is “an unashamed infringement of all international engagements of the Dominican Republic in violating the human rights and dignity of its population…….It sets the condition for an eventual ethnic cleansing on the island of Hispaniola,” states HDCHR (Haitian Diaspora for Civic and Human Rights.) In CSMS Magazine, we are asking the world to take a stand against this latest xenophobic move against our Haitians brothers in the RD. Tomorrow, thousands of Haitians and Dominicans stand ready to march on the Dominican Consulate located at 1501 Broadway, NY. NY 10036
Trujillo did it in 1937! We must stop it from happening again in 2013!
NO to Civic Genocide!!!
YES to Human Rights!!!
