Fishermen from Pedernales and Anse a Pitre working together to improve fishing in their area.

As part of its MIF/OAS funded program, PADF hired Dr. Gerald Murray to conduct a study of the sources of conflict along the Haitian-Dominican border. This work was done in parallel with Dr. Murray’s study of mutual perceptions and attitudes that exist between Dominicans and Haitians. Although the bulk of the fieldwork was done in 2009, Dr. Murray returned to the island after the earthquake and updated the report based on the changed conditions that he found. Though nobody yet knows what is in store post-earthquake, Haiti will never be a replica of the country before the earthquake. The earthquake also exerts a profound impact, somewhat more predictable, on the economy and demography of the Dominican Republic as well. These impacts are already being sensed, though they cannot yet be fully charted.

Not only popular media accounts, but also several academic treatments, depict a situation of ancient deeply-rooted hostility between the two nations, buttressed by racial antipathies, usually attributed by journalists and academics to Dominicans. To anticipate the conclusions, which will be dealt with in another report, this vision of deep rooted binational antipathies is a distorted and ideologically driven caricature of the complex relations, many of them tense, many of them humanly warm, that actually occur in daily life. During the six weeks of fieldwork all along both sides of the border, he found that the racial interpretative template that is routinely imposed on the question of Haitian-Dominican relationships – Dominicans hate Haitians for racial reasons—to be very inaccurate. The tensions and problems that do exist have nothing to do with skin color or hair type. The relationship between the two populations on different sides of the border, and between Dominicans and Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, is strong enough to permit cordial and collegial interactions in serious development activities. The image of two hostile populations who cannot interact with each other is a media-generated stereotype based on shoddy information and lack of prolonged contact with real life interactions that occur on the border.

The report focuses on one particular dimension of issues that has affected the past, and will affect the future, of the development of Haiti: the relations between Haitians and Dominicans on the border area. In that regard the report has several modest, analytically focused objectives:

PADF commissioned Dr. Gerald Murray to investigate mutual perceptions and attitudes that exist between Dominicans and Haitians, with a particular focus on the border area. The context for the assignment was the concern among development professionals, created not only by negative media coverage, but also various human rights reports and academic studies, that a situation of such conflict exists between Haitians and Dominicans in the border area that bilateral collaboration will be difficult. A companion report to the current one deals with the specific conflicts. This report will deal with the opinions that Dominicans and Haitians expressed about each other during six weeks of interviewing in the months.

The first part of the report deals heavily with the topic of race. A comparison and contrast is given of Dominican and Haitian racial classification systems. The guiding conclusion is that there is more concern with racial differences in the Dominican Republic than in Haiti, but that these strictly racial concerns (which affect black Dominicans as well) are not a major driving force in the perceptions and sentiments which Dominicans have of Haitians.

The next two parts of the report deal with Dominican perceptions of Haitians and then with Haitian perceptions of Dominicans. In each of these sections I report on what members of each group had to say about the other group. A major pattern emerged by which Dominicans in general are much more aware of and concerned about Haitians than vice versa. Except for the Haitian migrant sector for Haitians living along the border and participating in cross-border market activities, most Haitians may never see a Dominican. Because of the Haitian presence in the Dominican Republic, however, virtually every Dominican sees Haitians, usually engaged in lower status economic activities. Dominican generalizations about Haitians are consequently much more abundant than Haitian generalizations about Dominicans. Quite tellingly, however, the comments made by Haitians actually living in the Dominican Republic, who are receiving free medical care at Dominican facilities, and whose undocumented children are nonetheless attending Dominican schools for free, tend to be more balanced than the statements made by Haitians in Haiti, who may have never heard a Dominican, but whose highly negative opinions of Dominicans are shaped by radio reports which intentionally try to dissuade Haitians from going to the Dominican Republic by depicting life there as a long string of unmitigated abuses against Haitians by Dominicans.

The final section of the report deals with the currently delicate question of the refusal of the Dominican government to grant citizenship rights to individuals with Haitian parentage. A particularly difficult case is that of the arrayanos, children with a Dominican father and a Haitian mother, raised totally bilingual by both parents, who are generally denied citizenship. If the mother is Dominican and the father Haitian, the child is given a Dominican birth certificate. If the mother is Haitian, however, the child remains stateless under current practice, unless the Dominican father recruits a Dominican female relative or friend to declare herself to be the mother of the child.

The report (pdf) is available free of charge and can be downloaded by clicking on the link below:

This report has also been translated into Spanish and will soon be in French.

Sebastián Molano

Ms. Yadira Soto, advisor  to the office of the Assistant Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), and expert on conflict resolution visited the border area -her second visit, during a mission on the Haitian-Dominican border. During her visit, she visit different areas (Pedernales-Anse a Pitres), discuss with producer groups of the area, and asses the current situation of conflict.

As a result, she offers us this report , where she states different sources of conflict, assessment of the work done by PADF in the area, and formulate a series of recommendations in a technical level that could be useful for future interventions in the region.

This mission was possible due to the support of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the OAS and PADF.

www.PanAmericanRelief.org

“This is a critical time for Haiti and our neighbors need our help,” says Amy Coughenour, Deputy Executive Director of PADF.  “PADF will be working with civil protection authorities, the private sector and community organizations to provide immediate and long-term assistance.”

PADF – the natural disaster relief arm of the Organization of American States (OAS) – set up the safe and secure www.PanAmericanRelief.org so individuals may find out information and make donations.