dominican republic iss wan aff da moas racist country inn da wurld ann oww dem treatinn da haitian deserve ann international reprimand
agree with you here.. Sanctions and a boycott of all things DR would be in order. The least we can do from this end is, petition their embassies and avoid use of their products and services
If you don't fight for what you deserve, you deserve what you get.
We are > Fossil Fuels --- Bill McKibben 350.org
For starters, this would involve a boycott of sugar and all products that contain sugar from the Dominican Republic. Are people willing to pay the price?
The sugar sector was the backbone of the national economy until a few decades ago. In the late 1970s, the sugar sector occupied 12% of all the country’s farmland, provided 49% of its export income, 75% of export taxes and 20% of the government’s fiscal revenue, and accounted for 85% of its GNP.
The country’s sugar cane plantations now comprise more than 1.6 million acres, with annual production of over 500 thousand metric tons of sugar, more than 30 million gal-lons of molasses and over 30 thousand metric tons of furfural (a sugar byproduct used in petrochemical refining and solid resin production).
A boycott may create more hardship for the sugar workers with the rich unscathed.
The Dominican sugar industry currently generates 30,000 jobs a year and distributes approximately US$100 million a year in salaries; including some US$14 million invested in corporate social responsibility. The industry also generates foreign currency amounting to US$120 million from exports of sugar, molasses and furfural, plus over US$243 from domestic sales of sugar and molasses, contributing some US$62 million a year in government taxes.
César Heredia, the President of UNAZUCAR, is a Black man. The sugar industry is one of the main industries keeping the Haitians under conditions that are just a notch above indentured servitude.
These are pathetic and self-loathing Black people discriminating against other Black people on the basis of ethnicity not race.
The are prejudiced and engaging in behaviour that is highly discriminatory.
tropi dominicans doan cansidar demselves as blakk peeps but dem cansidar da haitians as blakk peeps. so inn dat way da discrimination iss dunn pon da basis aff race
Caribbean trade bloc leaders are preparing to meet at an emergency session in the coming days to review a late September ruling by a court in the Dominican Republic outlawing citizenship to more than 200,000 of its citizens because of their dark skin and also because they have ancestral links to friends and family in neighboring Haiti, which the DR traditionally disdains.
The ruling takes away citizenship for anybody born in the DR with Haitian blood or ancestry after 1929, leaving them stateless although all of them were born nowhere else but in the DR and hold automatic citizenship rights to no other country than their place of nativity.
Angered by the move and the fact that the DR has applied to join the 15-nation Caribbean Community while its court renders hundreds of thousands of people linked to Haiti as stateless, a growing number of prominent citizens including Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent have called on CARICOM to act, even expel the DR from any forum with which it has formal contact.
Haiti incidentally is a full CARICOM member nation and could very well sway other nations to deny the DR’s application to join the REGIONL grouping of nations if it so desires.
The meeting of the regional CARICOM Bureau currently comprising Michel Martelly of Haiti, Gonsalves and current chairperson, Kamla Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad, should have been held this week but was pushed back to a later date. Officials in Trinidad blamed schedule clashes for the postponement but plans are advanced for it to be held in the coming days.
The Bureau oversees affairs of CARICOM in between summits.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Gonsalves, regional diplomats, the Caribbean Council of Churches (CCC) and a plethora of civil society organizations are mounting relentless pressure on leaders to act.
In fact, Gonsalves and others say they are so incensed by what they call an openly racist ruling against citizens because of their links to Haiti, that they are ready to take extreme measures against the DR to reverse the ruling or to put the Spanish-speaking island on the permanent isolation list.
As an indication of the level of indignation, Gonsalves has written President Nicholas Maudro of Venezuela urging him to scrub the DR from the list of countries benefitting from the 2005 Petro Caribe Initiative, forcing DR officials to beat a hasty retreat to Caracas to lobby against any possible punishment.
Additionally, the DR sits with other CARICOM nations in a grouping called CariForum, established specifically to govern trade and other relations with Europe. Many, including the Churches’ umbrella group, have called for it to be expelled from the Forum but how this will be achieved remains unclear.
Throwing in its proverbial “three cents” on the issue as well is the Caribbean Civil Society organizations (CSO), which said this week that “We are of the view that statelessness is a violation of Clause 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights embraced by the international community of states,” the CSOs said, adding: ”We condemn this act as immoral, unjust and totally unacceptable in a modern, civilized society and express grave concern for the welfare of all those persons that this decision has impacted.”
Respected regional academic, Prof. Norman Girvan of the University of the West Indies said he was very disappointed by the decision not to convene the meeting. “This is a matter of extreme urgency and I hope that they can get their act together and convene a meeting as soon as possible.”
Gerard Granado, general secretary of the CCC, said the region must act fast and decisively.
“Haitians are brought into the Dominican Republic to labor on the sugar cane plantations. They are kept in barracks under horrible slave-like conditions. When you go there you see animals and human beings drinking from the same water trough and then suddenly one night, a vehicle might pass and pick up all the Haitians and take them back to the border. Women losing their husbands, children losing their parents and they don’t know what happened to them. Churches and other groups in the Dominican Republic are standing firmly against this,” Granado noted, as pressure mounts on governments to deal with the issue.
Caribbean trade bloc leaders are preparing to meet in emergency session in the coming days to review a late September ruling by a court in the Dominican Republic outlawing citizenship to more than 200,000 of its citizens because of their dark skin and also because they have ancestral links to friends and family in neighboring Haiti, which the DR traditionally disdains.
tropi dominicans doan cansidar demselves as blakk peeps but dem cansidar da haitians as blakk peeps. so inn dat way da discrimination iss dunn pon da basis aff race
yes they do discriminate based on race.. and love to remove the african from themselves.. It is said the dominican hairdresser is the master of taking the african out of your hair
If you don't fight for what you deserve, you deserve what you get.
We are > Fossil Fuels --- Bill McKibben 350.org
tropi dominicans doan cansidar demselves as blakk peeps but dem cansidar da haitians as blakk peeps. so inn dat way da discrimination iss dunn pon da basis aff race
Doesn't matter what they consider themselves to be. The facts are the fact. Haitian is an ethnicity not a race any more than Jamaican is a race.
The IACHR is a principal and autonomous organ of the Organization of American States (OAS) whose mission is to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere. It is composed of seven independent members who serve in a personal capacity. Created by the OAS in 1959, the Commission has its headquarters in Washington, D.C. Together with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ("e;the Court" or "the I/A Court H.R."), installed in 1979, the Commission is one of the institutions within the inter-American system for the protection of human rights ("IAHRS").
It is interesting that the Dominican Republic is one the most economically prosperous countries in the Caribbean and Latin America.
That tells me they have the blessing of Uncle Sam.
Some have rebuked Caribbean governments for not coming down hard enough on the Dominican Republic for taking away citizenship of persons born in the country with Haitian blood, but the truth about the relatively mild rebuke might lie in the fact that no one might be too anxious to interfere with the robust trade in goods between the DR and the Caribbean Community in recent years.
Early last week, the prime ministers of Trinidad, St. Vincent and the president of Haiti met in emergency session in Port of Spain to discuss a recent court ruling in the Dominican Republic that basically stated that people of Haitian ancestry who were born on its soil after 1929 could no longer be considered as citizens and must prepare to leave the country in the coming months or go through a humiliating process to prove actual connection to DR society.
The three heads of government were at the special meeting of the CARICOM Bureau of prime ministers, which runs the affairs of the region in-between the two yearly summits. Kamla Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad is the current chairperson.
At the end of their meeting, the leaders decided to suspend any consideration of an application by the administration of President Danilo Medina to allow the DR to become a full member of CARICOM, just as Haiti did back in 2002. Haiti has traditionally protected against racist policies perpetrated against its darker skinned citizens at the hands of its neighbor. The two share the island of Hispaniola. They also said they would review working relations at a host of international forums including the OAS.
But statistics seen by this newspaper in recent days show since the two sides signed off on a free trade deal in 1998, exports from the region to the DR have moved from $73.1M in 2002 to $261M in 2011 the last year for which statistics are available.
On the other hand, businesses in Santo Domingo started to benefit from the trade deal in 2002 with a mere $26M in exports but this has since moved up to $153.1M in 2011.
Incidentally, the 2011 figure was the highest recorded so far for the DR while CARICOM’s 2008 export figure of $531.2M was the highest since the 1998 agreement actually came into force in 2001.
The figures clearly show that the two sides are of great value to each other despite a recent ruling by the DR’s highest court
“With respect to goods traded duty-free under the agreement for the period 2002-2011, CARICOM’s average annual exports to the Dominican Republic were US$176.9 million. CARICOM’s average annual imports from the Dominican Republic were US$64.6 million, with an average balance-of-payment surplus of US$112.3 million in favour of CARICOM,” the main document stated.
So far the agreement covers only trade in goods. The portion pertaining to the trade in services has not been enacted as yet, while the DR has been restricted from exporting duty-free products to smaller Eastern Caribbean islands which fear they would be swamped by imports. They are however allowed to export products tariff-free to the DR, the document showed.
Among the exporting nations, oil- and gas-rich Trinidad has dominated exports, selling liquefied gas, motor fuels, urea, baby napkins and other products, while the DR has concentrated on products like beer, milk, cream concentrate, animal vegetable fats and oils, cane- and beet-sugar, aerated water and cement, among others.
Some have rebuked Caribbean governments for not coming down hard enough on the Dominican Republic for taking away citizenship of persons born in the country
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