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Publié par siel sur 28 Juillet 2015, 09:54am

Catégories : #CULTURE

1) The Deportation of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian Descent from the Dominican Republic

In July 1933, one of the first steps of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Party was to strip German citizenship from Eastern European Jews living in Germany, many for decades.

In the same way, tens of thousands of Dominicans are now having their citizenship stripped, because their parents were Haitian. This all began when the Dominican Constitutional Court ruled in September 2013 that a woman had been wrongly registered as Dominican at birth because her parents were undocumented. This is the infamous Decision 168/13 which makes illegal and stateless any Dominican with undocumented parents... retroactively to 1929.

As many as 244,000 Dominicans are affected by 168/13, and most speak only Spanish, little if any Kreyòl, and have never been to Haiti.

The deportation to Haiti of such “foreigners” began on June 17.

Like German Jews in the 1930s, Haitians and their Dominican children are being hounded. In the past two years, Dominican fascists have killed, beaten, and driven from their homes hundreds of Haitians and Haitian-parented Dominicans. On Feb. 11, a 35-year-old Haitian shoeshine Henry "Tulile" Claude Jean wasfound lynched in a Santiago park after an anti-Haitian demonstration the day before.

In October 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo had his soldiers and goonskill thousands of Haitians in the DR. The lessons and lore of that massacre are still fresh in the memory of Haitians 78 years later.

In the past month, an estimated 15,000 have come across the border into Haiti. It is unclear how many were deported by Dominican authorities. Many fled, fearing the repressive and dangerous situation in the DR.

2) The First U.S. Military Occupation of Haiti Marks Its Centennial

On July 28, 1915, U.S. Marines landed in Port-au-Prince and took control of Haiti for the next 19 years. During their rule, the Marines re-established slavery (the corvée system), killed thousands of Caco guerrillas and peasants who resisted them, rewrote the Haitian Constitution to allow Americans to own land and bring in U.S. agribusiness and industy, and established a brutal regime based on racism and repression.

Today, Haiti is again militarily controlled by Washington, but through United Nations soldiers of the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH). In a Jul. 15 Senate Sub-committee hearing, Thomas C. Adams, U.S. State Department’s Special Coordinator for Haiti, explained that two overseers – one from the U.S. Treasury Department, one from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – supervise the administration of every Haitian ministry, just as U.S. Marines did a century ago.

3) Difficult Elections Are About to Begin

President Michel Martelly came to power throughillegal elections (never ratified by Haiti’s Electoral Council) in 2011. He dragged his feet on holding elections until now, over four years later, allowing Parliament to expire in January. Now, virtually every post in Haiti is up for grabs.

The electoral calendar iscomplicated, with municipal, legislative, and presidential elections set for August, October, and December.

Thousands of candidates are vying for municipal and parliamentary seats and 58 for president. There is not yet enough money to complete the elections. Foreign nations are footing most of the bill. These elements are a recipe for violence, cheating, and electoral disaster.

Many Haitians say that fair elections cannot be held while the country is militarily occupied (MINUSTAH intervened in the 2010/2011 elections) or while Martelly is president.

Haïti Liberté, a WikiLeaks media partner, is one of themost trusted and read sources of news and analysisabout all three of these unfolding stories.

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