HUFFPOST.Don't Mistake Montreal's Mayor For a Friend of Haïti. Par Nydia Dauphin

Publié par siel sur 4 Février 2014, 15:46pm

Catégories : #PEUPLE sans mémoire...

A whirlwind of debate was recently created by a Dominican Republic ruling which, once implemented, will put tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian Descent in a limbo of statelessness.

This decision by the Dominican Republic's Constitutional Court is seemingly pulled from the same book as the 1937 Parsley Massacre which was a government-sponsored genocide that claimed the lives of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. For important historical context, it is referred to as the Parsley Massacre because, without any way to visually tell Haitian-descendant Dominicans apart from non-Haitian descendant Dominicans, Dominican border guards would ask people to pronounce the word "perejil" (Spanish for "parsley"). Individuals who pronounced perejil with a Creole-sounding accent were murdered.

The significant damage this genocidal massacre caused to Haitian-Dominican relations still reverberates into the present and haunts this latest ruling by the Dominican Republic's Constitutional Court on the citizenship rights of Dominicans of Haitian descent.

The Constitutional Court's ruling has been met with much internal and external resistance. I'd like to focus on the external reaction, more precisely, the one carried out by the Haitian Diaspora.

Haitians from all corners of the globe denounced this unacceptable ruling in the form of organized campaigns to both inform the greater populations of this gross violation of human rights and to pressure the government of the DR to reverse it. In Montreal, a staged boycott campaign at the national airport garnered much international attention.

In light of these events, I couldn't help but think back to my first memory of participating in a Haitian diaspora-led political initiative to assert pressure from the outside.

It was in the early 90s. Haiti's first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide (A.K.A. "Titid"), had been deposed by a coup-d'état, less than a year after being elected. Like grass fire and to support Haitians protesting on the ground, diaspora mobilization took off in Montreal. My parents, like many others who had emigrated to Canada in the 60s and 70s, joined in, even though they had both been religiously apolitical for as long as I could remember. Adapting to the difficult realities of immigration to a foreign country and raising a family meant that being political was a luxury they simply couldn't afford. But this drastic shift in their sense of agency as it pertains to the coup was echoed throughout the diaspora. Myself and my two older siblings got front row seats to the action.

We sold chocolates (ok, ate a lot of chocolates. Sorry you had to find out this way mom, but it was always done from a place of solidarity), attended meetings, participated in rallies. I can still remember the chants:

Woy Loni!
Anmwey Loni!
Se Aristid nou te mande.
Nou pa bezwen lòt prezidan.
(United Nations, we had voted for Aristide, we do not need another president)

And this one:

Nous voulons nous voulons
Le retour d'Aristide
N'ap mande N'ap mande
Pou Aristid tounen.
(We want and demand for the return of Aristide)

Although Titid did return eventually, the rules of the game had radically changed. His capacity to carry out his initial mandates had been drastically hampered. Amongst the elements at play, Canadian NGOs played a significant role in creating division within his support base by in a sense offering financial security in exchange of their allegiance to Aristide.

But regardless of the constraints imposed on Aristide post-'91 coup, the Diaspora's actions spoke volumes. It tapped into the potential of diaspora diplomacy; a term that is used to describe the phenomenon when a highly organized Diaspora uses its presence in a host nation-state to leverage benefits their country of origin.

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HUFFPOST.Don't Mistake Montreal's Mayor For a Friend of Haïti. Par Nydia Dauphin

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