Haiti crisis spills over the border

HAITI’S ousted leader Jean- Betrand Aristide has often said neighbouring states are like "two wings of the same bird", mutually dependent on each other for economic and political stability.

The Dominican Republic is usually Haiti’s quiet neighbour on the island of Hispaniola, known mostly as a pleasant stop-off on a Caribbean cruise.

Yet even as order begins to be restored in Haiti after the ousting of Aristide by rebel forces and the arrival of foreign troops, there is a fear that its neighbour is heading for a destabilising crisis all of its own, the outcome of which will be crucial to both nations and which is already preoccupying the United States.

As the country heads toward presidential elections in May, Dominican democracy, barely a decade old, is in a fragile state, suffering from many of the same problems which led to the current turmoil in Haiti. The administration of President Hipolito Mejia has more than doubled the country’s foreign debt in less than four years to around 4.2bn and is already having trouble keeping up with interest payments.

The Spanish-speaking country’s second-biggest bank collapsed last year, a 1.2bn disaster that crippled the economy and devalued the peso from 17 to more than 50 to the US dollar. The bank’s demise also uncovered a vast network of corruption and payoffs, and although Mejia’s Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) was not the only one implicated, Dominicans blame the ruling party.

In a poll of Latin American public opinion on their leaders’ performance last October, Mejia had the lowest approval rating - even the deeply unpopular Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, at 7%, edged out Mejia, who scored only 6%. The PRD has fractured over who its candidate should be in May, but concerns have arisen that Mejia may try to steal the election. Recently, a local newspaper revealed that voter rolls authorised one man to vote at three different stations, only one example of the kind of corruption Dominicans fear could tarnish their recently-won democracy.

An election crisis could jeopardise not only the country’s stability, but also international efforts to help Haiti at a time when Dominican support has been crucial. As Haiti’s crisis played out, the Dominican military helped evacuate foreigners. The Dominican Red Cross also helped get aid to Haiti, and although it closed the border and doubled the number of troops posted there to prevent an influx of refugees, the Dominican government did allow Haitians in on market days twice a week to shop, a significant humanitarian gesture.

The US also has a vested interest in a stable Dominican Republic, not only because of its presence in Haiti - where in the last few days its troops have come under fire from suspected Aristide loyalists - but because of an increase in the flow of boat people seeking a life elsewhere.

As Haiti’s crisis escalated last month, the US prepared 50,000 new beds at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba to accommodate a feared wave of Haitians. But instead it was a steady stream of people already leaving the Dominican Republic, in numbers dramatically higher than in previous years and larger than those leaving Haiti, that have kept them busy.

In the first two months of this year, the US Coastguard picked up 1,977 Dominicans, against only 717 Haitians. And over the past three years, 300 Dominicans have gone missing while attempting the dangerous 75-mile journey to Puerto Rico across the shark-infested Mona Passage aboard rickety wooden motorboats called yolas.

Mejia himself has said that the Dominican Republic and Haiti are in a marriage with no possibility of divorce, words that reflect a fragile and now threatened peace that has held for the past decade.

In that period, Dominicans have taken the lead in pursuing joint border development projects and warming the tone between the two countries. Dominicans have worked with the Haitian government to legalise the status of several hundred thousand Haitian migrants living in the Dominican Republic, a long-standing source of division.

After international criticism of the mass deportations of Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans it had periodically carried out, the Dominican Republic also took steps to reduce abuses and signed an agreement with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Dominican investors even opened an industrial park in Ouanaminthe, on the Haitian side of the northern border, to employ Haitian workers.

But crisis in both countries has put this progress at risk, and Haiti’s uprising has stirred old animosities. Until former dictator Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier gave an interview from France earlier this month saying he wanted to return to Haiti, rumours swirled that he was living in the Dominican Republic.

And when Haitian rebel leaders Guy Philippe and Louis Jodel Chamblain returned to Haiti from Dominican exile last month, Aristide denounced the Dominicans for allowing them to cross back into Haiti.

Rumours in late February, strenuously denied, also insinuated that Dominican military officials had known of and condoned rebels training within their borders. The Dominicans, for their part, suspect Haitian rebels of killing two Dominican soldiers at the border. Meanwhile, the Dominican Republic is itself preparing for a potentially destabilising flow of refugees.

The US measures the success of its Caribbean policy in the numbers fleeing its island nations. By that measure, Hispaniola’s tally is discouraging - the Dominican Republic and Haiti have each sent more than one million migrants to the US, some arriving, quite literally, in the same boat.