Dominican Republic Expels Haitians--Even Their Own Nation Doesn't Want Them Back

 In early October, the Dominican Republic started deporting or repatriating Haitians, "fulfilling a pledge to do so weekly as neighboring Haiti scrambles to handle the influx while besieged by gang violence and poverty." Under the plan, the Dominican Republic pledged to deport up to 10,000 per week, although its first week saw 11,000 deported. This is on top of the tens or hundreds of thousands already deported in recent years.

    Of course, Haiti hates the plan, with its representative to the Organization of American States calling the plan "discriminatory" and based on the Haitians' skin color and nationality. "That campaign, which the Dominican government said focuses on expelling up to 10,000 Haitians a week, risks further aggravating the humanitarian crisis in Haiti and fueling instability in the region, Ambassador Gandy Thomas warned."

“These discriminatory policies create enormous pressure on Haiti right when we are facing economic stability, general security issues and political challenges,” Thomas said, describing the move as “a strategy of ethnic cleansing.” “Massive deportation will worsen the fragility of our [Haiti's] infrastructure while the deportees will arrive with no support, no resource and no ties to the community.”

Also:

    But Haitian representatives of two organizations, one based in Haiti and the other in the Dominican Republic, said Haitians were being hunted down and no categories were being spared: School children and pregnant women are part of the roundups. In some cases, the individuals being driven across the border to Haiti, weren’t even Haitian but Black Dominicans. They each stressed the need for dialogue, warning that the crisis could make Haitians even more of a target. 

    In a letter to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Dupuy, the Haitian foreign minister, said the expulsions lack transparency, due process, legal oversight and are in violation of international human rights norms, including the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, to which the Dominican Republic is a signatory. In some cases, the wrong people are also being detained and deported, the letter states, citing human rights groups monitoring the expulsions.

They are also concerned that Haitians being deported from the Dominican Republic face being victimized by gangs upon returning to Haiti. 

    The Dominican Republic has previously stated, however, that its actions are being driven by concerns of national security. 

    There has also been some international condemnation of the action:

OAS representatives from Canada, the U.S. and Colombia called on the Dominican Republic to respect Haitians’ human rights. The country has a sovereign right to manage migration and enforce its laws, they said, but migrants’ human rights must be respected during deportations.

The problem, however, is that the mass gang violence in Haiti is driving a flood of refugees from that benighted country to other nations in the region, including, I would add, the United States. 

    As you may have gathered, it is not just recently arrived Haitians that are being deported, but those born in the Dominican Republic. The Open Society Foundation (one of Soros' key organizations) notes that "[t]he current crisis originated in the September 2013 ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal in the Dominican Republic that stripped over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent of their nationality previously attained by birth."  Dominican law passed after the 2013 ruling set out a pathway to citizenship for those stripped of citizenship, but apparently the number of those applying have been relatively small. 

     One could whine about Haitians being forced back to their own nation, but it is one of those things that happens, particularly when (rightly or wrongly) the interlopers are viewed as threats to the larger population. Although I know we aren't allowed to think ill of Winston Churchill, it was Churchill that suggested the plan to repatriate Germans back to Germany following World War II, forcing German populations out of other European countries, even those those German settlements had existed there for generations--sometimes even hundreds of years. The ethnic cleansing of Germans from around Europe, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Greece, was approved as part of the Potsdam Agreement. Per the Wikipedia article on the topic, "[b]y 1950, a total of about 12 million Germans had fled or been expelled from east-central Europe into Allied-occupied Germany and Austria. The West German government put the total at 14.6 million, including a million ethnic Germans who had settled in territories conquered by Nazi Germany during World War II, ethnic German migrants to Germany after 1950, and the children born to expelled parents." Another 500,000 to 2.5 million died in the course of the expulsions. I'm sure that many of those Germans were lawful citizens of their respective countries before being expelled. But it was believed that forcing Germans back to Germany would increase the stability and security of other European states and the burgeoning Soviet Empire, and so it happened. 

    But back to Haiti. As noted above, Haiti is claiming that the Dominican government's actions violate international law, something echoed by Amnesty International. But as John Wilder noted in a recent post, "laws are just words.  Ultimately, enforcement of the law means that someone has to be willing to employ violence to follow up on the law, up to and including killing the violator." The Dominican Republic is enforcing its laws. Haiti does not have the ability to enforce so-called "international law" and the West (which invented the notion of "international law") is rapidly losing both its power of coercion and moral authority.