| Isaac Risco |
JIMANI, Dominican Republic (dpa) – The only identification document that Belina Derival owns is a stained, yellowing sheet of paper – a birth certificate that a provincial official filled out by hand 28 years ago.
Derival is careful about how she unfolds it, since the worn paper is already torn. It could easily finally fall to bits in her hands. Getting a certified copy is unlikely, so she carries the birth certificate – made out when she was a baby – with her at all times.
It is her only protection against being deported from the Dominican Republic should she find herself in one of the many regular military roundups that take place in the city where she lives, Jimani, on the border to Haiti.
”Currently I have no nationality,” she explains. Although she was born on Dominican soil, authorities have refused since 2008 to issue her with any identity document.
”They told me that they cannot issue a certificate to obtain an identity card for the children of foreigners,” she said.
Derival considers herself Dominican, although her parents came from neighbouring Haiti on the western end of Hispaniola Island, which the two countries share.
Haitian vendors wait on the Dominican side of the border at the border crossing between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in Jimani
Dominican border patrol officers at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic at the Jimani-Maplasse border station in Jimani
Her mother tongue is Spanish and she only has a rudimentary knowledge of the French or Haitian Creole spoken beyond the border.
The law, at least, would seem to be on Derival’s side.
Up until 2010, the so-called “rule of the soil”, or “jus soli” in Latin, prevailed. Under that legal regime, all persons born on Dominican soil were entitled to citizenship, even if their parents were foreigners.
That law was repealed over five years ago, but even before that, descendents of Haitians in the Dominican Republic used to face hindrances obtaining citizenship documents.
Because of that arbitrariness, they are now bereft of any nationality.
Derival explained that even today, authorities feign ignorance or suggest outright that descendants of Haitians obtain themselves a Haitian passport.
”They have paralysed my life,” she said. Derival cannot work or travel. The university she is enrolled at allows her to continue her studies in law on condition that she eventually submit valid identity documents.
She has two years left to do that. The problems Derival now faces are tied to rolling amendments in immigration law in the Dominican Republic, which has been trying for years to curb immigration from poorer Haiti.
For decades, the immigrants had found ways into the Dominican Republic, where they work in construction, as field-hands or as domestic employees.
Many, like Derival’s father, are employed as labourers under harsh conditions on sugarcane plantations.
Almost half a million Haitians are estimated to be living and working in the Dominican Republic.
Hundreds of thousands of the Haitian immigrants’ descendants come on top.
Frequent coup d’etats and popular rebellions have contributed to making Haiti the poorest country in the Americas and have forced many Haitians to seek a better life in the Dominican Republic or the United States.
”When the political crises hit Haiti, starting in 1991 and 1992, large migratory movements began to take place,” Roque Feliz, director of the Bono Centre in Santo Domingo, told dpa.
The Bono Centre is a human rights organisation with ties to the Catholic Church.
Since mid 2000, Dominican legislators have approved several measures seeking to stem the inflow of Haitians.
A 2010 constitutional amendment instituted citizenship by descent only.
It was confirmed by the Constitutional Tribunal in September 2013 in a ruling that provoked some worldwide criticism, because the amendment has the effect of stripping Dominican citizenship from all children of foreign immigrants born in the Dominican Republic since 1929.
Belina Derival, 28, holds up her yellowing birth certificate, her only official identity, in Jimani, Dominican Republic
Social worker Pedro Cano of the Jesuit Service in his office in Jimani, Dominican Republic. PHOTOS: DPA
Removing citizenship is considered a breach of human rights in most of the civilised world.
Although the amendment only specifies non-Dominicans, it clearly is aimed mainly at citizens of Haitian descent.
”When this ruling was issued, we called it a form of civil genocide,” said Feliz. Some international organisations said the law could potentially make 200,000 people stateless.
Bowing to harsh international criticism, the government of President Danilo Medina in 2014 approved a ‘National Regularisation Plan’ for foreigners that stipulated that thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent could at last obtain a Dominican passport.
Hundreds of thousands more were to achieve residency, but not passports.
But this plan also provides for the deportation of thousands of other Haitian descendents who fail to meet its criteria.
According to the Bono Centre, up to July 2015, some 240,000 people had obtained a limited residency permit. Another 45,000 were denied the permit.
Another 200,000 immigrants, according to estimates, have not registered with the programme for fear of being expelled.
Those immigrants now face deportation, Feliz told dpa. The deadline to enrol in the programme was in June 2015.
There are many Haitian-descent people in the Dominican Republic who cannot prove that they were born on Dominican soil.
Most of them lack valid birth certificates like Derival’s. That would for example be the case if they were born in remote communities or on the sugar plantations and were never registered at birth.
Some 100,000 people might come into this category, according to estimates.
The Dominican Republic feels it is being unfairly attacked abroad because of the way it is dealing with the immigration situation. It has become one of the country’s red-hot diplomatic issues.
The Inter-American Human Rights Commission has on several occasions strongly criticised the Santo Domingo government.
”I want to regulate this while respecting the rights of all people,” Medina has said.
Some observers say the crisis has uncovered a racial bias in Dominican society that goes back to the colonial era, when there were two classes of people: on the one hand blacks and on the other, the mixed race and white people who held themselves to be superior.
Caught in the crunch today are people who face discrimination “because of their French-sounding names, their race, or their origin,” said social worker Pedro Cano.
He works with the Jesuit Service in Jimani, which provides aid to immigrants on the border.
People of Haitian appearance are commonly stopped and searched by authorities in Jimani.
Soldiers stop public transportation buses even though they are not coming from the town of Malpasse, on the Haitian side of the border.
They often demand bribes to let the Haitians continue on their way.
On the small bus that travels from Jimani to Santo Domingo, a young Haitian-origin man was seen on three occasions during the six-hour ride to pay soldiers 100 Dominican pesos (about two US dollars) so they would not force him off the bus, even though he showed them a document that proves he has begun his paperwork as part of the regularisation programme.
Some observers say that the international outrage has so far prevented mass deportations.
But in early 2015 there were in fact numerous deportations, said Cano.
“There were raids on the streets and in homes and at workplaces.”
People who were apprehended were not allowed to present documents and they were immediately taken to the other side of the border, Cano recalled.
In Cano’s view, the aim of the roundups was to keep people of Haitian background from signing up for the regularisation plan as long as they still had a chance to do so.
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