Tremors from the January 12 earthquake that devastated the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, reached all the way to the Dominican Republic, which shares the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola. In the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, new high-rise apartment buildings that have gone up over the past several years swayed but did not collapse. The brand-new metro system closed in case of aftershocks. In most cases, however, the biggest issue was motion sickness.
The tremors will be felt in other ways, particularly in their impact on the long-complicated relationship between the two countries. It may not be a tectonic shift, but more likely a series of lurches for the better, even keeping in mind the new challenges to the ties between the two nations.
Dominicans mark their independence from Haiti, won in 1844 after a brutal and corrupt 22-year occupation which left long-lasting resentment. Yet it’s often forgotten that Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture helped Dominicans win independence from Spain in 1821; that Dominican leaders at first welcomed the Haitian presence as a way to discourage European ambitions of reclaiming the entire island; and that Haiti provided essential assistance in re-winning Dominican independence from Spain in 1865, after a relatively brief re-annexation to the European colonial power.
Haitians remember the 1937 massacre of an estimated 25,000 Haitians near the Dominican border, an ethnic cleansing ordered by the Dominican dictator, General Rafael Trujillo, who was openly inspired by Hitler’s eugenics. Yet Haitians were not Trujillo’s only victims; he brutalized his own people as well.
Above all the conflicts between the two countries have stood out, but they have much in common as well. Their shared history of tragedy includes colonial occupations by France and Spain, repeated twentieth-century occupations by the United States, long dictatorships and authoritarian governments supported in part as Cold War proxies who promised to keep Communism at bay, and struggles with poverty and political instability.
In the mid-1990s, a formerly antagonistic relationship between the governments of both countries began to shift as the Dominican Republic and Haiti made significant strides toward greater democracy. In the Dominican Republic, generations of light-skinned presidents—including the octogenarian Joaquin Balaguer, who stoked fear of Haitian and African heritage as a way to stay in power—ceded to the election of a mixed-race young lawyer as president. At his election victory press conference in 1996, Leonel Fernandez made a point of answering questions from Haitian reporters in French.
Relations were improved by the departure of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was often antagonistic to his cross-island counter parts. Aristide’s early political career was bolstered by criticism of the Dominican deal with the Duvalier dictatorship for Haitian cane cutters, who were treated badly. But Dominicans are so fond of Aristide’s protégé, current Haitian president René Préval, that his nickname is “marasa” (or “twin” in Haiti’s Kreyol language, based on French and African languages).
As a result, trade between the two countries has grown. The number of Dominicans estimated to be living in Haiti more than doubled as Dominican businesses have capitalized on relative stability in Haiti and improved cross-border ties.
But over the past few years even as government relations have mostly been at a high, there have been setbacks, devolving into lynchings of Haitians in a few well-publicized cases. Some observers attribute the tensions to perceived increases in Haitian migration—a long-standing sore point between the two countries—following a series of hurricanes that devastated homes and crops in Haiti. In another setback to relations, feathers were ruffled (so to speak) when Haiti banned poultry imports after avian flu was detected in Dominican chickens.
Nevertheless, just as the tsunami altered the dynamic of the long-standing civil war in Sri Lanka, the earthquake has put human compassion above historical and political difference. All Dominican government buildings flew flags at half mast over the weekend following the earthquake with two days of official national mourning decreed on behalf of Haiti.
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I arrived in Yemen yesterday ruminating on somewhat contradictory mental snapshots of the country. It’s the place where Noah’s Ark was launched and Osama bin Laden’s father was born. It is a country where Westerners are kidnapped by tribesmen (but rarely harmed), where suicide bombers struck the USS Cole in 2000, where young women lower the blinds and cast off their abayas to dance and chew qat [a mild stimulant derived from a shrub] with their friends.
I have come to Yemen to report on many things, but the overarching, pressing story is food security. Though the global food crisis dropped from the front pages of newspapers a year ago, the reality of food shortages and alarming malnutrition rates has not subsided—in fact, it has worsened.