Hands Across the Border

Although they share the same island, relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic are scarred by a bloody history.

That changed when a massive earthquake hit Haiti on January 12. Barely two days after the earthquake, the president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández, made a unprecedented helicopter trip to search for his good friend, Haitian President René Préval. He was worried that Préval was still incommunicado, unable to coordinate any kind of response to the disaster, let alone rally the world’s help.

 “I said this is the right time to go in there to show our sense of solidarity at the highest political level,” Fernández said in an interview at the presidential palace in Santo Domingo. Unable to contact Préval himself, Fernández landed and went in search of the president. He found him shell-shocked in an unlit office at a police station near the airport. “There he was all by himself, I think overwhelmed by the situation perhaps with no specific plans at that moment because he had no contacts with his ministers,” Fernández said. “We started building some solutions [about] what the Dominican Republic could do... and from there we have just been working very closely together. “

Few countries have been more generous than the Dominican Republic, itself a poor and undeveloped country. Crews of Dominican electrical engineers helped fix power lines, while telecom technicians worked on restoring communications. Fernández sent 15 mobile, trailer-sized kitchens to provide hot meals to hundreds of thousands of survivors in the weeks after the tragedy, as well as 100 old buses, refitted with desks and chairs to serve as temporary classrooms.

The Dominican Republic waived visa restrictions for Haitians seeking emergency medical care, authorized nearly 300 flights carrying aid and donated $11 million, according to Dominican officials. One of the country’s wealthiest corporations, Grupo Vicini, has also donated millions of dollars for the recovery, including raising money for St. Damien Pediatric Hospital in Port-au-Prince.

Dominican cardiologist Dr. Victor Atallah has been instrumental in helping put together a makeshift hospital in Jimani on the border with Haiti, staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses from around the world to treat earthquake victims.

“The Dominicans have been very good to us,” says Joseph Williamson, a 26-year-old Port-au-Prince university student who lost a leg when his classroom collapsed. Atallah is already starting to build a rehabilitation clinic in Jimani, where he hopes to fit some of the thousands of victims who lost limbs with prosthetic arms and legs, a vital medical service that is virtually non-existant in Haiti. “That’s my only hope in this life—a new leg,” Williamson says.

Fernández is also taking a lead role in an international reconstruction effort for Haiti, agreeing to host a major conference in June in Santo Domingo with major donor countries. He talks of the need for a $20 billion Marshall Plan for Haiti, including funds for education, healthcare, roads and infrastructure, as well as long-term institution building.

It will be years before Haiti recovers—if it ever can. If solutions are not found, Fernández is understandably worried about the potential for increased migration into his country of Haitians looking for work. But it’s not just Hispaniola’s problem.

“This is also a national security problem for the U.S., because if Haiti falls apart... drug trafficking will increase, we’ll become failed status, and could end up as a platform for terrorism,” he warns.

Fernández recently sat down with PODER at the ornate presidential palace in Santo Domingo.

[Poder Enterprise] Does the earthquake mark a new day in relations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, considering the bad history between the two countries?

[Leonel Fernadez] I think this sense of solidarity and brotherhood has always been there on the Dominican side and I’m sure also from the Haitian side. There was a quick response from the Dominican government and from Dominican society as a whole. We were able very quickly to come in with basic aid in terms of food, water, medical supplies and heavy machinery in order to remove the rubble. We are the closest neighbors, so it was our moral obligation to rapidly respond. It was very natural, very spontaneous from the Dominican people and I think it speaks very highly of the Dominicans’ spirit of solidarity.

[The tension] has a historical origin and it stems from a paradox that the Dominican Republic achieved its independence not from a colonial European colonial power but from its neighbor Haiti. When Haiti became independent in 1804, slavery was abolished. The Haitians always thought that if there was a European colonial power on the eastern side of the island, where the Dominican Republic is now, there would always be a threat to their freedom... so they felt they would only be a free people if there was also an abolition of slavery in the eastern part. In 1822 they occupied the Dominican Republic for 22 years. The Dominicans revolted against Haitian troops. There was a war that took place for 17 years between our nations. There were atrocities committed by Haitian troops in some provinces. This has been taught over the years to different generations. As a high school student I still remember reading this narrative about Haitian troops slaughtering Dominicans. Then in the 20th century the Trujillo regime ordered a mass murder in 1937 that killed thousands of Haitians.

But in the last few years there has been more closeness between both of our countries. During my first administration I visited Haiti officially [in 1998]. It was the first time a Dominican head of state visited Haiti in over 60 years. I established a very close, warm relationship with Haitian President René Préval that has been maintained over the years.

Even before the tragedy we were always having conversations about subjects of mutual interest, and of course with the tragedy now we have upgraded our relations to its highest point. We are working with the Prime Minister and several cabinet ministers to come up with a long-term economic and social development plan for Haiti, going beyond the crisis. We will present this plan in Santo Domingo in June at an international conference for the future of Haiti. I think it needs a commitment from the international community to really implement all this work we are doing together.

[PE] Can you tell us about the guidelines of the plan?

[LF] We are working together on a plan that has two stages. One is an immediate response to the tragedy, and for that we did an assessment of the damage—what are the immediate needs that Haiti has, and what can be done by the international community to sort out these needs.

But Haiti was already in tragedy before the earthquake, so we have to look beyond and come up with a long-term and economically sustainable program for Haiti, and there we are looking at different issues. One has to do with institution building. Haiti early has to come up with a functional operating state apparatus. We have to improve the quality of public services, especially in water supply, electric utilities, transportation, health care, education etc.—the basic public services have to be improved. There has to be some sort of modernization of public administration in Haiti. There needs to be a program for training public officials. Second has to do with infrastructure: build better schools and hospitals, but also roads and bridges, improve the water supply system, build better housing with international standards, ports, airports.