Today’s Diario Libre editorial, Wednesday 22 January, comments on the way that Haiti has taken advantage of the Dominican Republic’s weak foreign relations institutions and policies to cover up its own major problems.
The executive editor of Diario Libre Adriano Miguel Tejada writes: “In international relations it is said that foreign policy of poor countries is a continuation of their domestic policies, and Haiti is a paradigmatic case of this. The current Haitian government should have organized elections in 2011, but has not done so to date. Instead it has exported its domestic crisis by using its favorite adversary as a target: the Dominican Republic, which in its traditional laissez faire stance has not known how to defend itself and how to unmask its bad neighbor.
“Haiti does not have education or health policies, but is able to hide its weaknesses by making allegations against the neighboring country, which generously takes in any citizen who enters (we acknowledge that local complicities are at fault on the border with Haiti), and instead is vociferously demanding the right to education and health for Haitians in the Dominican Republic.
“Haiti has not provided legal documentation to more than half of its population, but it demands not only that we provide legal identity for its nationals and their descendants, but that we also provide them with a privileged nationality n for having crossed the border illegally! Or for continuing the practice of not complying with the laws of this country that takes them in, by failing to declare their children before the corresponding authorities.
“So many concepts have been twisted, that a Haitian activist now says that the Dominican state “has to win the trust of the immigrants,” when the opposite should be the case: the immigrants should have to prove that they deserve to reside in the country that takes them by respecting the laws.
But the government continues to be mute…
www.diariolibre.com/opinion/2014/01/23/i450591_retorciendo-conceptos.html