By Reginald Dumas
Reginald Dumas is a retired Ambassador and Head of the Public Service of Trinidad and Tobago. In 2004 he served as Special Adviser on Haiti to former UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan. This column was first published in two parts in the Trinidad & Tobago Daily Express on March 10 and 11.
Last month, in the morning of the 11th, the corpse of a black man was found hanging from a tree in a park in Santiago, the second-largest city of the Dominican Republic (DR). The body had been beaten and the hands and feet bound by rope. It was subsequently identified as that of a Haitian who worked in the park as a shoe-shiner.
The scene was immediately reminiscent of the “nigger” lynchings of the old white American South. It quickly elevated to a new level of tension and mistrust the relationship between Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian origin on the one hand, and Dominicans of non-Haitian origin on the other. It is common knowledge, though many
