Within one week of the earthquake that drove tens of thousands of Haitians out of their homes, its island neighbour, the Dominican Republic, is being transformed into a base for humanitarian efforts, from border soup kitchens to road convoys, warehouses, and visa waivers for humanitarian workers.

Dominican government disaster workers are responding guardedly to the expected influx of Haitian migrants – the two countries share a 78,000 sq km island and a 380km border that demarcates their bloody past and politically sensitive present, speckled with persistent allegations of racial discrimination against Haitians.

“We will be criticized if people see us as throwing out Haitians, but how can we absorb so many? There are thousands now in border hospitals. Will they want to leave? … We cannot provide for all of them,” the disaster relief director, Edwin Luciano, told IRIN in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, three days after the earthquake in Haiti.

“We are judged by our past actions and cannot get around that,” said Luciano, who is also head of the government centre for emergency operations. He told IRIN that in his two decades of disaster relief work, the earthquake on 12 January was one of the most complex because of the socio-political sensitivities.

In 1937 President Rafael Trujillo ordered the massacre of more than 15,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic, in a move to reinforce his rule.

In 2005 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the Dominican Republic’s system of registration for citizenship was unconstitutional and violated the rights of two children who had been denied birth certificates. Without citizenship papers, the children were not allowed to go to school, as is the case for many Dominican children of Haitian descent, according to rights groups in both countries.

Persons of Haitian descent without residency papers in the Dominican Republic have periodically been repatriated en masse and by force, according to the Support Group for Refugees and Repatriated Persons (GARR), an umbrella body for Haitian NGOs and rights groups. An estimated 800,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent are living in the Dominican Republic.

Yet, today the Dominican Republic is the primary logistics base for humanitarian operations in Haiti.

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