CARICOM nations discriminating against Haitians- Ramjattan

Last Updated on Saturday, 16 March 2024, 9:34 by Denis Chabrol

Leader of the Alliance For Change (AFC), Khemraj Ramjattan has accused Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member-nations, including Guyana,  of discriminating against Haitians by blocking their free movement across the region.

“It is in my opinion, looking at the demeanour and even the expressed words of some of the CARICOM leaders; they always give the impression that Haitians are second class in the CARICOM Community,” Mr Ramjattan, a former Minister of Public Security, told a news conference on Friday.

Mr Ramjattan believed that Haitians were being discriminated in CARICOM because of the extreme poverty in their homeland and “uncalled for and unjustified characteristics.” He said restricted movement of Haitians had gotten worse with the recent prison break and the movement of more Haitian boat people to escape the socio-economic and political crisis.

Guyana is among many member-nations of the Single Market  that have imposed visa restrictions on Haitians, but in the case of his home country, he believed that that the June 2021 decision by the People’s Progressive Party Civic administration for Haitians to have visas is “obviously racial.” “They are even worse than other CARICOM countries  and the racism is obvious in my mind ,” he said.

Mr Ramjattan estimated that 34,000 Haitians had arrived in Guyana during the A Partnership for Nati0nal Unity+Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) administration that lasted from 2015 to 2020. “Of the 34,000 or whatever it is, a lot of them just used Guyana as a front-entry for French Guiana and then they also left via Brazil for a number of other countries in Chile and Peru where they got families,” he said.

But at a time when Haitians had been found locked up in hotels, whisked off directly to Brazil via road or stranded on the forested Linden-Lethem trail, the Guyana government said all Haitians coming here needed visas. On arrival in Guyana, most of them had been transported to French Guiana via Suriname or to neighbouring Brazil.

Fending off repeated APNU+AFC criticisms that the PPP does not like Haitians because they are of African origin, last week, PPP General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo last week restated that then APNU+AFC had facilitated 40,000 Haitians to be “smuggled through Guyana with people complicit, working with APNU.” “They collected money to smuggle them and bring them here, pass them through the airport, take them to the border with Brazil and smuggled them out the country. They made millions of US dollars smuggling them through the country. They didn’t love the Haitians. It was a money-making venture,” he said.  He denied that APNU+AFC’s claim that the PPP did not like the Haitians.

The treatment of Haitians in Guyana is now before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)