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People fleeing gang violence take shelter at a sports arena, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
The clock starts ticking on Haiti’s border
The Dominican Republic has suspended all new visas for Haitians, and threatened to close the border with its neighbor entirely by Thursday unless a dispute over water rights is resolved before then.
Workmen in Haiti have recently been spotted building a canal that diverts the waters of the Dajabon River, which forms part of the border. The Dominicans say this violates international agreements on sharing the water, and want Haiti to stop the construction.
Haiti-DR tensions have risen over the past year. Haiti’s deepening political and economic crisis has driven more Haitians to seek refuge in their eastern neighbor. Citing concerns about the Dominican Republic’s ability to absorb refugees, Dominican President Luis Abinader has sent troops to the frontier, expelled tens of thousands of Haitians and people of Haitian origin, and begun construction of a border wall.
Closing the border wouldn’t just shut out refugees. It would also exacerbate Haiti’s economic suffering – last year, nearly a quarter of the goods that Haiti imported came from the Dominican Republic.
Can Haiti even do what the DR is asking? The Haitian government of Ariel Henry – who took over after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021 – is weak and deeply unpopular. With gangs controlling nearly 80% of Port-au-Prince, does Henry even have the ability to enforce his will 120 miles away in Dajabon? We have about 24 hours to find out.
What We're Watching: Iran plays hard to get, China gets up in India's grid, Dominicans build a wall
Iran rules out nuclear talks… for now: Iran has reportedly rejected an offer to join direct talks with the US and EU over its nuclear program, saying it won't start the conversation until sanctions on Iran's economy are eased. To be clear, this does NOT mean that prospects for reviving the Iran nuclear deal are dead. Europeans and the Biden administration want a return to the 2015 nuclear agreement, and Iran certainly needs the economic boost that would come from a removal of sanctions. But Tehran is going to try to maximize its leverage before any talks begin, especially since this is a sensitive election year in in the country. Iran's leaders are going to play hard to get for a while longer before edging their way back to the bargaining table. Still, it's high stakes diplomacy here between parties that have almost no mutual trust — and one misstep could throw things off track quickly.
Is China inside India's electrical grid? A newly published study from intelligence analytics firm Recorded Future suggests that China may have retaliated against India following border skirmishes in the Himalayas last year by using malware to attack India's power grid, triggering a blackout last October that left 20 million residents of Mumbai in the dark. The study's authors acknowledge that these conclusions are still speculative, but recent comments by Indian officials add to their credibility. The findings are all the more striking because conventional wisdom holds that while governments regularly use cyber-attacks to steal the secrets of other countries, they generally don't tend to sabotage other governments for fear of dangerous retaliation. If there is truth in this story, it's possible that China believes its cyber advantage over India is strong enough to deter retaliation. That's a powerful warning for every government.
Dominican Republic to "build the wall:" Ok, they are calling it a fence, but whatever you call it, recently-elected Dominican president Luis Abinader says that a new 230 mile hi-tech barrier is meant to stop drug trafficking, illegal immigration, and cross-border crime between his country and Haiti. The two countries, which share the Caribbean Island of Hispañola, have long had testy relations, in particular over the presence in the DR of hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants who have fled their own country — the poorest in the Western Hemisphere — in search of opportunity next door. About five percent of the DR's population is of Haitian origin, according to government estimates, and many lack formal papers. At the same time, the porousness of the border has facilitated trafficking of human beings and contraband, according to a US State Department report. The Dominican government has deported Haitians en masse on several occasions over the past several decades, and there is a history of anti-Haitian violence in the country that runs back more than a century. Construction of the new fence is set to begin later this year.
What We're Watching: A big blast hits Iran, Serbia and Kosovo sit down again, Dominican Republic has a new president
Iran's main nuclear site gets hit: An explosion at the Natanz nuclear site, Iran's main nuclear facility, will likely set back Tehran's nuclear program by months, the Islamic Republic confirmed Sunday. A powerful bomb evidently destroyed infrastructure that Iran has used in recent years to build more advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium — fuel that can be used to make an atomic bomb. The attack has been widely attributed to Israel, though the Israeli government rarely acknowledges actions carried out by its intelligence agencies. Since President Trump walked away from the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018, isolating the US from its European allies, Iran has flouted its own commitments by ramping up its production of enriched uranium and blocking international inspectors from key nuclear facilities. Now, analysts warn that this latest episode could push Iran to move more of its enrichment programs in harder-to-find places underground.
Serbia-Kosovo to resume talks: EU-sponsored talks between longtime foes Kosovo and Serbia will resume this week, almost two years after a disagreement over territorial exchanges prompted Kosovo to slap 100 percent tariffs on Serbian products. The aim of the talks is to reach a peace deal between Serbia and Kosovo, the majority-Albanian region of Serbia that suffered a campaign of Serb-directed ethnic cleansing in the late 1990s and then declared independence with US and EU backing in 2008. Though the EU has long brokered talks between the rivals in the hopes of stabilizing the Western Balkans and strengthening their ties with the EU, the US has recently tried to play a more prominent role in overseeing a détente between the two sides, presenting a rival plan that riled the EU. Meanwhile, Kosovo's President Hashim Thaçi was forced to abandon a meeting with President Trump last month when the Hague announced they had filed war crimes charges against him.
The Dominican Republic has a new president: Opposition candidate Luis Abinader is poised to become the next president of the Dominican Republic after amassing an insurmountable lead over the incumbent, Gonzalo Castillo. Abinader, a US-educated businessman whose second surname is, as it happens, Corona, won despite having to briefly suspend his campaign to recover from the coronavirus himself. The vote had originally been planned for May but was postponed due to the pandemic. Abinader will be just the second member of the Lebanese diaspora to lead a Caribbean country after Robert Malval, who was prime minister of neighboring Haiti from 1993-1994. In addition to addressing the devastating economic blow of losing tourism inflows, Abinader will also have to manage a delicate issue with neighboring Haiti: the spread of COVID-19 in Haiti attributed to migrants returning home from the Dominican Republic.