Enemy Brothers: The April 24 Ultimatum and the Bloody Shadow of 1937 over Hispaniola.

Boukan News, 04/12/2025 – On one small island, two nations share a history as intertwined as it is fractured. Today, as the Dominican Republic’s April 24, 2025 ultimatum approaches, we stand witness to humanity’s most shameful cycle: the willing repetition of atrocity.

The machetes of 1937’s Parsley Massacre have been replaced by deportation buses and military rifles, but the underlying hatred remains unchanged. When Dominican soldiers ordered Haitians to pronounce “perejil” nearly nine decades ago, those whose Creole accents betrayed them were slaughtered where they stood. Up to 35,000 souls—neighbors, workers, children—butchered for the crime of pronunciation.

Have we learned nothing?

Today, families are torn from sleep by soldiers kicking down doors. Children wail as parents are dragged away. Elderly Haitians who have known no other home for decades are forced onto overcrowded buses, their documentation destroyed before their eyes. Videos circulate of Dominican forces executing Haitians at border checkpoints—modern technology capturing age-old brutality.

The disgrace deepens with each passing day. These are not distant strangers but peoples whose bloodlines, cultures, and histories have commingled for centuries on an island barely 29,000 square miles. Children of Hispaniola turning against their own brothers and sisters.

What perverse understanding of nationhood demands such cruelty? What hollow patriotism celebrates the terrorizing of farmworkers, housekeepers, and construction laborers whose only crime is seeking survival? These are not invaders but essential contributors to the Dominican economy—the invisible hands that build the resorts where foreigners vacation in blissful ignorance of the suffering around them.

The April 24 deadline looms as a stain spreading across our collective conscience. Each silent day inches us closer to potential massacre. The Haitian government’s inaction is a betrayal of its most vulnerable citizens. International organizations offer nothing but tepid statements of “concern” while preparing no meaningful intervention.

We cannot claim ignorance as our ancestors might have during the 1937 killings. Today’s atrocities unfold on smartphone screens worldwide, yet the response remains muted—as if Black Caribbean lives hold less value than others.

The bitter truth is this: without immediate intervention, we may soon speak of another Haitian massacre in the present tense rather than as historical tragedy. The Dominican government must rescind this unconscionable ultimatum. Haiti’s leaders must finally stand for their people. The international community must offer more than hollow words.

This is not merely a migration crisis but a moral catastrophe unfolding in slow motion. Two peoples, descendants of both colonizers and enslaved, indigenous and immigrant, sharing a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea—yet unable to share their humanity.

How many bodies must wash ashore before we acknowledge that what happens on Hispaniola is not distant or foreign but a reflection of our collective failure? The blood of 1937 still stains this island’s soil. We cannot—must not—allow it to flow again.

Pierre R. Raymond