Turks and Caicos Islands Coping With Haitian Influx

When the water turns from deep blue to shallow green, the Haitian refugees are told to scramble out of the boat and make sure they have dollars for the bus ride to Miami.

But they’re not in Florida. Smugglers have tricked the Haitians and stranded them on Providenciales in the wind-swept Turks and Caicos Islands, about 600 miles southeast of Miami.

Officials in this British colony in the West Indies say the influx of Haitians fleeing poverty at home, 125 miles to the south, has become as serious a threat to the islands’ stability as drug trafficking by South American cartels.

“It’s got out of hand. We can’t cope with this much longer,” said Hilly Ewing, the social welfare minister.

The local parliament is demanding the removal of the appointed British governor, accusing him of not acting against illegal immigration and criticizing him for saying that the islands are rife with drug corruption.

The governor, Martin Bourke, refuses to leave and is being supported by the British government in London.

As a result, nearly all government work in the eight-island colony is at a standstill, a situation that business people say could hurt its international banking and tourism industries.

Unhappiness heated up after Offshore Finance Annual 1996, a banking trade journal, published an interview earlier this year in which Bourke was quoted as saying that the fight against drug traffickers was hampered by corruption and incompetence in the police.

Bourke told Associated Press that he was “quoted out of context” in the interview. However, aides say privately that the governor was responding to a jury’s acquittal in February of four men accused of drug smuggling.

Among the defendants was Alden “Smokey” Smith, who while a junior minister in the Turks and Caicos government was convicted of drug charges in Miami in 1986.

Although 440 pounds of cocaine were seized in the colony last year, politicians say the governor is blowing the drug problem out of proportion while ignoring the much more pressing problem of Haitian refugees.

Nobody really knows how many Haitians there are in the colony, which has an official population of 15,000. Ewing, the social welfare minister, estimates that the island of Providenciales has a population of about 7,000 legal residents, including 1,000 Haitians with work or residence permits, plus about 6,000 illegal Haitians.

Some Haitians find work on the growing number of hotel construction sites. Others do domestic work.

But many live in the desolate northwest of Providenciales, scurrying away when strangers approach. Smoke rising from cooking fires often is the only sign of their presence.

Haitians are easy to identify on these islands, which never have been rich but where no one seems in want of a meal. They are the ones in the ragged clothes who speak Creole, the ones willing to take any job for as little as $2.50 an hour--half the minimum wage.

“Half the kids in primary school don’t speak English,” Ewing said. Last year, he added, five Haitians were born in the Turks and Caicos for every birth to a “belonger,” as locals call themselves.

Signs of growing resentment over the Haitians turned up during a reporter’s visit to Glenn’s grocery store in Cockburn Town, the capital on Grand Turk island. Unprovoked, a resident berated an old Haitian man packing his groceries.

“The government doesn’t have money for us because it’s got to spend so much on you Haitians,” the shopper shouted. “The next time the warship comes, we’re going to line all you Haitians up and load you onto it.”

He referred to the HMS Brave, a British warship that visited the islands in April during a period of high anger directed at the governor.

Bourke said the authorities have not acted because immigration issues “are the reserve of the elected government.”

“That’s only true when it suits the governor,” said opposition politician C. Washington Misick, who has suggested burning boats caught smuggling Haitians. “The governor is responsible for protecting our borders, foreign affairs and internal security.”

Ewing agreed. “All the days that ship was out there, not a single Haitian boat came in. And then Britain says it can’t afford to guard our borders.”