Dominican Republic Open To Haiti Ties, Leader Tells US

Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader, who has championed a tough line on Haiti, told the United States on Friday that he was open to normalizing relations with its impoverished Caribbean neighbor as security improves.

Meeting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was back from a rare visit to Haiti, the popular Dominican leader promised to look both at restoring political ties and reopening airspace closed for months to flights to and from Haiti.

"Our intention is to try to normalize as much as possible, while always respecting the security of Dominicans," Abinader told a joint news conference with Blinken.

"Thanks to efforts by the United States, we now have a peace force in Haiti, so to the extent that they can move forward on internal security, we will also move forward in the normalization of relations," he said.

Abinader won a resounding reelection in May in part due to the popularity of his hard stance on Haiti, with which the Dominican Republic shares a border and has long had tense relations.

Abinader began work on a 164-kilometer (102-mile) concrete wall with Haiti and last year had more than 250,000 Haitians deported, leading Amnesty International to accuse the Dominican Republic of racism.

Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, had plunged into virtual anarchy with gangs taking over the capital Port-au-Prince, and the security and health systems collapsing.

In Port-au-Prince on Thursday, Blinken voiced hope for progress in Haiti after early efforts by a new international security force headed by Kenya and largely funded by the United States.

Blinken praised Abinader's record at home, saying he has shown "real leadership" in combating corruption and ensuring the judiciary's independence.

At the United Nations, the United States circulated a draft resolution Friday that calls for extending the Haiti security mission's mandate by another year.

It proposes eventually turning it into "a UN Peacekeeping Operation, in order to sustain the gains made by the MSS," according to the text seen by AFP.

Some 400 Kenyan police officers have arrived in Haiti so far, out of the 2,500 officers that the Multinational Security Support (MSS) Mission envisages, but securing consistent funding for the project has been a problem.

"Our goal is to have a mission that is effective, strong, able to deliver the kind of security progress that the Haitian people deserve," Brian Nichols, US assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said recently.

"A formal peacekeeping operation is one of the ways that we could accomplish that, but we're looking at multiple ways to do that," Nichols said.