(nyt) Ms. Pierre is the Dominican Republic’s most polarizing human rights advocate, a dark-skinned woman who says she can only dream of a country in which her color — and the skin tone of hundreds of thousands of other Dominicans like her who are of Haitian descent — is a non-issue. Carlos Morales Troncoso, the Dominican foreign minister, was among those who were infuriated at the honor Ms. Pierre received from the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights. He fired off a letter to Mr. Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, labeling the award “ill advised” and “myopic.” “I fear that, unfortunately, the Robert F. Kennedy Prize is divorced from reality on the island of Hispaniola, and unfortunately there was bad information on the consequences of the work of Ms. Pierre in these parts,” wrote Mr. Morales, who blames her for smearing the reputation of the country internationally and creating, rather than healing, racial divisions. Within months, the Dominican government began questioning Ms. Pierre’s citizenship and suggested that she belonged on the other half of Hispaniola, the island that the Dominican Republic shares with Haiti. Born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents, Ms. Pierre, 44, has spent her life advocating on behalf of Haitians and ethnic Haitians who hold Dominican citizenship but are subjected to racial discrimination in a society that places a high value on lighter skin. At the age of 13, she organized a protest by sugar-cane workers in one of the Dominican slums — known as bateyes — where she grew up seeing Haitian workers oppressed by their Dominican bosses. Her current troubles with the government stem from 2005, when her organization, Movement for Dominico-Haitian Women, took to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights the case of two ethnic Haitian children who were denied Dominican birth certificates. The court found in their favor, ordering the government to provide the birth certificates and pay ,000 in damages to each of the children. The court could hardly have found otherwise. The Dominican Constitution grants citizenship to those born on Dominican soil, except the children of diplomats or those “in transit” through the country. That has long meant that the children of Haitians who came to the country to work, legally or illegally, gained Dominican citizenship. But after the decision, the Dominican Supreme Court ruled that Haitian workers were considered “in transit,” and that their children were therefore not entitled to citizenship.

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