France's debt of dishonour to Haiti
After Haiti won independence, France extorted compensation for its slave-owning colonists. Now Nicolas Sarkozy must repay it
Isabel Macdonald guardian.co.uk,
Monday 16 August 2010 10.00 BST
Nearly seven months after a devastating earthquake killed upwards of 250,000 people in Haiti, UN special envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton told the Associated Press (AP) that international donors have yet to make good on their promises of billions of dollars to rebuild the ravaged country. Haiti's rebuilding could cost $14bn, according to a recent Inter-American Development Bank study. Yet only "five countries – Brazil, Norway, Australia, Colombia and Estonia – have so far provided $506m, less than 10% of the $5.3bn pledged for Haiti at a March donors' conference," according to AP.
On Monday, dozens of leading academics, authors and activists from around the world propose a bold solution to this desperate financial shortfall. Why not reimburse Haiti for the illegitimate "independence debt" it paid France?
In an open letter to French President Nicolas Sarkozy published in the French newspaper Libération, 90 leading academics, authors, journalists and human rights activists from around the world urged the French government to pay Haiti back for the 90m gold francs Haitians were forced to pay as a price for their independence. (Full the sake of full disclosure, I am no impartial observer of the proposal: I helped draft the text of the letter, and played no small role in soliciting the signatures. In fact, the scores of intellectuals I contacted needed little prodding to sign on.)
There are "powerful arguments in favour of the restitution of the French debt," Harvard medical professor Paul Farmer, who was recently appointed deputy UN special envoy to Haiti, pointed out in his testimony in the 2003 hearings in France on Haiti's independence debt. This historic payment was patently illegitimate, and, on several different scores, it was also illegal, according to a 2009 paper produced by the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.
Prior to independence, St Dominique – the country that is now Haiti – was France's most profitable colony, thanks in no small part to its particularly brutal system of slavery. In 1791, the slaves revolted, and in 1804, after defeating Napoleon's armies, founded the world's first black republic.
Following Haiti's independence, former French slave-owners submitted detailed tabulations of their losses to the French government, with line items for each of "their" slaves that had been "lost" with Haitian independence. In 1825, the French King, Charles X, demanded that Haiti pay an "independence debt" to compensate former colonists for the slaves who had won their freedom in the Haitian Revolution. With warships stationed along the Haitian coast backing up the French demand, France insisted that Haiti pay its former coloniser 150m gold francs – ten times the fledgling black nation's total annual revenues.
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