Isn’t that how we now call Haiti? A dagger that sinks deeper and deeper into the heart of my native country.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
I have been striving for a long time to make people understand what is at the origin of this misery that has become perennial and what are the interests at stake.
In the first place, there is the ransom demanded by France for more than 100 years, as compensation for the affront of these Negroes who dared to break the chains of slavery.
You have to read the monumental survey on the subject published a few days ago by the New York Times in English, but also, historical fact, in Haitian Creole and French1.
It was without hesitation that I agreed to help Canadian journalist Catherine Porter, formerly at the Toronto Star, but since attached to the New York daily, which directed this series. “France, I told him, ignobly demanded and obtained that the former slave masters be compensated by the very people they cruelly dispossessed, for four centuries, men, women and children captured in Africa to be sold, enslaved in overseas colonies, treated as beasts of burden, subjected to rape and other horrifying violence. Demanding compensation also presupposes that we take it into account. But how to quantify 400 years of denial of humanity? »
See the fate of the Republic of Haiti, born in 1804 from an invincible audacity, that of 500,000 insurgent slaves, determined to free themselves, to eradicate the nightmare that was the colony of Saint- Domingue, the most prosperous of the French empire, to found a new country, that of their freedom and their dignity.
Napoleon will try in vain to restore the colonial order and slavery, but he will lose more men in this fight than at Waterloo. The black revolutionaries had sworn to die rather than fall back under the control of France, which, however, had not said its last word.
Twenty-one years after the proud proclamation of independence, the Haitian population has seen French warships armed with more than 500 guns appear off the coast. The ultimatum was daunting: “You pay, you compensate us or it’s war!” We will exterminate you! France thus demanded a colossal sum that my parents’ generation was still forced to pay to the heirs of the former master torturers.
The team mobilized by the New York Times was able to trace several of these heirs, also quantify the immense profits for the Crédit Industriel et Commercial (CIC), the same French bank which co-financed the construction of the Eiffel Tower. There is the indemnity, but also the loan contracted to pay it, a double debt at dizzying interest rates. France will require Haiti to borrow from French banks to meet its payments, which greatly exceed the revenues of the first black republic in the history of humanity, thus condemned not to prosper.
Placed under total embargo, cut off from all markets by the world powers of slavery who wanted to prevent the Haitian example from spreading, the country had few resources to get by.
The CIC kept control of Haitian finances for decades, this double debt stimulated the growth of the fledgling international banking system in Paris and precipitated Haiti on the path of chronic poverty and underdevelopment.
The American newspaper also reports how much Wall Street coveted Haiti’s wealth and ensured very comfortable income for the bank that would become Citigroup. Displacing French influence, this would encourage the American invasion of Haiti, one of the longest military occupations in the history of the United States, from 1915 to 1934, clearly envisaged within the framework of the expansion of the American interests in Central America and the Caribbean Basin. Haiti is trapped, engulfed in this spiral of indebtedness and predation, to the benefit of France, the United States, but also of corrupt dictators who were able to keep power with the tacit support of these two powers.
The investigation of New York Times demonstrates perfectly what Haiti could have achieved in terms of economic development, construction of essential infrastructure, education and health services, if all this money had not been sent to former slaveholders. “The shortfall for Haiti is staggering, in the order of $115 billion, eight times the size of its economy in 2020,” the experts conclude.
The only Haitian president to have dared to ask France to reimburse this spoliation is Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Paris and Washington could not bear it and this would have earned him, diplomats testify, to be forced into exile in South Africa. the New York Times also talks about it and made sure to publish the raw data in complete transparency2 collected in the hope that they will stimulate further research on the subject.