Haiti: A Reminder by Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.

Haiti: A reminder

While I was watching the news today (01/13/2010) concerning the earthquake, reporters constantly reminded us of Haiti’s poverty. It is the poorest country in this hemisphere was repeated. Let us look back at the history of why Haiti is such a poor country. I doubt the media will inform us of this.

I will quote extensively from two books by Randall Robinson “An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President”. The other book “Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from his Native land”

From “An Unbroken Agony”, page 21;

“As punishment for creating the first free republic in the Americas (when 13 percent of the people living in the United States were slaves), the new Republic of Haiti was met with a global economic embargo imposed by the United States and Europe. The embargo was strengthened by a further demand from France for financial reparations of roughly $21 billion (2004 dollars) as compensation from the newly freed slaves for denying France the further benefit of owning them. It would be the first time in history that reparations would be imposed by a defeated nation on the nation that had defeated it.”

“American economic sanctions against Haiti would not end until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, nearly sixty years after the founding of the free Haitian republic.”

“In 1825, twenty-two years after L’Ouverture’s death, the Haitian army was no longer the feared fighting force it had once been. France, threatening to reenslave Haitians, imposed an ordinance requiring from Haiti a payment of 150 million francs and a 50 percent tariff reduction for all French ships docking in Haiti.* To meet the first payment of 30 million francs under the terms of the ordinance, the government of Haiti was constrained to borrow the full amount from a private French bank, MM Ch Ternaux Grandolphe it Cie.”

“After extended negotiations, in 1838, under the Traite’ d’Amitie’ (Treaty of Friendship), the original obligation of 150 million francs was reduced to 90 million francs, with the government of Haiti required to make thirty annual payments of 2 million francs in order to pay off the 60 million franc balance. Haiti had to make these payments in addition to payments it had been making to a succession of private banks from which it had to borrow at onerous interest rates in order to meet the terms of its original obligation to France.”

“And forcing slaves who had won their freedom to compensate their former masters for their lost property was recognized, even in the 19th century, as a violation of human rights and international laws. By the time of the 1825 Ordinance, the international slave trade had been abolished and the reintroduction of slavery into free territories forbidden by the Second Treaty of Paris and the Congress of Vienna – both of which France had signed in 1815. Human Rights Advocates
*From a statement by Human Rights Advocates, an American organization that supports efforts to win restitution from France for the Haitian people: “Compare the (French-) imposed cost of Haiti’s independence – 150,000,000 francs – to the price paid by the United States to France for the Louisiana purchase – 80,000,000 francs for an area of land seventy-four times that of Haiti and one can only begin to sense the enormity of the reparations burden and the extortionate terms imposed.”

“As late as 1915, 111 years after the successful slave revolt, some 80 percent of the Haitian government’s resources were being paid out in debt service to French and American banks on loans that had been made to enable Haiti to pay reparations to France.”

“In 1922, seven years into a nineteen-year American military occupation of Haiti that resulted in 15,000 Haitian deaths, the United States imposed a $16 million loan on the Haitian government to pay off its “debt” to France.”

“The American loan was finally paid off in 1947. Haiti was left virtually bankrupt, its workforce in desperate straits.”

“The Haitian economy has never recovered from the financial havoc France (and America) wreaked upon it, during and after slavery.”

Agony, page 57;

“On April 7, 2003, The Bicentennial of Toussaint L’Overture’s death, President Aristide announced the findings of a restitution commission formed by his government. The commission determined that France owed Haiti $21 billion, the value in current dollars of the money France extorted from Haiti following its successful slave rebellion. On October 12, 2003, the president convened a four-day international conference of experts at Haiti’s National Palace to further discuss Haiti’s restitution claim against France for repayment of the debt. Among the participants were French historian, human rights commissioner, and author of The Crime of Napoleon, Claube Ribbe, and Tulane law school professor Gunther Handl, a respected authority on international law.”

Indeed, much of Haiti’s current problems are directly attributable to the exploitation and repression during France’s colonial rule, as well as the brutal, far-reaching measures imposed on Haiti by the major powers in response to Haiti’s declaration of independence… Arguments supporting France’s right to have drained Haiti’s treasury were not persuasive 200 years ago, and they are not persuasive now. As legal scholars and litigants, we are willing to work with Haiti to seek redress from France, and this deserves broad-based international support.”

Professor Charles Ogletree
Harvard Law School

“France was not the only Western society that would capitalize an industrial economy with proceeds amassed from slave labor. The United States, Spain, Holland, Denmark, and Great Britain would do much the same.”

“The personal and public wealth of Britain created by slave labour was a crucial element in the accumulation of capital that made the industrial revolution possible, and the surviving profits have remained a bold element with specific families and within British society generally, cascading down from generation to generation, in John Major’s felicitous phrase. In this context, the demand for reparations is a serious position, similar to the claim put forward by the nations of Holocaust survivors for the return of property stolen by the Nazis. Black people whose forebears were slaves, victims of that other Holocaust [Maafa], are simply asking for the stolen fruits of their ancestors’ labour power to be given back to their rightful heirs.”

Richard Gott
Guardian
January 17, 2007

“If Britain owes reparations to the descendants of the enslaved Africans whose uncompensated labor, in large part, financed Britain’s industrial revolution, France owes Haiti a great deal more than the $21 billion Haiti applied for in late 2003.”

“Over a century and a half, France not only appropriated the worth of Haiti’s enslaved population’s toil but also forced Haiti to pay reparations to France following the Haitian revolution. France’s real debt to Haiti thus amounts to the $21 billion France exacted, in addition to the assessed value of the labor of the Africans France enslaved in Haiti from the mid-seventh century to the end of the slave revolt in 1804.”

“One month after the conference, in December 2003, French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin sent his sister to Port-au-Prince to tell Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected president, that it was time for him to step down.”

From “Quitting America”, Randall writes, page 200;

“I’ll try to make this as painless as possible, but Americans really must learn that one needs to know, at least, a little of what went on in the past to have any chance at all of understanding the present. Between Toussaint’s heroic rebellion of 1791 and Aristide’s stunning election in 1991 (with 67 percent of the vote to the U.S.-supported candidate, Marc Bazin’s, 14 percent), the United States has done documentably some quite awful things to the people of Haiti:”

• During the rebellion itself, the United States joined European powers in aiding France’s violent suppression of the slave uprising.
• The United States blocked Haiti’s participation in the Western Hemisphere Panama Conference of 1825 and did not recognize Haiti until 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln thought of Haiti as a convenient repository for freed American slaves. Said Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina in 1824: “We never can acknowledge her independence…. The peace and safety of a large portion of our union forbids us even to discuss it.”
• Placatory toward France, the United States accommodated its European ally as France pressed Haiti for 150 million francs to be paid in reparations to the slave plantocracy for losses suffered in the slave’s successful quest for freedom. This served early on to destroy the new black republic’s fragile economy.
• During the American military occupation of Haiti, which began under President Woodrow Wilson on July 28, 1915, and lasted for nineteen years, de facto slavery in Haiti was reinstituted; Haiti’s constitutional system was dismantled; 226,000 acres of Haitian soil were given over in concessional lease arrangements to American corporations; fifty thousand peasants were dispossessed in the North alone; workers were forced to toil for twenty cents a day, and the U.S. Marine Corps” “pacification” efforts claimed up to fifteen thousand lives.
• In 1937, three years after the American occupation had ended, Rafael Trujillo, ruler of the neighboring Dominican Republic, ordered troops to undertake a massacre of Haitians that claimed eighteen thousand to thirty-five thousand lives. Afterward, Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state, said: “President Trujillo is one of the greatest men in Central America and in most of South America.”
• President John F. Kennedy provided the murderous Haitian dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier with broad military assistance, in the words of Noam Chomsky, “as a part of a general program of extending U.S. control over the security forces in Latin America, a long-standing project carried a long step forward by the Kennedy intellectuals, who recognized that ‘in the Latin American cultural environment’ the military must be prepared to remove government leaders from office whenever, in the judgment of the military, the conduct of those leaders is injurious to the welfare of the nation.”
• Under Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the ruthless dictator’s ruthless son, the United States funded efforts to establish American assembly plants in an environment of terror and pittance wages. Chomsky: “The consequences were profits for U.S. manufactures and the Haitian superrich, and a decline of fifty-six percent in Haitian wages through the 1980’s.”
• The United States provided the post-Duvalier National Council of Government (NCG) with $2.8 million in its first year, a year in which the NCG killed more Haitian civilians than Jean-Claude Duvalier had killed in fifteen.


Now you know that the aid being given to Haiti is no more than reimbursement. Aid tends to make money for U.S. companies because goods and services are paid by taxpayers’ money to these companies providing the goods and services.

Now we know.
By Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.