THE MODERN NATION of Haiti was founded 200 years ago after the first and only successful slave revolt in the Americas. Today it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. To historians, the connection between these two facts has long been obvious. But even as the beleaguered republic launched its bicentennial on Thursday with celebrations marred by protests, debate swirls around a campaign by the Haitian government to link one to the other.
Haiti has called upon France -- the ousted former colonizer of historical Saint-Domingue -- to pay restitution of $21,685,135,571.48. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti first outlined that demand last April, in a speech honoring the 200th anniversary of the death of revolutionary hero Toussaint L'Ouverture. At every stop on the bicentennial trail, the president has repeated his cry. He declared in November, "Poverty today is the result of a 200-year plot . . .. In 1803 and in 2003, this is the same plot. Do you understand my message?" At Thursday's celebration, he announced a new 21-point development program to be funded with the restitution payments.
Why $21 billion? It's the modern equivalent of the 90 million francs Haiti agreed to pay France in 1825, in return for official recognition of Haiti's sovereignty. For two decades following Haitian independence in 1804, the former mother country, with the support of the United States, Britain and Spain, enforced a crippling embargo, accompanied by a threat to recolonize and reenslave Haiti if indemnity wasn't paid for lost property -- i.e., slaves. Haiti, once France's richest colony, agreed to pay the price -- more than twice the value of the entire nation at the time -- but could only afford to do so using high-interest loans from French banks.
Two centuries later, the Haitian government's annual revenues are a mere $237 million, about 1,000 times less than those of France. In his 1994 book, "The Uses of Haiti," Dr. Paul Farmer of Harvard Medical School, a longtime public health advocate in Haiti, ironically described the indemnity as "a business expense," a political necessity that left the country so economically and politically ravaged that democracy could never take root. But in Haiti itself, since the call for restitution went out last April, it's more common to hear those 90 million francs referred to as "ransom."
The rest at....
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/01/04/reparation_day/
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