If we’re to believe the G7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to getting something it has deserved for a very long time: full “forgiveness” of its foreign debt.[rssbreak]
In Port-?au-?Prince, Haitian economist Camille Chalmers has been watching these developments with cautious optimism. Debt cancellation is a good start, he told Al Jazeera English, but “it’s time to go much further. We have to talk about reparations and restitution for the devastating consequences of debt.”
In this telling, the whole idea that Haiti is a debtor needs to be abandoned. Haiti, he argues, is a creditor – and it is we in the West who are deeply in arrears.
Our debt to Haiti stems from several sources. Here, far too briefly, are highlights of the case.
The Slavery Debt – When Haitians won their independence from France in 1804, they would have had every right to claim reparations from the powers that had profited from three centuries of stolen labour. France, however, was convinced that it was Haitians who had stolen the property of slave owners.
So in 1825, with a flotilla of ships stationed off the coast threatening to re-?enslave the former colony, King Charles X came to collect: 90 million gold francs – 10 times Haiti’s annual revenue at the time. The young nation was shackled to a debt that would take 122 years to pay off.
In 2003, Haitian President Jean-?Bertrand Aristide, facing a crippling economic embargo, announced that Haiti would sue the French government over that long-?ago heist. “Our argument,” Aristide’s former lawyer Ira Kurzban told me, “was that the contract was an invalid agreement because it was based on the threat of re-?enslavement at a time when the international community regarded slavery as an evil.”
But, while trial preparations were under way, Aristide was toppled from power.
The Dictatorship Debt – From 1957 to 1986, Haiti was ruled by the defiantly kleptocratic Duvalier regime. The case against the Duvaliers made it into several courts, which traced Haitian funds to an elaborate network of Swiss bank accounts and lavish properties.
In 1988, Kurzban won a landmark suit against Jean-?Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier when a U.S. District Court in Miami found that the deposed ruler had “misappropriated more than $504,000,000 from public monies.”
Haitians, of course, are still waiting for their payback – but that was only the beginning of their losses. For more than two decades, the country’s creditors insisted that Haitians honour the huge debts incurred by the Duvaliers, estimated at $844 million, much of it owed to institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. In debt service alone, Haitians have paid out tens of millions every year.
Was it legal for foreign lenders to collect on the Duvalier debts when so much of it was never spent in Haiti? Very likely not. As Cephas Lumina, the UN’s independent expert on foreign debt, put it to me, “The case of Haiti is one of the best examples of odious debt in the world. On that basis alone, the debt should be unconditionally cancelled.”
But even if Haiti does see full debt cancellation (a big if), that doesn’t extinguish its right to be compensated for illegal debts already collected.
The Climate Debt – This concept was championed by several developing countries at COP15 in Copenhagen. Wealthy countries that have so spectacularly failed to address the climate crisis they caused owe a debt to the developing countries that are disproportionately facing its effects.
In short: the polluter pays. Haiti has a particularly compelling claim. Haiti’s per capita CO2 emissions are just 1 per cent of U.S. emissions. Yet Haiti is among the hardest hit countries, according to one index, and it’s not only because of geography.
Yes, it faces increasingly heavy storms. But it’s Haiti’s weak infrastructure that turns challenges into disasters and disasters into full-?fledged catastrophes.
The earthquake, though not linked to climate change, is a prime example. This is where all those illegal debt payments may yet extract their most devastating cost. Each payment to a foreign creditor was money not spent on a road, a school, an electrical line.
And that same illegitimate debt empowered the IMF and World Bank to attach onerous conditions to each new loan, requiring Haiti to deregulate its economy and slash its public sector still further. Failure to comply was met with a punishing aid embargo from 2001 to 04, the death knell for Haiti’s public sphere.
This history needs to be confronted now, because it threatens to repeat itself. Haiti’s creditors are already using the need for earthquake aid to push for a fivefold increase in garment-?sector production, some of the most exploitative jobs in the country. Haitians have no status in these talks, because they are regarded as passive recipients of aid – not full and dignified participants in a process of redress and restitution. 3
This column was first published in The Nation (thenation.com), naomiklein.org.
Naomi Klein speaks on Climate Debt at the Inaugural David Lewis Lecture, February 25, 8:30pm, Trinity-?St. Paul’s United Church, $15-$20.
