Thread by @ZachWLambert

Many of Haiti's ongoing issues are the direct result of reparations.

Not reparations paid to formerly enslaved people and their descendants. That has never happened.

These reparations were paid to enslavers by the people they enslaved.

a thread

In 1791, self-liberated slaves rose up against French colonial rule and what became known as the Haitian Revolution began.

It ended in 1804 with Haiti declaring its independence from France, but the French refused to recognize Haitian independence for another 20 years.

In 1825, King Charles X said France would recognize Haiti’s independence, but it with a cost.

Haiti was required to pay former French slaveowners 150 million francs (~$21 billion today) because they claimed to have lost income when they could no longer enslave the Haitians.

The French delivered this demand by sailing 14 battleships carrying more than 500 cannons into Port-Au-Prince. Haitian refusal would have certainly meant another war and possibly complete annihilation.

As one writer put it, “this was not diplomacy. It was extortion.”

So Haiti agreed to pay 150 million francs to the French. A number that amounted to 10 times more than Haiti’s annual budget.

Guess who they had to borrow money from in order to keep from defaulting on their first few payments?

French and American banks.

The fees and extremely high compounding interest only drove the debt higher.

By the late 1800’s, 80% of Haiti’s wealth was devoted to paying off this debt.

I'm gonna say that again, but it's an absolutely insane number: 80% of Haiti's wealth was used for debt service.

In 1914, the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) was a primary holder of Haitian debt.

They pressured Woodrow Wilson into sending Marines to occupy Haiti for the purpose of taking $500k from the Haitian reserves and bringing it back to the Citibank vaults.

Dan Sterling is a Virginia-based writer who is married to a Haitian national. In an article he wrote about this for Forbes, he says this:

“My father-in-law still recalls the patriotic song he was taught as a Haitian schoolboy...

forbes.com/sites/realspin…

its poignant lyrics urging all Haitians to reach into their own pockets to help their government raise the amount that was still 'owed' to France. Thanks to voluntary contributions from Haiti’s citizens, most of whom were desperately poor, that debt was finally settled in 1947.

But decades of making regular payments had rendered the Haitian government chronically insolvent, helping to create a pervasive climate of instability from which the country still hasn’t recovered. France’s demand for reparations from Haiti seems comically outrageous today –

equivalent to a kidnapper suing his escaped hostage for the cost of fixing a window that had been broken during the escape.

While France still ranks among the world’s wealthiest nations, Haiti – with a per-capita annual income of $350...

a power grid that fails on a regular basis and a network of roads that’s more than 50-percent unpaved – is plagued by drought, food shortages and a struggling economy.” Dan Sterling

Obviously, there have been other factors which have contributed to the conditions in Haiti today, natural disasters and corrupt governments to name a few, but 122 years of paying reparations to their former enslavers was absolutely crippling.

After 35 years of American occupation and economic control, Haiti finally made their last payment in 1947 to Citibank.

Today, Haiti has a per capita annual income almost 100 times lower than France and almost 200 times lower than the US.

According to Britannica, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere by many measures with 4/5th of its population lives in absolute poverty and the continue to struggle mightily with violence and corruption.

When we learn all of that, it helps us understand why 15,000 Haitians came to our border seeking asylum last week.

And hopefully, it helps propel us into actually doing something to right this series of wrongs.

I'm not talking about charity, either. The Haitian people don't need donations, they need justice.

Charity makes us feel better. Justice makes things right.