Haitian independence debt
[15] Between the years of 1697 and 1804, French colonists brought 800,000 West African slaves to what was then known as Saint-Domingue to work on the vast plantations.
[20] Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Governor-General of Haiti, ordered the execution of remaining whites; in response, Thomas Jefferson, United States President, feared a slave revolt would spread to the United States, ceased the aid that was initiated by his predecessor John Adams and sought the international isolation of Haiti.
[24][25] The Haitian diplomat and politician, Jacques Nicolas Léger writes that even Simón Bolívar ignored Haiti when he called the Congress of Panama for fear of offending the United States.
Nevertheless, the French calculation of the indemnification (made in 1825 and confirmed in 1826) was based on articles 44 and 48 of the Code Noir, which established that the enslaved labourers on an estate in the preceding 30 years constituted 30–60 percent of the property value.
[27] Haiti had hoped that the United Kingdom would support their recognition due to Britain's strained relationship with France, even providing British merchants lower import duties, though during the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Britain agreed not to prevent France's actions by "whatever means possible, including that of arms, to recover Saint-Domingue and to subdue the inhabitants of that colony".
Despite their anti-colonial assertion in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the American government refused to recognize Haiti, largely due to opposition by Southern slaveowners.
[28] By 1824, President Boyer began to prepare Haiti for a defensive war, moving armaments inland to provide increased protection.
[28] As a show of force, captain Ange René Armand, baron de Mackau, in the ship La Circe, along with two men-of-war, arrived at Port-au-Prince on 3 July 1825.
[14][28] Soon after, more warships led by admirals Pierre Roch Jurien de La Gravière and Grivel arrived at Haiti.
The present inhabitants of the French part of Saint-Domingue shall pay at the Caisse des Dépots et Consignations of France, in five annual instalments, the first one due on 31 December 1825, the sum of one hundred and fifty millions of francs, in order to compensate the former colonists who may claim an indemnity.
[28] The final discussions between France and Haiti regarding the signing of the Ordinance took place between the months of April and July 1825.
Whatever the political expediency might have been (and there seemed to be none), Charles X was not of a disposition to reward a revolutionary Republic at the expense of a regime he viewed very much as kindred.
[4][28] Ternaux Gandolphe et Cie seized assets of the Haitian government for failing to pay on its loan, though the Tribunal de la Seine overturned these actions on 2 May 1828.
[28][2][22][33] President Boyer, who agreed to make the payments to prevent an invasion, was forced from Haiti in 1843 by citizens who demanded lower taxes and more rights.
[4] By the late 1800s, eighty percent of Haiti's wealth was being used to pay foreign debt; France was the highest collector, followed by the German Empire and the United States.
[9] On the board of the BNH was Édouard Delessert, the great-grandson of French slave trader and owner Jean-Joseph de Laborde who established himself when France controlled Haiti.
[9] Under the French-controlled BNH, Haitian funds were overseen by France and all transactions generated commissions, with CIC shareholders profits often being larger than the entire budget for Haiti's public works.
[37] Six weeks later, the United States seized control of Haiti's customs houses, administrative institutions, banks and the national treasury, with the United States using a total of forty percent of Haiti's national income to repay debts to American and French banks for the next nineteen years until 1934.
[39][11] Under U.S. government control, a total of forty percent of Haiti's national income was designated to repay debts to American and French banks.
Haiti could potentially have experienced a level of development on par with neighboring Caribbean island nations that gained independence in the early 19th century, such as the Dominican Republic and Jamaica.
[40][41][42] French and Haitian officials later claimed to The New York Times that Aristide's calls for reparations led to French and Haitian officials collaborating with the United States on removing Aristide because France feared that discussions of reparations would set a precedent for other former colonies, such as Algeria.
However, the Security Council voted unanimously to send troops into Haiti three days later, just hours after Aristide's controversial resignation.
The provisional prime minister Gérard Latortue who assumed office after the coup would later rescind the reparations demand, calling it "ridiculous" and "illegal".
[43] Myrtha Desulme, chairperson of the Haiti-Jamaica Exchange Committee, told IPS, "I believe that [the call for reparations] could have something to do with it, because they [France] were definitely not happy about it, and made some very hostile comments ...
[45] A number of commentators, for example The New York Times’ Matt Apuzzo, Selam Gebrekidan, Constant Méheut, and Catherine Porter, analyze how Haiti’s current troubles stem from its colonial past [46] drawing references from the early 19th-century indemnity demand and how it had severely depleted the Haitian government's treasury and economic capabilities.
