A very good com­men­tary from The Nation asks the ques­tion: What is Haiti Owed? Writer Richard Kim goes beyond talk­ing about the res­cue or even the restora­tion of Haiti. Instead, Kim talks about what mea­sures do inter­na­tional banks and gov­ern­ments need to take to make Haiti a more sta­ble nation, and one that is on the same eco­nomic play­ing field as other countries.

Kim begins with some his­tory as to how Haiti got into it’s mis­er­able state in the first place. With folk­lore and biased opin­ions being heard last week we made that his­tory a focus on for our snip­pet. Kim goes into some pos­si­ble solu­tions for Haiti to fin­ish his piece, and it is well worth read­ing the whole commentary.

Haiti’s vul­ner­a­bil­ity to nat­ural dis­as­ters, its food short­ages, poverty, defor­esta­tion and lack of infra­struc­ture, are not acci­den­tal. To say that it is the poor­est nation in the West­ern hemi­sphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor–by France, the United States, Great Britain, other West­ern pow­ers and by the IMF and the World Bank.

Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pur­su­ing the same kinds of poli­cies that made Haiti a geog­ra­phy of pre­car­i­ous­ness even before the quake. To great fan­fare, the IMF announced a new $100 mil­lion loan to Haiti on Thurs­day. In one cru­cial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a mas­sive cash infu­sion. But the new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facil­ity, to which Haiti already has $165 mil­lion in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with con­di­tions, includ­ing rais­ing prices for elec­tric­ity, refus­ing pay increases to all pub­lic employ­ees except those mak­ing min­i­mum wage and keep­ing infla­tion low. They say that the new loans would impose these same con­di­tions. In other words, in the face of this lat­est tragedy, the IMF is still using cri­sis and debt as lever­age to com­pel neolib­eral reforms.

For Haiti, this is his­tory repeated. As his­to­ri­ans have doc­u­mented, the impov­er­ish­ment of Haiti began in the ear­li­est decades of its inde­pen­dence, when Haiti’s slaves and free gens de couleur ral­lied to lib­er­ate the coun­try from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was liv­ing under a new kind of bondage–external debt. In order to keep the French and other West­ern pow­ers from enforc­ing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 mil­lion francs in repa­ra­tions to French slave own­ers (yes, that’s right, freed slaves were forced to com­pen­sate their for­mer mas­ters for their lib­erty). In order to do that, they bor­rowed mil­lions from French banks and then from the US and Ger­many. As Alex von Tun­zel­mann pointed out, “by 1900, it [Haiti] was spend­ing 80 per­cent of its national bud­get on repayments.”

It took Haiti 122 years, but in 1947 the nation paid off about 60 per­cent, or 90 mil­lion francs, of this debt (it was able to nego­ti­ate a reduc­tion in 1838). In 2003, then-President Aris­tide called on France to pay resti­tu­tion for this sum–valued in 2003 dol­lars at over $21 bil­lion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d’etat; he claims he left the coun­try under armed pres­sure from the US.

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