French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that historic injustice was imposed on Haiti when it was forced to pay a colossal indemnity to France in exchange for its independence 200 years ago.
Macron also announced the creation of a joint French-Haitian historical commission to ‘’examine our shared past’’ and assess relations, but did not directly address longstanding Haitian demands for reparations.
France ″subjected the people of Haiti to a heavy financial indemnity, … This decision placed a price on the freedom of a young nation, which was thus confronted with the unjust force of history from its very inception,’’ Macron said in a statement.
It’s good that the head of state says so publicly. I won’t exactly hold my breath for anything beyond this acknowledgement to happen, sadly.
We’re coming up on the 1-year anniversary of Macron dissolving the French Parliament, which is when he will be legally allowed to dissolve it again. The last time he hoped to bolster his party by capitalizing on the country’s reactance to the far-right surge in the (then-) recent European Parliament elections, but the left got their shit together and managed to form a coalition that arrived ahead of both the far-right and macron’s party. This time around he seems to be courting the moderate left a lot harder: a few weeks ago he announced that France could formally recognize a Palestinian State later this summer, last week he courted American Scientists fleeing the Trump Administration, and now this.
It stinks of opportunism, and I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him. Still, this is better than him not saying anything. It is a disgrace that France made Haiti trade their freedom on the basis of compensating for the market price of the former slaves, and has (to my knowledge) never given back a cent.
Opportunism indeed. Maybe he’s thinking France needs any potential business allies in the future now that the US might be gone out of the picture, although the reconstruction of Haiti and building a consumption-happy middle-class there would take long time… If that’s the case, it might be bound to remain a pale attempt compared to China showering investments into African and Asian infrastructure.