PARIS (Reuters) -French President Emmanuel Macron is to set up a joint Franco-Haitian commission to examine France’s past with its former Caribbean colony, but he made no mention of the possibility of reparations that Haitian activists have long called for.
Macron said on Thursday that once the commission’s work was completed, it would propose recommendations to both governments.
At last year’s United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD) in Geneva, a coalition of civil society groups said France should repay billions of dollars in reparations to Haiti, pointing to the estimated $21 billion Haiti lost after it paid France following its independence.
At this year’s PFPAD forum in New York, which ended on Thursday with a session on Haiti, its chair Martin Kimani said the commission was an important development as it “acknowledges the need for official engagement with a history long marked by exploitation, violence and enforced silence”.
“The effectiveness of this commission will depend on its willingness to fully recognise the scale and consequences of the so-called independence debt imposed by France,” Kimani said. “It will also depend on who participates, how the process unfolds, and whether it leads to meaningful redress.”
The Caribbean country became the first in the region to win its independence in 1804 after a massive revolt for liberty by enslaved people.
But in a move that many Haitians blame for their continuing turmoil, France imposed a harsh debt on the country for lost income when it recognised independence on April 17, 1825, and that was only fully repaid in 1947.
“Today, on this bicentenary, we must look history in the face,” Macron said. “For France, it also means assuming its share of truth in the construction of memory, so painful for Haiti.”
He described the financial indemnity as a decision that “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 France would stand by Haiti in the face of present-day challenges, notably security, which he said was “an absolute priority”.
Armed gangs control nearly all of Haiti’s capital and surrounding areas and have forced over 1 million people from their homes, contributing to a freezing of the economy and fuelling mass hunger.
Also speaking at the forum, Ericq Pierre, Haiti’s permanent representative at the U.N., said it was crucial to analyse the structural and historical causes of the current crisis in his country.
“We are demanding that justice be done with a clear and restorative act: the full restitution of this unjust debt,” Pierre said.
France has pledged 4 million euros ($4.2 million) to a U.N. fund financing an international mission to help restore security.
Over the course of his two mandates since 2017, Macron has increased some transparency into France’s colonial past, opening access to classified archives and setting up a historian commission on Algeria, among others.
(Reporting by Geert De Clercq and Michel Rose in Paris; Additional reporting by Catarina Demony in LondonEditing by Sudip Kar-Gupta, Alison Williams and Aurora Ellis)
