19 July, 2010 — HLLN
Ezili Dantò Note: I wrote a “Readers comment” to the New York Time’s Lede Blog coverage of the hoax about the independence debt at the Robert Mackey article entitled “France Will Not Repay Haiti Reparations.” New York Times blog chose not to print the comment. One of my favorite song is Billy Holiday’s – God Bless the Child Who Has Her OWN. So, for the Ezili Network, here’s the comment this mainstream media won’t print:
“First let me say there are two mistakes in this New York Times blog, one the writer or his editor make themselves, the other is in the statement made by the hoaxers. The title of this piece is France Will Not Repay Haiti Reparations. It’s wrong because the debt is not about reparations but restitution. When we get around to asking for the 300-years of free labor and slavery that will be asking for reparations (1503 to 1803) when Haiti won in combat with France, Britain, Spain and over a US embargo. What Haitians are asking for is RESTITUTION of the Independence debt Ayisyen then had to pay to France and other nationalities (including US families in what is now Louisiana/Philadelphia) who owned our grangrans as “their property” even after our grangrans had beat these three nations in combat.
This hoax affords us Ayisyen the opportunity to tell Haiti’s history and not the mainstream’s colonial narrative. It’s a rare chance and a good way to educate the world on France’s hypocrisy and heinous avarice. France and its allies forced Haiti to pay for its Independence after Haitians had won in combat and after Haitians had given France and Spain a total of 300 years of free labor and been brutalized, raped, dehumanized and bred in farms and plantations, like animals, by these white settlers/colonists during the 300 years of enslavement. The Independence debt Haiti was forced to pay, at the point of 300 French canons, and under the power of the now united colonists, who were fighting amongst themselves before, was almost ten (10) times more than US President Jefferson paid (15 million) France for the Louisiana Territory which doubled the size of the United States by 13 States. Haiti, the small size of Rhode Island, was permanently impoverished for two centuries. It took Haiti 122 years to finish paying the debt. We won’t mention the usurious interest rates, the extortion, constant modification, penalties, and doubling of tariffs for goods from Haiti whenever France wanted more money, nor the fact that in order to pay France Haiti had to close all the rural schools and put everyone on farms to harvest cash crops & food for export to feed France. 122-years!
What’s wrong about the hoax, which we at Ezili’s HLLN, who have had a petition on-line for 6-years now and sent letters to the French Embassy regularly reminding them of the debt to be paid is that the fake statement says France owes from 1825 to 1947. That’s not technically true. It wasn’t just France that kept bullying defenseless Haiti. But after France forced the Independence Debt on Haiti, all the US/Euro businessmen who wanted an easy buck kept coming back to pillage Haiti – the Dutch, Germans, English, Spanish, et al. The US alone, in addition a trade and sea embargo on Haiti similar to that which is now put on Cuba, entered Haiti waters with gunboats more than 24 times from the time of Haiti’s independence – reducing Haiti to debt slavery, denying her the right to trade, brutalizing Haiti’s peoples, terrorizing her merchants, crippling her economy, and forcing the Haitian people to depend on the US. – before finally occupying the country outright from 1915-1934. And then during the 19year brutal US occupation where Haiti’s gold treasury was flown to New York, the corvee established and the brutal US-trained Haitian army from School of the Americas left in Haiti to terrorize the people up until the election of President Aristide by the people to get rid of these Tonton Macoutes and Fort Bening, Georgia-trained death squads, but the Empire came back with the UN as cover, two Bush Regime changes destroyed Haiti’s fledging democracy and today Haiti is under occupation again under Obama, no less.
The hoax statement is wrong because in 1914, US took over the Independence Debt – another modification (guess to whose advantage!?) paid off France and Haiti had to pay the US up until 1947. The poorest nation paying the richest a slave trade debt until 1947!
Today, the US, USAID, Clinton-Bush Fund and over 14,000 NGOS are busy collecting funds, private and public, in the name of the suffering earthquake victims; while said same ilks’ corpotocracy, under a multi-national UN firepower cover have been operating in Haiti for 6-years now, with impunity and without regards to the Black public’s welfare or for environmental safety, busy pillaging ocean seabeds in Haiti, mining Haiti’s gold, iridium, oil, coal and copper (See Haiti’s Riches http://bit.ly/l960t; mining http://bit.ly/viqxn); while US-chemical-pharmaceutical-agribusiness deplete Haiti’s soil, destroy small farmers, dump excess rice, food, manufactured products (vaccines, chemical fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, et al ) they want a market for on Haiti’s starving peoples, financed by their good friends at USAID/WB as “aid” to Haitians and resold to the DR and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the impoverished Haiti masses’ unearned suffering, is, as Randall Robinson, writes, “an unbroken agony.”
Those who wish to learn more about Ezili’s HLLN work demanding return of the Independence Debt to Haiti, may go to:
2. Sign our on-line petition (http://bit.ly/2Fqsjq)
The New Dark Age 
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