Pressure mounts on France
to Repay extorted billions to Haiti
by Anthony Fenton
"A group of international
academics and authors has written to Nicolas Sarkozy calling on France
to reimburse the crushing "independence debt" it imposed on Haiti nearly
200 years ago.
The open letter to the French president says the debt,
now worth more than €17bn (£14bn), would cover the rebuilding of the
country after a devastating earthquake that killed more than 250,000
people seven months ago.
Its signatories – including
Noam Chomsky,
the American linguist, Naomi Klein, the Canadian author and activist,
Cornel West, the African-American author and civil rights activist, and
several renowned French philosophers – say that if France repays the
money it would be a solution to the shortfall in international donations
promised following the earthquake."
[More at The Guardian, original letter (to which I am a signatory) in French, published in today's Libération, and here's the English version via C.R.I.M.E.]
- No doubt much to France's chagrin, the publication of the open letter has generated more mass media coverage: New York Times, Al Jazeera, BBC, among others.
- Isabel MacDonald, one of the drafters of the letter, has published an op-ed in today's Toronto Star.
