Haiti's 'odious debt' must be completely and unconditionally cancelled

Haiti was partially destroyed by an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale. We have all shed tears and the media, as it bombards us with apocalyptic images, reports on generous financial pledges that various states have made. Haiti needs to be rebuilt. But most mainstream comments fail to look beyond the terrible earthquake. While we are told that Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world, no explanations of why that is so are provided. We are led to believe that poverty just happened, that it is a situation beyond remedy, that Haiti is an 'accursed land'.

There is no doubt that this natural disaster has led to considerable and unforeseeable material and human damage. Emergency aid is, therefore, urgently needed and everyone can agree on this point. This earthquake, however, was not the root cause of Haiti's poverty and squalor. This country needs to be rebuilt because it has been stripped of its means to rebuild itself. Haiti is neither a free nor a sovereign country. In recent years, its domestic policy choices have been made by a government constantly under pressure and orders coming from outside the country and by manoeuvres carried out by the local elites.

There are few political or media commentators who note Haiti's independence gained in 1804, after a hard-fought struggle against Napoleon's French armies. Rather than focusing on their fight for human rights, the traits attributed to Haitians are those of savagery and violence. Eduardo Galeano talks about Régis Debray Commission report preferred to scrap the idea of repaying this sum on the pretext that it was 'legally unfounded' and that this action would open a 'Pandora's box'. The Haitian government's request was rejected by France; no compensation was warranted. Moreover, France does not recognise the role it played in the shameful present it gave to the dictator-in-exile 'Baby Doc' Duvalier, by granting him political refugee status and, thus, immunity.

'Papa Doc' Duvalier's rule began with the help of the United States in 1957; the Duvalier dictatorship lasted until 1986 when his son Baby Doc was thrown out by a popular uprising. The violent dictatorship, broadly supported by Western countries, ravaged the country for almost 30 years. It was marked by an exponential growth in Haiti's debt. Between 1957 and 1986, foreign debt had multiplied 17.5 times. At the time Duvalier fled, it amounted to US$750 million. It then rose, through interest and penalties, to more than US$1,884 million.[2] This debt, far from serving the interests of the impoverished population, was actually aimed at enriching the ruling regime; it is therefore in legal terms an 'odious debt'.

A recent inquiry reveals that the Duvalier family's personal wealth (well protected by their Western bank accounts) amounted to US$900 million, or in other words, a greater sum than the total debt of the country at the time Baby Doc fled. A trial is currently taking place before the Swiss courts for the restitution of goods and assets to the state of Haiti, embezzled during the Duvalier dictatorship. For the moment, these assets remain frozen by the Swiss bank UBS, which has put forward unacceptable conditions for the restitution of these funds.[3]

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, by contrast, was enthusiastically elected by the people of Haiti. He was, however, soon accused of corruption, before being put back in office as a United States puppet and finally ousted by the US army. So Aristide, unfortunately, is not innocent in relation to debt and the embezzlement of funds. Furthermore, according to the World Bank, between 1995 and 2001 the debt service, that is to say capital and the reimbursed interests, had reached the considerable sum of US$321 million.

All current financial aid announced following the earthquake is already lost to the debt repayment! According to the latest estimates, more than 80 per cent of Haiti's foreign debt is with the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IBD), with up to 40 per cent each. Under these institutions' instructions, the Haitian government applied 'structural adjustment plans', now disguised as 'poverty reduction strategy papers' (PRSPs). In exchange for contracting more loans, Haiti has been given some insignificant debt relief or cancellations, which cast the creditors in a positive light. The Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative (HIPC), for which Haiti was accepted, is a typical odious-debt laundering manoeuvre, as was the case with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).[4] Odious debt is replaced by new, so-called legitimate loans. The Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM) views these new loans as a key part of Haiti's odious debt as they are used to pay off the old debt. The offence continues to be committed.

In 2006, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Paris Club accepted that the HIPC initiative would include Haiti, the whole stock of public foreign debt totalled US$1,337 million. At the time of completion of the initiative (in June 2009), the debt totalled US$1,884 million. The cancellation of a debt totalling US$1,200 million dollars was decided so as to 'make the debt bearable'. Meanwhile, the structural adjustment plans wreaked havoc, especially in the agricultural sector, the effects of which reached their peak at the time of the 2008 food crisis. Haitian peasant farming suffered from US agricultural goods dumping.

As CADTM stresses, 'The macro-economic policies supported by Washington, the UN, the IMF and the World Bank do not concern themselves at all with the need to develop and protect domestic markets. The only concern of their policies is to produce at the lowest price for exportation on the global markets.'[5] It is, therefore, a scandal to hear the IMF say that it is 'ready to play [its] role with the appropriate support in these areas of competence.'

As stated in the recent international appeal, CADTM Belgium (Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt). He is the author of 'Bank of the South. An Alternative to the IMF-World Bank', 'The World Bank, A Critical Primer', 'Between The Lines' and 'Your Money or Your Life, The Tyranny of Global Finance'. Sophie Perchellet is vice-president of CADTM France (Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt).
* This article was first published in [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES
[1] http://www.haitijustice.com
[2] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2009/cr09288.pdf (page 43)
[3] http://www.cadtm.org/Le-CADTM-exige-que-la-restitution
[4] See the CADTM magazine, In favour of an audit of Congolese debt, Liège, 2007 online: http://www.cadtm.org/spip.php?page=imprimer&id_article=2599
[5] See http://www.cadtm.org/Haiti-Le-gouvernement-mene-une
[6] http://www.cadtm.org/Solidarity-and-respect-for-Popular