Cancel Haiti’s Debt petition — Oxfam International
Alex von Tunzelmann, writing for The Times, explains how Haiti became so indebted in the first place:
The appalling state of the country is a direct result of having offended a quite different celestial authority — the French. France gained the western third of the island of Hispaniola — the territory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and coffee, supported by an unprecedented increase in the importation of African slaves. Economically, the result was a success, but life as a slave was intolerable. Living conditions were squalid, disease was rife, and beatings and abuses were universal. The slaves’ life expectancy was 21 years. After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.
For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.
Here’s another reason why I opposed the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Give war criminals like Blair an inch and they’ll take the rope and go on to invade the rest of the world:
Wood told the inquiry that some ministers and even the then prime minister, Tony Blair, used to privately claim that the Nato bombing of Kosovo in 1999 provided a useful precedent for going to war in Iraq.
The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war is already running a propaganda campaign that it “won’t be a whitewash.”
But you only need to realise that its members were appointed by Gordon Brown — one of the perpetrators — and read the terms of reference to realise this is a whitewash before it even starts.
Jacqui Janes believes her son is dead because the war in Afghanistan is under-resourced. He’s not. He’s dead because he was fighting an unjust war. The stated aim of the invasion of Afghanistan was to find Osama bin Laden and other high-ranking Al-Qaeda members. On 14 October, 2001, the Taliban publicly offered to hand over Osama…
They invade and lay waste another country, destroy the lives of millions of Iraqis for generations to come, all on some trumped up drivel about “weapons of mass destruction.” Now they’re arguing over the real reason. Oil. It’s not enough that control of Iraq’s crude is being divvied up amongst the capitalists of the world.…
‘No credible evidence’ of Iranian nuclear weapons, says UN inspector: The UN’s chief weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, said today he had seen “no credible evidence” that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, rejecting British intelligence allegations that a weapons programme has been going on for at least four years. Anyone surprised by this is just a fucking…
The Guardian: ‘Memoirs to reveal Dick Cheney thought Bush had gone soft on war on terror.’ Who knows what dark place we’d all be in if this man had become U.S. President.
Ahh, yes, there’s nothing like a little American exceptionalism to get one going in the morning. According to Reuters, Colonel Greg Julian, a U.S. military spokesman in Kabul, has been complaining that the Taliban is violating international law by parading a captured U.S. soldier on camera. It seems Colonel Julian didn’t get the memo: the…
Afghanistan is spun as a war we should be fighting. In fact, a fact long forgotten by the Western media and others involved in the invasion of Afghanistan is that, on 14 October, 2001, the Taliban publicly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third country, provided the U.S. halted the illegal bombing…
Chris Walker, writing to the The Herald (webpage removed):
It’s one of life’s more savage ironies, but one which has become drearily familiar, that your headline “Death toll rises in Afghanistan” (Leader, The Herald, July 11) means British military fatalities.
These are given piquancy because they exceed similar losses incurred in Iraq. Thus the headline.
As a matter of fact, combined, they approximate the loss of Iraqi civilian lives only last week — repeat, week — in Mosul and Baghdad. But that’s how war’s rhythms (and its successes and failures) are calibrated. That hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis have died since 2001 hardly raises an eyebrow, far less engendering a headline. But, then, death “over there” was held to be one of the reasons for invasion, and for stopping it “over here”, on the streets of Leeds, London or Glasgow. Or so it is said. Thus death over there, excepting ours, is inconsequential in our mindset: even a million deaths by invasion and occupation.