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France refuses to pay slavery reparations

French President François Hollande announced on Friday that France would not be paying reparations for the role of the state-owned CDC bank in the slave trade, despite allegations that a €21 billion debt has crippled Haiti for centuries.

Published: 10 May 2013 15:29 CEST
France refuses to pay slavery reparations
A colonial fresco in Paris depicts French-run slavery. On May 10th France said it would not pay the equivalent of €20 billion in reparations involving the CDC bank (right.) Photos: Verdy/Piermont/AFP

Hollande on Friday ruled out the payment of reparations for slavery as a rights group announced a suit against state-owned bank CDC over its role in the trade.

"What has been, has been," Hollande said in a speech to mark France's slavery remembrance day. "History cannot be rubbed out. It cannot be subjected to an accounting process that… would be impossible to complete."

France's Representative Council of Black Associations (CRAN) announced it will on Monday be serving a writ on the bank CDC (Caisse des depots) over its role in the slave trade in general and events surrounding Haitian independence in particular.

"The CDC was an accomplice to a crime against humanity," CRAN President Louis-Georges Tin told reporters. "It played a considerable role in the slave trade."

Haiti won its independence from France in 1804 after the celebrated slave revolt that had been inspired by the French revolution of 1789.

But the French navy subsequently blockaded the Caribbean country and extracted massive compensation for the colonial power's property losses.

According to Tin, the amounts paid to France via the CDC between 1825 and 1946 were the equivalent of $21 billion in today's money and contributed to a legacy of underdevelopment that has left Haiti as one of the poorest countries on the planet.

"This ransom condemned Haiti to an infernal spiral of instability and misery," he added.

Legal experts believe that CRAN's action has little prospect of making headway through the French courts, with even the organisation's own lawyer, Norbert Tricaud, implicitly admitting as much.

"If we are presenting this suit, it is to promote debate," Tricaud said.

In the United States, a class action aimed at forcing the bank JP Morgan and 17 other companies to pay reparations for their involvement in slavery was dismissed in 2004.

JP Morgan subsequently issued a public apology over the action of two of its predecessor banks, which had accepted slaves as collateral on loans.

The bank also agreed to set up a $5 million scholarship fund to help with young blacks from poor backgrounds with education costs.

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TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

Published: 16 May 2023 08:29 CEST
France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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