SHARE
COPY LINK
OPINION: FRANCE AND SLAVERY

REPARATIONS

‘Shameful’ France must pay for slavery legacy

The man leading the fight to make France pay for the crimes against humanity committed during the slave trade tells The Local why the French government must face the truth and how a racist attitude towards its overseas territories has left people living in abject poverty.

'Shameful' France must pay for slavery legacy
Photo: Pierre Verdy/AFP

For Louis-Georges Tin it is a simple matter of forcing France to pay for the legacy of the slave trade in its former colonies such as Haiti and its current overseas territories like the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

The president of the country's Representative Council of Black Associations (CRAN) was dismayed last week when France's head of state President François Hollande said no reparations would be paid out to the descendants of the victims of slavery.

Two days later, however, Justice Minister Christiane Taubira raised hopes again when she suggested that one of CRAN's other demands – that land owned by the French state should be given to descendants of slaves – could be viable.

Tin tells the Local it is time for French governments – which he accuses of racism in their attitude towards France's overseas territories – to finally face the truth and pay up, whether through monetary compensation, the transfer of land, or allowing young people places at French universities.

Louis-Georges Tin:

"Paying reparations is a simple matter of justice. When a crime has been committed, there is a need to pay reparations. That’s the case for any crime.

"The French committed a crime against humanity in its role in the slave trade, so reparations are needed. By refusing to pay, François Hollande is showing he lacks humanity.

"The history of countries like Haiti is obvious. It was devastated by France. At one point it was the richest colony in the world but under France it became the poorest country in the world and Hollande thinks people will be happy if he just offers them a few words?

"It’s a slap in their face. These people are poor, they have nothing to eat. It is unacceptable.

“Marine le Pen, the leader of the far right, congratulated Hollande for his attitude on reparations. I wonder if the president is proud of being supported by her? He should reflect on that.

“Most people say to us: 'No one is interested in reparations and no one cares about it.' But they are wrong.

"The French say we are isolated in our demands, but 63 percent of people in the former colonies are demanding compensation. We also have Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln and Malcolm X on our side. We are not isolated, it’s just that the French aren't listening.

“We have many ways to make it happen, one of which is going to court. Even if we don’t get a positive result against those French banks who were involved in the slave trade, we are at least damaging their image.

"We have the truth and that is always the best way to put pressure on people."

Land is freedom

“Land is hugely significant. In the past, having land for most people was the beginning of a career. If you had land you could live. If you didn't, you had no life. Of course things are different now, but when everyone was a peasant, those without land had no freedom.

“It would be very easy to distribute land. All you need to do is make a list of the available land that belongs to the state and say we will give a certain amount of it to the poorest people. It wouldn't cost anything , it’s a simple measure.”

Government policy towards overseas territories 'shameful and racist'

“The policy of France towards its overseas territories is shameful and there is more than an element of racism involved. In 2008 Eurostat, the EU data agency, revealed that the four poorest departments in Europe are not in Greece or Portugal but in France and of course they are its overseas departments.

“People in France speak about the poverty in the 'banlieues' (estates) but on the island of Réunion there is 60 percent youth unemployment.

"People talk about social housing in France, but in Martinique we talk about slums. The only thing to compare the living conditions of some people in Martinique to is the situation of the Roma people living in makeshift camps and squats in France.

“One example of the racist attitude in the French government towards its former colonies is the use of pesticide named Chlordecone in Guadaloupe and Martinique.

"This pesticide was banned in the US and elsewhere but the descendants of the former slave owners in the French colonies said it was good for the banana plantations so they used it without regard for the impact on people’s health.

"Now we have some of the highest prostate cancer rates in the world.

“There hasn't been much difference between the French governments, both left and right, in their policies towards the former colonies over the years.

"All I can say is that Nicolas Sarkozy did many things that encouraged racism and François Hollande has done nothing to fight it."

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

WAR

WWII wounds remain as Poland seeks German reparations 80 years on

Eight decades after the first Nazi bombs fell on Poland, echoes of the blasts can be heard in the bickering between Warsaw and Berlin over the possibility of billions of euros in war reparations.

WWII wounds remain as Poland seeks German reparations 80 years on
Archive photo shows Adolf Hitler in Poland. Photo: DPA

It was only recently that the neighbours, allies within NATO and the EU, had appeared to have turned the page on World War II.

But that changed with the 2015 election of Poland's Law and Justice (PiS) party, which sees wariness of the EU and Germany as a useful political tool. And the right-wing party has reopened discussion on reparations.

“Poland has yet to receive proper compensation from Germany… We lost six million people over the course of the war — many more than did countries that received major reparations,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said
earlier this month.

“It's not fair. This can't continue.”

READ ALSO: Polish president demands war reparations from Germany

PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski relaunched the issue in 2017, and since then, a parliamentary commission has been working on a new analysis of the extent of Poland's wartime human and material losses.

The figures could be even higher than those drawn up by Poland in 1947, which are equivalent to around 850 billion today, according to the commission head, PiS lawmaker Arkadiusz Mularczyk.

“It's been so many years since the war ended and Germany hasn't reflected on its past. It's more concerned with the stability of its budget than with observing the democratic guidelines of the rule of law and respecting human rights,” Mularczyk told AFP.

He claims “discrimination,” saying Germany provides compensation to other war victims while there are still Poles alive “who experienced the same suffering as the Jewish nation.”

'Reparations closed'

The German government has accepted responsibility for Nazi war atrocities but routinely rejects demands for reparations, be they from Poland or Greece.

“The German government's position remains unchanged. The matter of German reparations is legally and politically closed,” said government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer.

According to Berlin, Poland, then a Soviet satellite, relinquished its claims for reparations to the former communist east Germany – the German Democratic Republic – in 1953.

A cross in a ruin in Wielun, Poland, stands where a church was destroyed at the beginning of the World War II.

In 1990, Poland and a united Germany signed a border agreement after the Two Plus Four conference on the reunification of Germany, followed by a good neighbour agreement in 1991. The question of reparations was never raised, leading Berlin to assume a tacit agreement that the matter had been settled.

But Polish conservatives contest the validity of the 1953 accord, claiming Warsaw acted under pressure from the Soviet Union.

They also focus on insisting that Germany has a “moral duty” in the matter, perhaps trying to avoid it ending up as a thorny legal dispute.

Reparations 'left unsettled'

Poles themselves are divided on the question of reparations.

For Tadeusz Sierandt, who was a child when the Nazis bombed his hometown of Wielun, the matter has been settled since the Allies redrew Poland's borders at the war's end.

At the time Poland lost almost half of its eastern territory to the Soviet Union but it also gained a smaller chunk of land to its west that had belonged to Germany.

“I would just be happy with the land recovered in 1945,” Sierandt, 88, told AFP.

But for historian Tadeusz Olejnik, the current call for reparations remains “morally justified”.

However, there is consensus among Germans that reparations are a closed case.

But at the same time among the country's rising political far-right – especially present in areas bordering Poland – there is talk of rehabilitating the Wehrmacht.

Ahead of the 2017 general election, the co-leader of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alexander Gauland, said Germans “have the right to be proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.”

The comments triggered outrage from German politicians of all stripes, but the criticism did not stop the AfD from becoming the country's first nationalist party to win dozens of seats in parliament since World War II.

Poland has not yet made a formal demand for reparations,  but PiS lawmaker Mularczyk stressed that the issue must be addressed.

“With the issue (of reparations) left unsettled, we reach the point of relativising the role played by the Germans during World War II,” he said.

Two weeks after Germany invaded Poland from the west in 1939, the Soviet Union invaded from the east.

But “the Polish side is not raising the issue of war reparations with Russia right now,” Poland's foreign ministry told AFP, without elaborating.

By Stanislaw Waszak with Mathieu Foulkes in Berlin.

SHOW COMMENTS