Sarkozy in Haiti
February 17, 2010
French President Nicolas Sarkozy will travel to Haiti on Wednesday with a plan to offer reconstruction aid to the quake-stricken country.
France is the latest country to show an interest in setting up an aid and reconstruction program in Haiti, over a month after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince on January 12, reducing most of the capital to rubble.
Officials say Sarkozy will announce details on Wednesday of the French reconstruction plan for the country, if Haitian officials agree to it.
The French president has described the earthquake as "a chance to get Haiti once and for all out of the curse it seems to have been stuck with for such a long time."
Uneasy legacy
As the former colonial power in Haiti, France has a difficult relationship with the Caribbean island. Sarkozy's historic visit, the first ever for a French president, is likely to bring up bitter memories of Haiti's hard-earned independence.
In 1804 Haiti's population - which was primarily made up of slaves - overthrew the colonial rulers in a bloody uprising. Roughly one-third of the population was killed.
In retaliation to the uprising, an international embargo was imposed on Haiti, and France demanded 90 million gold francs as reparations for the "lost property" of French citizens. The calculations factored in the value of the slaves who had freed themselves.
This debt, augmented by international interest rates, continued to hobble the Haitian economy - once the richest of all the world's colonies - until 1947.
Former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted in 2004, has called for France to pay reparations for this legacy.
While Aristide's demands are unlikely to be met, the Associated Press news agency reports one source close to President Sarkozy as describing Wednesday's visit as "an occasion to show that France is mobilizing to give Haitians control of their destiny and to pay past debts."
Most destructive disaster in modern history
France has already indicated it was canceling all of Haiti's 56 million euro ($76 million) debt to Paris.
A study released on Tuesday by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) says the Haitian earthquake could be the most deadly and costly national disaster of modern times, if Haiti's small population and low economic output is factored in.
"In this respect, the Haiti earthquake was vastly more destructive than the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 and the cyclone that hit Myanmar in 2008," an IDB statement said, referring to its highest estimate for the damage caused, over 10 billion euros.
"It caused five times more deaths per million inhabitants than the second-ranking natural killer, the 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua."
The 10 billion euro plus estimate is the Washington-based bank's provisional calculation of the eventual total cost of rebuilding homes, schools, streets and other infrastructure in Haiti after the quake.
msh/AP/AFP/Reuters
Editor: Nancy Isenson