One Day Moral principles will guide policy and a lot of people will be happier, healthier and not suffering under sanctions or torture regimes.
Nicaragua and the USA
,> The highest per capita debt in the region is Nicaragua’s, currently $6.4 billion and clearly unpayable. The human costs of the IMF programs designed to ensure that lenders are compensated many times over are incalculable. About $1.5 billion is from the Somoza years, hence clearly “odious debt,” of no standing. Another $3 billion is from the post-1990 period when the US regained control over Nicaragua; also odious debt. The remainder is the direct responsibility of the United States, which was conducting brutal economic warfare and a murderous terrorist war against Nicaragua, for which it was condemned by the World Court, which ordered the US to pay reparations, variously estimated in the range of $17 billion. Accordingly, the highly conservative principle of adhering to international law, as determined by the highest international judicial body, would suffice to eliminate Nicaragua’s debt, with a good deal left over. Were elementary moral principles even to be imaginable in elite Western culture, similar conclusions would at once be drawn far more broadly throughout Europe and the US, even without World Court judgments. But that day remains very distant. [Patricia Adams, Odious Debts (Earthscan, 1991); Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers. Witness for Peace, A Bankrupt Future: The Human Cost of Nicaragua’s Debt (WFP, 2000); Envio (Managua, Nicaragua: UCA), 18.220, Nov. 1999.]
- Noam Chomsky in Rogue States Jubilee 2000
Haiti and France (and the USA...)
.> ... The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves when they deprived the French owners not only of land and equipment but of their human ‘property’.
.> The impact of the debt repayments – which continued until after World War Two – was devastating. In the words of the Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars, ‘the incompetence and frivolity of its leaders’ had ‘turned a country whose revenues and outflows had been balanced up to then into a nation burdened with debt and trapped in financial obligations that could never be satisfied.’ ‘Imposing an indemnity on the victorious slaves was equivalent to making them pay with money that which they had already paid with their blood,’ the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher argued.
...
.> Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.
.> Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’... [ Paul Farmer in "Who removed Aristide? Paul Farmer reports from Haiti" ]
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide #
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WorldCourtJudgments
