Crisis in Haiti
Floor Speech
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Mr. JACKSON of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I thank the Honorable Stacey Plaskett for her leadership, and I thank my colleague, the Honorable Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, for yielding.
Much of the world today has their attention focused on Gaza, and it seems as if Haiti has been ignored. Mr. Speaker, when you consider the long and difficult journey of the Haitian people from bondage to freedom and all that has been done to destabilize and punish Haitian independence, I say to you that Haiti cannot be ignored.
It would be easy to blame the Haitian people for the overwhelming violence being committed on the streets of Port-au-Prince, in Jacmel, and in the countryside, but such thinking would be the result of a tragic reductionism more so intended to manipulate the facts than to teach them. What is happening in Haiti today is the result of what happens when empires and colonial powers conspire to make it economically impossible for liberated countries to flourish and survive.
To think that Haiti had to pay France the equivalent of what would be today $21 billion in 1804 after Dessalines had declared independence-- King Charles X of France, a slaver and a colonial power, had the American Government, after its independence, enforce a payment to American, French, and German bankers and put a tax on the Haitian people for 150 years. Haitians did not stop paying French bankers until 1947.
Yes, a 150-year tax was put on the first freed African group of people to resist slavery and colonialism.
How is it even possible for the world to stand by and allow France to put a tax on the people of Haiti because they dared to do what Americans had done just 20 years prior to the Haitian Revolution?
Mr. Speaker, can you imagine the outcry in this country if Great Britain had required America to pay a freedom tax after the Revolutionary War to make up for lost wages and profits?
Americans would still be angry. Americans would be resentful. More importantly, Americans would still be recovering from having to dedicate most of its GDP to paying an unconscionable tax for the subsequent loans and interest needed to resolve it.
How did it happen that for 150 years the nation of Haiti was trapped in a vicious cycle of economic extortion and exploitation while the rest of the so-called civilized world acted as if making the victim pay the brutalizer was not a crime against humanity and the complete inversion of common sense?
This is what has happened to Haiti. This is the root cause and the base behind the bottomless music of chaos and violence happening in Haiti right now.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., said that violence is the language of the unheard, a point to which I shall add that criminality is the syntax and verbiage of the poor. People who have neither the means nor the opportunity to participate and benefit from the wealth of their own country will, in the end, act against the national interest because the politics of bread is unrelenting.
I stand with all of my colleagues who condemn the violence going on in Haiti because violence is never the answer. More than that, I call on all the Western powers to, once and for all, take their knees off of the neck of the Haitian economy. The world owes the Haitian people an apology and the real support Haiti has never received.
America should celebrate our longest and greatest democratic ally in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti. The Haitian Army fought with America in the American Revolution in Savannah, Georgia. We can end this violence not with soldiers but with real economic investment.
If the manifest destiny of America is to be concerned about the quality of life in our hemisphere, then the investment we make in Haiti is, in effect, an investment in the future stability of the neighborhood we live in. Charity begins at home, our Scriptures teach us. It is about time the Nation and the world support Haitians' self- determination.
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