indemnity - Haiti Observer Blog

A small colony of Germans colonized St. Domingue, as Haiti was known then, in Bombardopolis. The government of Haiti (GOH) received them warmly, and made them citizens when Haiti won independence from the French. By the 1850s, Germans became permanent residents.

But Germans' motives for settling there spelled trouble for GOH later on. They began meddling in the country's internal affairs, with several failed coup d'etats. As an example of their greed for power, they coerced GOH into paying exorbitant indemnities for a minor incident involving a Haitian-German at the Port-au-Prince dock. Haiti paid quickly to halt threats of violence to Port-au-Prince.

Read more →  

Less than a century before the shameful injustice the Nazis would inflict upon a people, Germany busied itself humiliated Haiti for showing allegiance to the wrong side in the French-Prussian war. After successfully strong-arming the smaller country into making payment on their debts to German merchants with high indemnities, the German's ended the seizure of the Haitian warships, used as leverage, by returning the ships with their Haitian flags trampled and smeared with feces.

This was, however, not to be enough. Emile Lüders, child of a Haitian mother and German father, was arrested and sentenced to jail for thirty days after beating a Haitian soldier. After an appeal he was fined to a year's jail-time on the 14th of October 1897. After forcing the Haitian Government and the then President, Simon Sam, into pardoning Lüders, Germany demanded to have all the police and judges involved in the case fired in accordance to the initial request which the Haitian government had ignored.

Read more →