http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/02/2010217161123953477.html

Sarkozy is the first French pres­i­dent to visit the for­mer French slave colony [Reuters]

Nico­las Sarkozy, the French pres­i­dent, has pledged an aid and debt relief pack­age amount­ing to about $450m to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

The amount includes a can­cel­la­tion of Haiti’s debt to France of $77m, Sarkozy said dur­ing a brief visit to the Caribbean nation on Wednesday.

Sarkozy arrived in Haiti to sup­port inter­na­tional relief efforts after last month’s deadly earth­quake which killed around 230,000 peo­ple and left more than a mil­lion homeless.

His visit is the first ever by a French pres­i­dent to the for­mer French slave colony, which fought for and won its inde­pen­dence in 1804, becom­ing the first inde­pen­dent black republic.

Stay­ing in Haiti for less than four hours, Sarkozy greeted French embassy staff and aid work­ers and took a heli­copter tour to see the extent of dam­age left by last month’s quake.Later speak­ing along­side Rene Preval, the Hait­ian pres­i­dent, Sarkozy said he wanted to turn the page in France’s long his­tory of trou­bled rela­tions with its for­mer colony.

But for many Haitians, Sarkozy’s visit high­lighted the bit­ter legacy of the price paid by Haiti to secure its free­dom from French rule.

Fol­low­ing a suc­ces­ful revolt in 1804, Haiti was forced to pay com­pen­sa­tion to France – a debt that took more than half a cen­tury to pay off.

‘Clear respon­si­bil­ity’

In today’s money the pay­ments amount to more than $20bn.

For many Haitians those pay­ments are what set the seal on Haiti’s endemic poverty and at a demon­stra­tion on Wednes­day hun­dreds of Hait­ian pro­test­ers called on France to pay back the money.“France has played an impor­tant role in the way the coun­try is suf­fer­ing eco­nom­i­cally, and it has a clear respon­si­bil­ity to pay repa­ra­tions,” Camille Chalmers, a Hait­ian econ­o­mist, told Al Jazeera.

Dur­ing his visit Sarkozy acknowl­edged that France and Haiti had had a trou­bled rela­tion­ship, say­ing he was con­scious that France “did not leave a good legacy” in its for­mer colony.

“We are star­ing at his­tory in its face, we have not dis­carded it and we assume respon­si­bil­ity,” he said.

How­ever, asked by Al Jazeera about the issue of repa­ra­tions for Haiti’s post-independence pay­ments to France he appeared dismissive.

“Non, non, non (No, no, no)”, he said.

‘New era’

Al Jazeera’s Steve Chao, report­ing from the Hait­ian cap­i­tal, Port-au-Prince, said that French offi­cials hoped that the visit “will sum­mon a new era between France and its for­mer colony”.

Pro­test­ers say France owes Haiti bil­lions of dol­lars in colo­nial era repa­ra­tions [Reuters]

“Sarkozy and his peo­ple are very much cog­nisant of the fact that Haitians hold a lot of sus­pi­cion and resent­ment over its for­mer bru­tal years of slav­ery as a colony and over feel­ings that France has con­tin­ued to med­dle in pol­i­tics on this island in more recent years,” he said.Sarkozy sur­veyed the dev­as­tated Hait­ian cap­i­tal and other affected areas by heli­copter, and was also to visit a French-run field hospital.

He was also due to meet Haiti’s lead­ers to offer France’s finan­cial sup­port for a plan for post-quake recov­ery and recon­struc­tion that is being put together by for­eign donors with the Hait­ian government.

Econ­o­mists from the Inter-American Devel­op­ment Bank have esti­mated the cost of rebuild­ing Haiti after the quake, which killed more than 200,000 peo­ple and left more than one mil­lion home­less, could reach nearly $14 bil­lion, mak­ing it pro­por­tion­ately the most destruc­tive nat­ural dis­as­ter in mod­ern times.

Besides pro­vid­ing imme­di­ate emer­gency aid to the hurt and home­less from the quake, inter­na­tional donors are look­ing to sup­port Haiti’s long-term recov­ery to try to pull the coun­try out of a cycle of poverty and polit­i­cal instability.

While aid work­ers rush to dis­trib­ute tar­pau­lins before the rainy sea­son starts, the United Nations says only about 272,000 peo­ple have been pro­vided with shel­ter mate­ri­als so far.

Mis­sion­ar­ies freed

In a sep­a­rate devel­op­ment late on Wednes­day, a Hait­ian judge ordered the release of eight Amer­i­can mis­sion­ar­ies who had been charged with child kidnapping.

The eight were expected to be flown out of the cap­i­tal, Port-au-Prince, aboard a US mil­i­tary trans­port plane.

Two oth­ers remain in deten­tion after the judge said he wanted to ques­tion them about pre­vi­ous vis­its to the country.

The ten mis­sion­ar­ies were arrested last month after try­ing to take 33 chil­dren out of the coun­try with­out proper documentation.

The group mem­bers have denied any wrongdoing.