'WORSE THA The G8 and Africa . The full list is: Brandt Commission, 1982 ive Aid, 1989 Arusha Charter, 1990 Jubilee Debt Campaign, 2000 Nepad, 2001 Millennium Challenge Account (USA), 2001 Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development, 2002 G8 Declaration, 2003 ILO World Commission on Social Dimensions of Globalisation, 2004 2. http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm? 3. -:to: www.spiked-online.co.uk/Articles/0000000CA93F.htm di aristes from Damian Millet &t Eric Toussaint, Who Owes Who? i.ettas or World Debt, Zed Books in association with CADTM :..exion de la Dette du Tiers Monde), 2004 Tony Blair is determined that the Gleneagles G8 meeting in July will have Africa as the main topic on the agenda. His Commission on Africa recently released a report that is only the latest in a long and tedious list of Western initiatives. Commission members include Gordon Brown and Hilary Benn, African government and business lead- ers, representatives from UN sponsored organisations, private business inter- ests, former IMF head Michel Cam- dessus and retired Dublin rock star Bob Geldof. The report combines a list of good intentions with a demand for free trade. It calls for an extra $25 billion a year in aid to Africa by 2010, and another $25 billion a year by 2015. It demands 100 per cent debt can- cellation 'for countries that need it', an end to the selling of arms into war zones, an end to rich-world ag ricultural subsidies and calls on rich countries to tear down the trade barri- ers that keep African goods out of their markets, including not only tariffs but also "finicky rules-of-origin and health- and-safety standards. " Wide-ranging the demands may be and if carried out they would have a real impact on some of the poorest nations in the world. But of course they won't be carried out. The US trade secretary has already re- jected calls by the Commission for an immediate end to
NSI AVERY'? Jane Kelly looks at the realities of life in African nations saddled with debt. subsidies on cotton and sugar, despite the fact that the World pectancy has plummeted from sixty-five in 2000 to thirty-one in trade rules. And the most important demand of all - for 100 per below forty years of age. Trade Organisation (WTO) judged these to have breached its cent debt relief - is opposed by the US Treasury. As with many of Blair's initiatives, it is not new. The outline of the new 'partnership' that the Blair Commission is propos- ing was already apparent in the Prime Minister's speech to the Labour Party conference in 2001, 'On our side: provide more aid, untied to trade; write off debt; help with good governance and infrastructure; training to the soldiers, with UN blessing, in conflict resolution; encouraging investment; and access to our markets so that we practise the free trade we are so fond of preaching. " The sting in the tail is the phrase about 'free trade' - he knows that the real effect of this is precisely why Africa has fallen even further behind in economic terms and so he proposes with great fanfare some sticking plaster solutions that seek to conceal the reality and head off any more radical questions. Poverty The poverty of many nations on the continent of Africa is well known and the statistics speak for themselves. In sub-Saharan Africa half the inhabitants are poorer now than in 1990; the number of people in extreme poverty has grown from 242 to 300 million over the past decade; by 2015 the World Bank, always conservative in its pronouncements, estimates this will rise to 345 million.4 Health statistics are similarly horrifying. Again in sub-Saharan Africa 50 per cent of children get no basic vaccines; at the end of 2000, 30 million were infected by the AIDS virus, one in twelve of the population; 2.5 million people die of the virus annually; in Botswana one in three is infected and the average life ex- 2005. In seven southern African nations life expectancy is now Malaria and tuberculosis are spreading too. Because there is no profit to be made, the paltry sum of $8 million is spent on research annually even though in 2000 there were 900,000 deaths from malaria, including 700,000 children under five years of age. The list of human, social and economic devastation is endless. And ordinary people in the rich North of the world are made to feel helpless, with the donation of money to Band Aid or Comic Relief presented as the only way they can help. Well meaning as these charities may be, they get nowhere near understanding the causes of poverty and so can do nothing to resolve them. News reports hide the truth that debt repayments, often on western loans stolen by their rulers or used to buy weapons used against them, are a stranglehold on the economies of the poor South. And structural adjustment programmes, imposed by the IMF or World Bank to ensure interest repayments, have the effect of decimating employment, wages and social programmes. After liberation - Indebtedness The history of the colonisation of Africa is well known: maps with frontiers drawn by a straight line speak of the division of the continent by its imperialist colonisers for its spoils, as do the different Anglophone, Francophone and Portuguese-speaking areas. Atter the liberation movements of the mid-twentieth cen- tury imperialism had to take a different tack. No longer able to control the natural resources as before and making use of global institutions such as the World Bank and the International Mon- 11
etary Fund. after 1960 they developed the strategy of indebted- ness. Any of the new generation of African leaders who refused to play ball and declined loans, such as Patrice Lumumba in the former Belgian Congo in 1961, were assassinated or overthrown by military intervention. The rest who did play ball got very rich at the expense of the development of their people. As Millet and Toussaint ask, 'How is it that, when he died, Mobutu, who had ruled Zaire for over thirty years, left a fortune estimated at $8 billion, equivalent to two-thirds of his country's debt?' Nor is this process of corruption confined to Africa, as the wealth of the Duvalier family in Haiti and the Suharto family in Indonesia attest; rather it is an inevitable consequence of the huge loans to corrupt governments and dictators who were allies of the impe- rial powers in the third world. The loans that were siphoned off by corrupt dictators were often invested in the very western banks that had made the loan in the first place. Another way of profiting from the loans was to tie them to huge, often unnecessary infrastructure developments. This process profited both western construction and extraction companies taking raw materials such as oil. The 1000 kilometre Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, begun in the 1990s, is an example and also exposes the 'complete disregard of the interests of the local population' for local people gain nothing from the extrac- tion and export of the oil. The World Bank, allied with Shell, Exxon and Elf, at first proposed to pay well below the market price as compensation to the farmers for the loss of groundnut, millet and mango plants and trees destroyed by this project. Rwanda Other examples show how huge loans from global financial in- stitutions have been used for even more lethal purposes -buying arms and military hardware. Nothing is more horrifying than the story of the Rwandan genocide. Up to 800,000 inhabitants were 12 massacred in a hundred days, following the downing of the then president, Habyarimana's plane. It is alleged that General Paul Kagame ordered the shooting down of the plane in order to take control of the country even though he knew it would lead to a war against the Tutsi population. The Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) equipped and funded by the US were in the area of Kigali when the massacres took place but did not nothing to stop it. According to Michel Chossudovsky, 'The civil war in Rwanda was a brutal struggle for political power between the Hutu-led Habyarimana government supported by France and the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) backed financially and militarily by Washington. Ethnic rivalries were used deliberately in the pursuit of geopolitical objectives. Both the CIA and French in- telligence were involved. "6 Both direct military aid and loans that were meant for economic and social development in Rwanda were used to buy weapons 'to finance the conflict'; the same had happened in Uganda. 'In other words, both the Ugandan and Rwanda external debts were diverted into supporting the military and paramilitary forces. Uganda's external debt increased by more than 2 billion dollars? Worse still the surviving populations of the region, Rwanda, Uganda and Congo (formerly Zaire) have since had structural adjustment programmes imposed to pay for the wars. In post- conflict Rwanda new loans were made, '...to enable Rwanda to service the debts used to finance the massacres. Old loans had been swapped for new debts under the banner of post-war recon- struction. The "odious debts" had been whitewashed, they had disappeared from the books. The creditor's responsibility had been erased. Moreover, the scam was also conditional upon the acceptance of a new wave of IMF-World Bank reforms." The Rwandan debt now stands at $688.5 million in a country with a population the size of London's and a GNI of only $1,800 million. Raw Materials This is just one example of the callous and hypocritical use of loans and debt repayments to manipulate the economic and po- litical situation in an area, leading to devastating poverty for the populations involved. We have got used to the idea of military intervention by the US using its own and its allies' troops - in Afghanistan and Iraq for example - but the conflicts in this area of Africa with its manipulation of surrogate fighters, had similar motives - raw materials. For example, the reserves of cobalt in the eastern and southern Congo are 'of crucial importance for the US defence industry.' Chossudovsky points out that even before the ousting of Mobutu from Zaire, president-to-be Lau- rent Desire Kabila 'had renegotiated the mining contracts with several US and British mining companies including American Mineral Fields (AMF), a company headquartered in President Bill Clinton's hometown of Hope, Arkansas."
Nor are other parts of Africa immune to future American imperi- alist intervention. Algeria, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Liberia and Ivory Coast have been noted in recent US policy statements as being 'in need of stabilisation', of being put on a more 'sus- tainable path. After the publication of the Pentagon document The National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, on March 18 this year it was confirmed by the National Intel- ligence Council of the State Department that, 'US intelligence experts are preparing a list of 25 countries deemed unstable and, thus, candidates for intervention.''° From past experience it seems all too likely that any country that goes against the neo- liberal agenda and Washington's conception of a free market de- mocracy will suffer this fate. In the light of these past histories and the present ruthless strategy by the US to maintain their political and economic dominance in the world, it seems that Britain's Commission for Africa and Blair and Brown's apparent determination to cancel debts and 'save' Africa, are both rhetorical and cynical exer- cises to placate an European public increasingly horrified by the state of many African nations. Cancel all Debts Cancelling the debts is the only way forward - but it is not enough on its own. Money stolen by corrupt dictators and hid- den away in western banks should be returned to the countries they were intended for; African governments should refuse to repay the debt and interest apparently 'owed'; structural adjust- ment programmes should be cancelled and replaced by policies to satisfy the human and social needs of health, education, hous- ing and employment; the peoples have to regain proper demo- cratic control of their countries to ensure independence from the neo-liberal policies of imperialism. None of this will be easy and it requires that socialists in the imperialist heartlands play their part in telling the truth about Africa's situation, the better to fight for the future of workers and the oppressed across the world. 5. Millet & Toussaint, p 25 6. Michel Chossudovsky, 'The US was behind the Rwandan Genocide: Rwanda: Installing a US Protectorate in Central Africa'. www.globalresearch.ca 8 May 2003 7,8 & 9. Chossudovsky 10. Chossudovsky, 'From "Rogue States" to "Unstable Nations": America's New Nationa: Security Doctrine', www.globalresearch.ca 7 April 2005 13