DON'T BE FOOLED BY DEBT RELIEF
by John Pilger
10th January 2000
Don't be fooled by Debt Relief ... it's just another way of reshaping the
third world to the demands of capital.
The recent announcement by the British government that it is to "cancel
third world debt" was a propaganda triumph. What a joy, sang the Guardian.
Debt forgiveness, said Bob Geldof, was an "instinct" that was "deeply
rooted" in Tony Blair's background.
A code word in Gordon Brown's statement ought to have been enough to alert
even the gullible. Brown said that poor countries would have their debt
forgiven if they used the relief "productively". Later, he wrote, "both the
IMF and the World Bank will show how together macro-economic, structural
reform and anti-poverty programmes can bring less poverty and more growth".
Not a single example exists where "macro-economic, structural reform" - he
means laissez-faire capitalism imposed by the IMF and World Bank - has
alleviated mass poverty. Throughout the developing world, especially
Africa, "structural adjustment programmes" have destroyed jobs and public
services, while shaping local economies to the demand of transnational
capital. In the IMF's most "successful" countries in sub-Saharan Africa, 13
children die every minute from the likes of diarrhoea and malnutrition. Far
from changing this, Brown's "initiative" will reinforce it. To qualify,
those countries that have been bled by British banks for 20 years will have
to adhere to the "conditionality" of the World Bank's "Poverty Reduction
and Growth Facility", which allows limited relief to highly visible
projects in countries that have been awarded World Bank/ IMF brownie points
for privatising and slashing jobs and services. The British Treasury will
now have a fine excuse for not increasing Britain's scandalously mean aid
programme.
There is a related hidden agenda here. This is the emergence, in another
guise, of the discredited Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). Had
it not been for an international campaign against MAI, the "Paris club" of
rich governments, notably the Blair regime, would have signed away, in
effect, the sovereignty and independence of developing countries to
transnational capital; for the power to override national environmental and
employment laws was at the core of MAI. The campaign against it forced
governments, notably the French, to break ranks. MAI died. Or so it seemed.
Those who follow the chameleon enthusiasms of Clare Short, Blair's
Secretary of State for International Development and defender of
globalisation and illegal bombing, will note her latest: "untying" British
aid from trade deals with British companies. Her stated reasons seem so
sensible. Why should poor countries, she says, be restricted to British
commercial contracts? Surely that is "unfair"? What she omits to say is
that the Blair government is at the forefront of "liberalising" the entire
procurement and contracting system in the third world: booty worth three
trillion dollars, more than international trade.
This "untying" will allow British and other rich-world transnational
corporations eventually to secure contracts in domestic markets previously
barred to them. By comparison, the 14 per cent of the British aid budget
presently exploited by British companies is chicken feed. This was not
debated at Seattle, and there is the danger of a behind-closed-doors fait
accompli.
In Britain, one of the obstacles to mounting an opposition to this is the
compliance of leading voluntary agencies, or non-government organisations.
The "euphoria" of certain NGOs following Gordon Brown's "debt relief"
announcement comes after a long seduction. NGOs represent the "civil
society" courted by new Labour. Having become dependent on government
funding and gone some of the way with the fakery of "productivity" linked
to poverty relief, and having in recent years "restructured" their
organisations right down to the use of claptrap market jargon, the more
ambitious in the NGOs are in danger of slipping into bed with new Labour,
the government of business. A few, such as Action Aid, remain unseduced,
and there are those who clearly have serious doubts: witness the report by
Louise Jury and Matthew Lockwood, Millennium Lottery: who lives, who dies
in an age of third world debt? published last month by Christian Aid.
When Peter Mandelson and his co-author Roger Liddle outlined in their book
one of the blueprints for new Labour, they identified Britain's "economic
strengths" as the transnational corporations, the "aerospace" industry
(arms) and the "pre- eminence of the City of London". The evidence is now
irrefutable; new Labour is a major facilitator of capital and of the
sinister changes planned for the world's economy as part of globalisation.
On the day Gordon Brown announced his "debt relief", this overshadowed the
news that the Commons International Development Committee had discovered
that a quarter of all export credit guarantees to poor countries were for
the sale of weapons. Five days later, at the climax of the Hamilton and
Fayed libel circus, the Trade Secretary, Stephen Byers, approved export
credit guarantees worth �200 million to finance the huge Ilisu dam in
Turkey that will assist in ethnically cleansing thousands of Kurds from
their cultural heartland. No one wants it, apart from the repressive
regime in Turkey, an arms client of the Blair government, and the British
construction firm, Balfour Beatty, which stands to make a fortune. Does all
this sound familiar? Recognise the name of the company from the Pergau Dam
scandal in Malaysia, the epitome of Tory corruption? Little has changed;
and we ought not to be fooled a second time.
--
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