G8 Actions
• Cancel the Debts of
Africa, Asia and Latin America
• Another World Is Possible! Convergence
on Gleneagles
• Arrests at G8 Summit Protests
A Fraud Assailed from All Sides
• A
Fraud Assailed from All Sides
• Africa’s
New Best Friends
• The G8 Summit Takes on a Different Mask -
Siv O’Neall,
Axis of Logic
Cancel the Debts of Africa, Asia and Latin America
The G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, promoted far and wide as the place the G8 would “make poverty history” has ended with yet more measures to impoverish the peoples, especially in Africa. The U.S. led the way in ensuring that the G8 did not cancel the massive debts. The U.S. and other G8 countries first imposed the debts on the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin American and then organized to ensure that these loans are paid many times over yet the debt steadily increases. As a well-known miners’ song puts it, you work all day and “what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt!” The latest measures are no different.
According to the Gleneagles Communiqué issued by the G8 governments (U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia) the “debt relief” measures announced last month for 18 of the world’s poorest countries, most in Africa, were “confirmed.” These measures have been widely denounced as serving to further impoverish these countries, with those in Africa representing about 3 percent of the continent’s population.
The “relief” has two key conditions. One is that whatever amount is provided in “relief” will be cut from “aid” packages. The second is that the countries receiving it will be forced to greatly increase privatization, including public resources such as water, and to facilitate greater penetration of their economies by the G8 — meaning greater destruction of their independent development and robbery of their resources. Thus these G8 gods of plague are saying the solution to the imperialist plague engulfing Africa is spreading more of it.
The U.S., notorious for its centuries of slavery on the backs of African peoples, for its continued enslavement, invasions and use of military force today, did not announce any reparations due Africa. It did not cancel any of the bilateral debt it holds. It did not insist that the IMF and World Bank, which it dominates, cancel all the debt of Africa and of Asia and Latin America. It is these actions which are just and which are needed to even begin down the path to “make poverty history.”
The “relief” provided by the U.S. will mean a cut from U.S. “aid” funding of about $130-$175 million a year. This amount is three times less than what the U.S. spends to run its embassy in Baghdad. It is nothing compared to the $2 billion spent monthly to wage their criminal war in Iraq, even less compared to the Pentagon’s $440 billion yearly budget. This is not an effort by the U.S. and G8 as a whole to right the wrongs of the present and past but to ensure that they continue.
We say Cancel the Debts NOW! Pay reparations NOW! Africa has a total external debt estimated at $300 billion. We say use the Pentagon’s budget to cancel it now! Asia, Africa and Latin America combined have an estimated debt of $2.4 trillion. Again, use the expected Pentagon budget over the next six years and cancel it! Such action will benefit the peoples by eliminating debt and blocking U.S. military might, action which also serves Americans. It will also assist the U.S. economy by ending the waste of military spending while opening space for the peoples to build up their own self-reliant economies, free of U.S. dictate. These are the just demands of the people and the measures that are possible and needed now.
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Another World Is Possible! Convergence on Gleneagles
On July 6, during today’s G8 opening, well over seven thousand people gathered for the Another World Is Possible convergence on Gleneagles. Sixty buses left from Edinburgh alone, and buses also left from Glasgow, Dundee and other places. So great was the demand to get to the remote site of the luxurious Gleneagles Hotel that around 1,000 protesters were left without transportation in Edinburgh. Not to be outdone, they also staged an impromptu demonstration, occupying Princes Street, the main Edinburgh thoroughfare.
People started to gather in the morning in Auchterarder, a village of 6,000 people in the Scottish countryside, about two miles from Gleneagles.
Beginning from around 9am and lasting until after noon, the activist buses coming from across Scotland were stopped at a traffic circle about 11 miles from Auchterarder. Sometime before 11 am, the police called a press conference and unilaterally declared that the march, organized by the coalition G8 Alternatives, had been cancelled for “security reasons.” After negotiations the ban was lifted, and the buses were released, to be escorted by a vast convoy of police to Auchterarder! Not the least of the protesters’ negotiating cards was that if not allowed to proceed, they would blockade the roads themselves and make it impossible for any traffic to proceed.
At Auchterarder, the convoy’s welcome from local residents had to be seen to be believed. Residents and protesters alike waved, cheered, applauded and held up clenched fists. Indeed, all along the route of the march, those who were perhaps too elderly to join the march waved from their windows and balconies.
From the stage at the rally before the march, George Galloway, one of the speakers, warmly thanked the people of Auchterarder for their welcome. He equally condemned the police for their attempts to cancel the march or prevent it from taking place with their blockades and harassment of those trying to reach the demonstration, including himself. “We have the right to demonstrate!” he declared, and that cannot be taken away from us, at the same time denouncing the government for turning the area into a police state. He insisted that the police, instead of targeting those who wear scarves and hoods, should arrest the real violent criminals, those who sit at the Gleneagles table and are responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the world.
He poured scorn on “Sir Bob” and “Sir Bono.” What should be said, he declared, is that the poor do not owe the rich anything. In fact, it is the rich who are indebted to the poor.
The march finally started at 2 pm, in an extremely festive and comradely mood. Colorfully dressed people, groups of clowns, three bands, the Rinky Dink bicycle-operated sound-system, giant puppets representing all the G8 leaders (which were finally lined up in comical array in a field) and with Prime Minister Tony Blair himself the puppet of U.S. President George W. Bush. Babies in buggies and representatives of every conceivable stratum of society in a packed throng made their way, passing by the Auchterarder golf course en route, to the heavily guarded entrance to Gleneagles at the end of the country lanes, where everyone wanted to vehemently denounce Bush, Blair and the rest of the G8 who were locked away from the people’s wrath, attempting to decide the people’s fate.
There were a few protesters who vigorously threw down some of the fences, causing the authorities to rush more police into the gap, and the riot police split the march into two parts so that not everyone was able to make it to the focus of the demonstration. Nobody was hurt, nobody arrested, but the way the monopoly media operates could be seen by the fact that at the very instant this act occurred, a reporter opened her report by saying, “This violence of the demonstrators is the very reason the police wanted to ban the march, to prevent this sort of nightmare in Scotland.”
Gradually, and in ever-increasing numbers, about a thousand activists clambered over the small perimeter fence of the fields of Easthill Farm, close to the G8 summit venue. The police suddenly found themselves unable to cope along a broad front with the flood of colorful people with flags and banners walking through the crops and presenting a festive spectacle in the “forbidden zone.”
The police opposed this festivity with a sinister display of might. Riot police were flown in several times with Chinook military helicopters, which circled at low level before landing in strategic points to disgorge their forces. Both mounted and riot police were deployed on the move as if this were a re-enactment of Waterloo or the Battle of Orgreave. Despite this, the people still continued their dancing and chanting, and the clowns their clowning.
The people had the last word, and the protesters moved back peacefully into Auchterarder for a final militant rally and a call that the struggle will continue until the G8 leaders have been made to answer for their crimes.
* Workers’ Daily is the on-line newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
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It is reported that around 500 people were arrested in Edinburgh and Stirling during actions against the G8 Summit. Voice of Revolution is printing below an extract from a July 7 report by Stefania Milan of Inter Press Service:
The G8 Legal Support Group, made up of lawyers and legal observers, is taking care of the prisoners. Before the mobilizations, the group issued a card, distributed to all protesters, with legal tips in case of arrest and the lawyers’ cell phone numbers.
Sixteen male activists arrested during the “Carnival of Full Enjoyment” parade on Monday are currently jailed on remand at the Edinburgh prison. Ten of them will appear in court Friday. The others are expected to remain in prison until Monday, the G8 Legal Support Group reports.
Seven women were put behind bars Monday in the Corton Vale prison in Stirling. Three of them were released, the others will have a hearing Friday in Edinburgh.
They all are accused of “mobbing,” “rioting” and “breaking the peace.”
Over 400 people were reportedly arrested while carrying out road blockades and actions during the first day of the G8 summit, and brought to police stations in Perth, Dundee and Edinburgh. The police did not confirm the number. Most were released, but it is unknown how many of them are still jailed. Most people are expected to be released on bail and required to leave the area. Some foreigners were deported. Trials are slated for -September and October.
On Thursday afternoon, a demonstration in support of the anti-G8 prisoners took place at the Edinburgh prison with the musical support of the band Infernal Noise Brigade, from the northwestern U.S. city of Seattle, while about 80 people protested in front of the Edinburgh sheriff court.
The Prisoners’ Support Group is visiting the detainees and providing them with clothes, books and five British pounds a day to make phone calls.
The Activist-Trauma group — a psychologist and 12 volunteers trained in psychological support — is offering support for those experiencing or witnessing violence or arrests. Part of the group is based in Edinburgh and part at the Stirling self-organized campground.
“We set up a helpline. So far, we dealt with 12 cases of post-traumatic stress. You cannot come back from war, and expect that everything will be the same. It will not,” German volunteer Christina Bauer told IPS.
“Our passion for freedom is stronger than their prisons. Solidarity with political prisoners is a part of our struggle,” Bauer said.
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A Fraud Assailed from All Sides
The G8 summit at Gleneagles, in which it was declared that African poverty and climate change were placed top of the agenda, concluded with even Tony Blair admitting that the leaders of the world’s richest countries have not been able to “make poverty history” and have made no substantial progress on resolving the issue of climate change either. The decisions that were announced in the 32-page Gleneagles Communiqué have thus been criticized from nearly all sides. Apart from the G8 leaders, the most enthusiastic supporters seem to have been Bob Geldof, Bono and World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz. The Make Poverty History campaign itself issued a statement that demanded that the world’s leaders do much more to catch up with the aspirations and expectations of the world’s people; Christian Aid called it a “serious disappointment,” while Kumi Naidoo, Chair of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, concluded: “The people have roared but the G8 have whispered.”
The Gleneagles Communiqué outlined an increase in “aid” to the world’s poorest countries of $50 billion and to Africa of $28 billion per year by 2010, confirmed support for the “debt relief” measures announced for 18 African countries last month and promised some measures to deal with preventable diseases in Africa, including providing “as close as possible” universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS by 2010. No agreement was reached on ending the export subsidies of rich countries that disadvantage poorer countries, and therefore no measures were taken to create a more equitable environment for world trade. In addition, the G8 countries announced that $3 billion will be provided for the next three years for the Palestinian Authority, a package that will be administered by the World Bank and will create all the conditions for further economic and political interference in Palestine.
As the Communiqué makes clear, the G8 countries have put Africa high on their agenda since the late 1990s, but it cannot be said that the involvement of the big powers in Africa has assisted in solving that continent’s problems. Indeed the major preoccupation of the big powers has been how to make globalization work in Africa; that is to say, to create the conditions whereby the big monopolies and financial institutions can continue to plunder the continent. The Gleneagles Communiqué continues along this well-trodden path using both “aid” and “debt relief” as means to further open up African countries to political and economic interference by the big powers. Thus the Communiqué announces a whole raft of measures that will serve to increase external intervention in Africa: the training and supplying of African “peace-keeping” forces; increasing the effectiveness of sanctions; supporting “good governance” and -“transparency” through a variety of means, including funding some bodies of the African Union itself; and interference in the economies of African countries by promoting a variety of so-called anti-corruption measures and economic reforms, many to be administered by such institutions as the World Bank.
All of these measures, including the demand for what is referred to as “good governance” and “transparency,” are designed to facilitate the penetration of foreign capital and privatization and thus to exacerbate the problems facing Africa. According to the Communiqué, “African countries need to build a much stronger investment climate” and naturally the G8 countries will do everything to help them, including promoting “partnership between the public and private sectors” and strengthening African countries’ abilities to meet the needs of the global market. Increased “aid” and “debt relief,” the Communiqué announced, will only go to those countries that are prepared to accept the demands of the G8 to open up their economies and adopt political systems approved by the big powers. Even the poorest countries are now resisting this program. All the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries that have qualified for “debt relief” have already been forced by the World Bank to accept massive privatization programs. In Tanzania, for example, the capital city’s water supply was privatized in a deal led by the British company Biwater. The Tanzanian government has since been forced to strip Biwater of its contract after the supply of water deteriorated.
There can be no doubt that some African countries have made great strides forward in recent years, but these have been made in spite of not because of the interference of Britain and the other big powers. At the same time, as recent events show there is massive support for ending world poverty and for creating a different world in Britain and other countries. But the people must not allow their aspirations to be diverted or hijacked by those who claim to be able to solve the world’s problems. Rather they must keep the initiate in their own hands and step up their struggles so as to create the conditions to usher in the new world themselves.
* Workers’ Daily is the on-line newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
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I began to realize how much trouble we were in when Hilary Benn, the secretary of state for international development, announced that he would be joining the Make Poverty History march on Saturday. What would he be chanting, I wondered? “Down with me and all I stand for”? Benn is the man in charge of using British aid to persuade African countries to privatize public services; wasn’t the march supposed to be a protest against policies like his? But its aims were either expressed or interpreted so loosely that anyone could join. This was its strength and its weakness. The Daily Mail ran pictures of Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof on its front page, with the headline “Let’s Roll,” showing that nothing either Live 8 or Make Poverty History has done so far represents a threat to power.
The G8 leaders and the business interests their summit promotes can absorb our demands for aid, debt, even slightly fairer terms of trade, and lose nothing. They can wear our colors, speak our language, claim to support our aims, and discover in our agitation not new constraints but new opportunities for manufacturing consent. Justice, this consensus says, can be achieved without confronting power.
They invite our representatives to share their stage, we invite theirs to share ours. The economist Noreena Hertz offers, according to the commercial speakers’ agency that hires her, “real solutions for businesses and individuals. Hertz teaches companies how to be smart and avoid the frictions that surface when corporate interests conflict with private life ... the political right is not necessarily wrong.” Then she stands on the Make Poverty History stage and calls for poverty to be put at the top of the agenda. There is, as far as some of the MPH organizers are concerned, no contradiction: the new consensus denies that there’s a conflict between ending poverty and business as usual.
The G8 leaders have seized this opportunity with both hands. Multinational corporations, they argue, are not the cause of Africa’s problems but the solution. From now on they will be responsible for the relief of poverty.
They have already been given control of the primary instrument of U.S. policy towards Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity Act. The act is a fascinating compound of professed philanthropy and raw self-interest. To become eligible for help, African countries must bring about “a market-based economy that protects private property rights,” “the elimination of barriers to United States trade and investment” and a conducive environment for U.S. “foreign policy interests.” In return they will be allowed “preferential treatment” for some of their products in U.S. markets.
The important word is “some.” Clothing factories in Africa will be allowed to sell their products to the U.S. as long as they use “fabrics wholly formed and cut in the United States” or if they avoid direct competition with U.S. products. The act, treading carefully around the toes of U.S. manufacturing interests, is comically specific. Garments containing elastic strips, for example, are eligible only if the elastic is “less than 1 inch in width and used in the production of brassieres.” Even so, African countries’ preferential treatment will be terminated if it results in “a surge in imports.”
It goes without saying that all this is classified as foreign aid. The act instructs the U.S. Agency for International Development to develop “a receptive environment for trade and investment.” What is more interesting is that its implementation has been outsourced to the Corporate Council on Africa.
The CCA is the lobby group representing the big U.S. corporations with interests in Africa: Halliburton, Exxon Mobil, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Starbucks, Raytheon, Microsoft, Boeing, Cargill, Citigroup and others. For the CCA, what is good for General Motors is good for Africa. “Until African countries are able to earn greater income,” it says, “their ability to buy U.S. products will be limited.” The U.S. state department has put it in charge of training African governments and businesses. The CCA runs the U.S. government’s annual forum for African business, and hosts the Growth and Opportunity Act’s steering committee.
Now something very similar is being set up in the UK. Tomorrow the Business Action for Africa summit will open in London with a message from Tony Blair. Chaired by Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the head of Anglo American, its speakers include executives from Shell, British American Tobacco, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and the Corporate Council on Africa. One of its purposes is to inaugurate the Investment Climate Facility, a $550m fund financed by the UK’s foreign-aid budget, the World Bank and the other G8 nations, but “driven and controlled by the private sector.” The fund will be launched by Niall FitzGerald, now head of Reuters, but formerly chief executive of Unilever, and before that Unilever’s representative in apartheid South Africa. He wants the facility, he says, to help create a “healthy investment climate” that will offer companies “attractive financial returns compared to competing destinations.” Anglo American and Barclays have already volunteered to help.
Few would deny that one of the things Africa needs is investment. But investment by many of our multinationals has not enriched its people but impoverished them. The history of corporate involvement in Africa is one of forced labor, evictions, murder, wars, the under-costing of resources, tax evasion and collusion with dictators. Nothing in either the Investment Climate Facility or the Growth and Opportunity Act imposes mandatory constraints on corporations. While their power and profits in Africa will be enhanced with the help of our foreign-aid budgets, they will be bound only by voluntary commitments: of the kind that have been in place since 1973 and have proved useless.
Just as Gordon Brown’s “moral crusade” encourages us to forget the armed crusade he financed, the state-sponsored rebranding of the companies working in Africa prompts us to forget what Shell has been doing in Nigeria, what Barclays and Anglo American and De Beers have done in South Africa, and what British American Tobacco has done just about everywhere. From now on, the G8 would like us to believe, these companies will be Africa’s best friends. In the name of making poverty history, the G8 has given a new, multi-headed East India Company a mandate to govern the continent.
Without a critique of power, our campaign, so marvelously and so disastrously inclusive, will merely enhance this effort. Debt, unfair terms of trade and poverty are not causes of Africa’s problems but symptoms. The cause is power: the ability of the G8 nations and their corporations to run other people’s lives. Where, on the Live 8 stages and in Edinburgh, was the campaign against the G8’s control of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the UN? Where was the demand for binding global laws for multinational companies?
At the Make Poverty History march, the speakers insisted that we are dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming towards our demands. It seems to me that the G8 leaders are dragging us dancing and cheering towards theirs.
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The G8 Summit Takes on a Different Mask
Make Poverty History is ‘The Big Show.’ It is orchestrated in unison with Live 8 rock concerts in order to cover up outrageous global poverty, the horror of war and carnage, the erosion of democracy; in short, the misery that is spreading its ugly claws all over the planet.
Under the emblem ‘The Long Walk to Justice,’ Live 8 and the major pop stars of the Western world are getting together to pull the wool over the eyes of the world on the scenes of the horror of war, starvation and untimely death that present the reality of the planet. Let’s put on a show, let’s sing a song to drown out the din of crashing bombs and screaming torture victims. It’s hard to believe they don’t know they are making it easier for the wars and the terror to continue.
Now, Tony Blair, the master opportunist and most excellent obedient tool for Washington’s policies, and George W, Murderer-in-Chief, are suppressing sneers and satisfied smiles under masks of oh-so-sincere concern and empathy for the victims of Thursday’s explosions throughout London.
Let no one suggest that yesterday’s events in London were not tragic or that we have anything less than genuine compassion for the victims and their families.
But today, the world is ablaze with news from terror attacks on the British capital, screaming headlines, mourning faces in huge photos on the front pages. What better opportunity could the leaders of the G8 nations possibly have wished for? It’s a splendid opportunity for them to change their message and the prime object of their spurious debate away from poverty and the horrors of Africa back to their pet theme, terrorism.
Neocolonialism and state-organized robbery will not be on public display for the world to see, because the media focus will be London’s bombings. How convenient! Blair’s big scheme to get the Queen’s subjects off the issue of his waning political star on the coat-tails of Make Poverty History has now been greatly helped by the tragic event of death and confusion in the streets of London. His self-aggrandizing Rule of Britannia has once again been saved from its own embarrassment by the trumpet call of the ‘Fight Against Global Terrorism’. Once again, suffering in the white world with the death of a few dozen innocent people and injuries to hundreds more, will serve as a smokescreen for the crimes of our ruthless, mindless and heartless politicians, the so-called leaders of the civilized world, that affect millions.
The din of the rock stars and the blasts in the streets and underground of London will make sure that the world forgets about hunger and suffering, of loss of democracy and civil rights, of the rights of all peoples to run their own countries, to defend their own territories, of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people who never asked for the neo-con version of democracy and illusion. The world is run by a super show and the citizens of the world are being drugged by a constant renewal of trivia displays and commercial hype.
John Pilger ends his latest essay ‘From Iraq To The G8: The Polite Crushing Of Dissent And Truth’ with the following lines:
“In Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice asked the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter to show her the way out of wonderland. They did, over and again, this way, that way, until she lost her temper and brought down her dream world, waking her up. The people killed and maimed in Iraq and the people wilfully impoverished in Africa by our governments and our institutions in our name, demand that we wake up.”
The ‘Long Walk to Justice’ Has a Long Way to Go. Thanks, Bono & Co. — but no thanks.