Save AFRICA!! : From Western Rock Stars!!

POSTED BY: Howard
UPDATED: Monday, October 31, 2005 21:23
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HOWARD

Monday, October 31, 2005 3:21 AM

October 27, 2005

Oh No, They Didn't!
Bono and Geldoff: "We Saved Africa!"
By STUART HODKINSON

Remember Make Poverty History, anyone? It seems a long time ago that some 200,000 people flocked to Edinburgh to rally G8 leaders as part of an unprecedented campaign for global justice. That same day, July 2, Bob Geldof organised free music concerts in nine countries under the Live8 banner.

The demands were straightforward and reasonable: rich countries should boost aid in line with their unmet 35-year-old promises; cancel the debts of the 62 poorest countries; set dates for the abolition of subsidies and other protectionist support to Western farmers, and stop forcing liberalization and privatization on poor countries, whether in trade negotiations or as conditions of aid and debt deals.

Six days later, in the shadow of the July 7 bombs that ripped through central London, the Gleneagles summit ended to rock-star cheers. "This has been the most important summit there ever has been for Africa," Bob Geldof said at the post-summit press conference. "There are no equivocations. Africa and the poor of that continent have got more from the last three days than they have ever got at any previous summit...

"On aid, 10 out of 10. On debt, eight out of 10. On trade ... it is quite clear that this summit, uniquely, decided that enforced liberalisation must no longer take place," he said, before finishing with a flourish. "That is a serious, excellent result on trade."

Bono, his voice cracking with emotion, concurred. "We are talking about $25bn of new money.... The world spoke and the politicians listened."

Journalists and campaigners broke into spontaneous applause; the next day's media coverage led with Geldof's "mission accomplished" verdict. But as the millions who signed up to Make Poverty History (MPH) and Live8 rejoiced, inside the upper echelons of MPH all hell was breaking loose. "They've shafted us," a press officer from a British development organization screamed down the phone.

Indeed they had. Moments earlier, Kumi Naidoo, the veteran South African anti-apartheid campaigner and current chair of MPH's international umbrella, the Global Call to Action against Poverty (G-Cap), had delivered the coalition's official response. "The people have roared but the G8 has whispered. The promise to deliver [more aid] by 2010 is like waiting five years before responding to the tsunami."

MPH officials knew that the G8's announcements on aid, trade and debt were not only grossly inadequate to help poor countries reach the UN's development goals by 2015. They were also bogus - and MPH had briefed the rock stars to that effect. More than half of the promised $50bn (£28bn) in aid - which wouldn't kick in until 2010 - wasn't new money, but a dishonest amalgam of old pledges, future aid budgets and debt relief. And despite agreeing that "poor countries should be free to determine their own economic policies", only Britain had announced that it would no longer tie overseas aid to free market reforms - a promise it would break in the G8 debt deal.

The US, by contrast, had made it clear at Gleneagles that aid increases would require "reciprocal liberalization" by developing countries. Worse, as Yifat Susskind, associate director of the US-based women's human rights organisation, Madre, explains, Bush's "millennium challenge account", praised by Bono and Geldof, "explicitly ties aid to co-operation in the US's 'war on terror'".

The much-lauded June G7 (G8 minus Russia) finance ministers' "$55bn" debt deal, in which 18 countries -- 14 of them African -- would receive "100 per cent multilateral debt cancellation", with 20 more countries soon to follow, was a similar pop-star-veiled deception. In reality, the G7 only agreed to take over the debt repayments of those countries to three of the world's 19 multilateral creditors -- the IMF, World Bank and the African Development Bank (ADB) -- meaning that they would continue to be saddled with crippling debts owed to the other 16.

And the $55bn would be worth little more

JAVELIN98

Monday, October 31, 2005 9:23 PM

No surprises there. Rock, TV, and film stars are generally an uneducated, self-centered lot, and I'm sure that most are only into causes celeb to hear themselves proselytize, as it were.

I'd much rather see these stars using their huge fortunes to fund infrastructure-development companies, or paying for better medical care, water decontamination, even contraception. Instead, they get up and sing and feel all self-righteous, and then fly home to their massive estates, where their 68º Evian and white roses and Olympic-sized pools await them.