Freedom from Debt =
Freedom from Domination spawned wars and conflicts in our region wom that have exacerbated levels of poverty, tinue human suffering and debt bondage. pove
The legacy of apartheid compounds hom this situation. Southern Africa, as a the region, suffers the effects of apartheid- righ caused debt. Apartheid-sponsored wars and economic destabilisation forced • th
Declaration of the Southern African Jubilee Debt Summit
On the eve of the new millennium, there is a rapid growth in Jubilee 2000 campaigns and other initiatives calling for abolition of III World debt
The vast majority of the people of sub-Saharan Africa live in pervasive poverty. In Southern Africa tens of millions of people are hungry, homeless, jobless, formally uneducated and die from preventable diseases.
Yet Southern Africa is not intrinsically poor. Indeed, it is a region rich in natural and human resources. Debt slavery, the same system of debt bondage that excludes four fifths of the world's population from economic and social development, is a central part of this nightmare. Southern Africa is shackled by debt owed to the same forces which initiated, enforced, condoned and sustained slavery and colonialism. Today this debt is both a manifestation and an instrument of the unjust international economic order in which the North dominates the South and the elites in our countries are willing accomplices and beneficiaries.
Countries in Southern Africa pay as much as 40% of their export earnings to service the debt. This outflow of resources in debt repayments along with profit remittances have led to the most wretched of human conditions.
The debt burden is choking the life of Southern Africa's human potential. Indebted nations have also been pressured to agree to crippling conditionalities to get loans to repay the debt in a deepening spiral of indebtedness. The Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) have caused increasing levels of unemployment, reduced government services, higher prices of food and other basic commodities and intensified poverty.
Through the imposition of export-led growth, financial and trade liberalisation, fiscal austerity, privatisation and deregulation, our economies remain sources of cheap raw materials and pools of cheap labour for the interests of the industrialised North. Through SAPs our governments have become more accountable to the elites of the North rather than to their own people. We have been denied the right to be active participants in the decision making process of our own development. In this sense we see how debt has come to be an instrument of control and domination.
The domination of the North over the South has led to conditions which have for Docoo nations to borrow billions of dollars me because of the international commu- cel nities' failure to enforce the international • th law violated by apartheid. tio
Over two million people have been att killed in Southern Africa in apartheid- nat related wars, millions more have been rel maimed and thousands of schools, tyi clinics, bridges and roads have been des- nO! troyed. Southern African nations are • th paying millions of dollars annually to Hi service apartheid-caused debt to creditors Co who were in the main supporters of apartheid. The total cost of apartheidcaused destabilisation in Southern Africa thos is far greater than the actual apartheid- and caused debts. The former estimated cost tion: exceeds US$115 billion while apartheid- canc caused debt is some $27 billion. if it
Wars have now escalated to the point cess of forcing states of the region to borrow of h even more and thereby further deepen righ our dependence on militarised politics the 1 and economic management.
Under these circumstances the debt the of Southern Africa is illegitimate and the t immoral. Yet there is a debt which we do quar recognise—a moral debt. This is the debt red. that our governments, the governments ecor of the G7/8, multilaterals and interna- our tional commercial banks owe us for OUT unbuilt and broken down schools, for rest tion rega ensi and Cantion neve international institute Tor No. 1 The Place of Marxism in History. Ernest Mandel (40 pp. E2, $3.50, 20 FF) No. 2 The Chinese Revolution - I: The Second Chinese Revolution and the Shaping of the Maoist Outlook. Pierre Rousset (32 pp. £2, $3.50, 20 FF) No. 3 The Chinese Revolution - II: The Maoist Project Tested in the Struggle for Power. Pierre Rousset (48 pp. E2.50, $4, 25 FF) No. 4 Revolutionary Strategy Today. Daniel Bensaid (36 pp. £2, $3.50, 20 FF) No. 5 Class Struggle and Technological Change in Japan since 1945. Muto Ichiyo (48 pp. E2.50, $4, 25 FF) No. 6 Populism in Latin America. Adolfo Gilly, Helena Hirata, Carlos M. Vilas, and the PRT (Argentina), introduced by Michael Löwy (40 pp. E2, $3.50, 20 FF) No. 7/8 Market, Plan and Democracy: the Experience of the So-Called Socialist Countries. Catherine Samary (64pp. £3, $5, 30FF) No. 9 The Formative Years of the Fourth International (19331938). Daniel Bensaid (48 pp. £2.50, $4, 25 FF) No. 10 Marxism and Liberation Theology. Michael Löwy (40pp £2, $3.50, 20 FF) No. 11/12 The Bourgeois Revolutions. Robert Lochhead (72pp. £4, $6, 40FF) No. 13 The Spanish Civil War in Euzkadi and Catalonia 1936-39. Miguel Romero (48pp. £2.50, $4, 25 FF) No. 14 The Gulf War and the New World Order. André Gunder 32 International Viewpoint #312 June 1999 neve
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women and girls who con-
OIL-RICH tinue to bear the burden of
TIGERIA poverty and for the jobs, homes, clean water and all the fundamental human
AMY OBER SIMLAR BRACEMEN rights we do not have.
We demand:
• the unconditional, immediate and total cancellation of the debt;
DART I"
• the immediate termina-
SANT UP tion of the conditions attached to all the internationally designed debt relief mechanisms to tying this to further economic adjustment; and
• the scrapping of the
Highly Indebted Poor
Countries initiative.
We shall continue to build Jubilee 2000 coalitions that will empower the broad masses of people to respond effectively to all the challenges posed by the debt crisis and the Jubilee clarion for a new millennium. We mean in this regard people-to-people campaigning to build our own power, capacity and "globalisation of solidarity" networking in order to ensure the achievement of our goals. We commit ourselves to self-determination in working for debt cancellation within a broader concept of Jubilee, including assertion of our sovereignty from Northern domination and transformation towards an alternative global economic system. * Southern African Debt Summit, Johannesburg, 21st March 1999 Affirmed by delegates from: Angola, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, ganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Jubilee 2000 Afrika and Jubilee 2000 Coalitions from Latin America and Philippines, For more information contact: Alternative Intormation & Development Centre (AIDC) Tel: (021) 6851565 Fax: (021) 6851645. <[email protected]> Internet: aidc.org.za PO Box 1139, Woodstock 7924, Cape Town, South Africa s debt cancellation "HIPC" (Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative) " will make no significant difference to the volume of future payments"
The Mozambican parliament met in a special session on 4th and 5th December 1998 and voted unanimously in favour of demanding the total and unconditional cancellation of Mozambique's debt. (That debt is principally due to policies imposed on the countries of the region by the racist regime of South Africa in the 70s and 80s.)
The members of parliament claimed that if the 100 million dollars destined annually to repayment of the debt could be invested in health and education, the lives of 300 children and 30 women who die in childbirth could be saved every day.
A World Bank representative immediately declared that there was no question of the Bank going beyond the measures previously announced since that was "the maximum that the creditors can bear, financially". [ET] * Source: AWEPA (Association of Western European Parliamentarians for Africa), February 1999.
International Viewpoint #312 June 1999 33
The only conditions we recognise are those that are developed by the popular and representative civil society organisations. We believe that the results of debt cancellation can only benefit our people if it is accompanied by deep-going processes of democratisation, the upholding of human rights-including workers rights-transparency, accountability and the provision of basic social services.
We reiterate the call for reparations in the 1993 Abuja Declaration embracing the totality of all the quantifiable and unquantifiable costs that have been incurred. Reparations must compensate for economic and social damage incurred by our people, to finance the rebuilding of our own infrastructure and society and to restore our dignity. We believe reparations are long overdue as our initiative to regain control over our destiny and to ensure that the African holocaust will never occur again.
We call for the building of a new democratic world order upon the eradication of the present order that continues to bond us to debt through the ties of free trade, exploitative and extractive movement of Transnational corporate investment, volatile and speculative hot money flows; all within an ideology concocted by a tiny minority based in the USA, the Washington Consensus'
We see the gathering of Jubilee 2000 coalitions and other popular forces in Cologne in June as an important step in the march towards the realisation of the objectives of our unifying movements.
We demand that the G7 and Bretton Woods Institutions do justice to us but are under no illusion that this will happen without an intensification of popular pressure.
That is why we deem it necessary to galvanise our forces in building up momentum for a strong South-South coalition and our own agenda for total liberation at the South-South Summit.
We affirm the Accra, Rome and Tegucigalpa Declarations and the World Council of Churches Harare Statement on Debt and welcome the forthcoming
Asia Pacific Jubilee summit as part of our South-South Jubilee process. We call on our Church and other civil society allies in the North to support our struggle and the process that has led to this and previous declarations. In so doing they would be transforming themselves, as we desire, into vehicles of genuine solidarity within a Jubilee 2000 global movement led by the South for a new world in the new millennium. Mozambique Parliament demand According to the World Bank, 70% of Mozambicans live below the poverty line. 60% do not have access to health services. 78% of women are illiterate. 70% of the population does not have access to drinking water. Mozambique spends three times more on foreign debt servicing than on health and education.
In 1997, the World Bank and the IMF made much ado about conceding to Mozambique the right to debt cancellation, for having been a model pupil in adjustment. In order to get this cancellation in July 1999 the government was obliged, much against its will, to commit itself to increasing yet again the costs of health care to the population.
Yet when the cancellation measures come into effect, Mozambique will have to repay as much as it has been repaying in recent years, that is, 100 million dollars a year. This is the amount that the World Bank and the IMF deem to be "sustainable"
The Minister of Planning subsequently declared that the World Bank/IMF initiative known as