[Global Poverty] Thousands Rally Against "Economic Apartheid"

Shirin Shirin
WASHINGTON, Sep 24 (IPS)

At least 100,000 people from different parts of the U.S. and the world converged on Washington Saturday to demand an immediate end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and what they termed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank's "war on the poor".

The march was timed to coincide with the ongoing annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF. Led by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), a coalition of anti-war organisations, people of different racial and national backgrounds joined the march, which started and terminated at the Washington monument. Although the U.S. Park Police no longer issue official crowd estimates, organisers said the event drew between 100,000 and 300,000 people.

Holding colorful banners, puppets and placards, they walked the streets surrounding the White House, U.S. Treasury and various monuments singing songs and shouting slogans promoting international peace and economic justice. A feeder march and rally was organised by the Mobilisation for Global Justice, a coalition of activists demanding an end to the "economic violence" of the World Bank and IMF.

Activists marched from Dupont Circle under the banner of "Another World Is Under Construction" in one of many independently organised actions planned to coincide with the anti-war demonstration. Thousands of police were deployed alongside the route of the march and at metro stations. Streets had been cordoned off at several points, limiting access to the city for commuters and sometimes would-be protesters. Asked about the connection between the war and the World Bank and IMF, Virginia Setsheti of the Anti-Privatisation Forum in South Africa told IPS, "It is not just about war. It is about how many people die around the world because of unfair policies and actions -- a large part of which are economic."

"So it is not just the military injustice that we are facing. We need to connect the dots together," Setsheti said. Mobilisation for Global Justice organiser Basav Sen added, "The connection is there for all to see. The U.S. policies in Iraq look very much like an IMF-style structural adjustment programme at gunpoint." A statement issued by the organisers of the march criticised the policies of the Bank and IMF around the globe, and specifically in Iraq. It claimed that these institutions "place corporate profits ahead of basic human needs worldwide. We will speak out against the corporate theft of Iraq's resources and the decimation of the Iraqi economy through privatisation and 'free trade'."

Addressing the protestors, Prof. Dennis Brutus, a veteran of the South African movement against apartheid, urged people to challenge the Bank, IMF and other international financial institutions (IFIs) on moral grounds. He told IPS, "I fought against apartheid. We had national apartheid and now what we are facing is global apartheid. The IMF and the World Bank are pushing a global agenda that favours big corporations. It is an agenda that is making the rich richer and the poor poorer. We need to fight them on moral grounds."

The crowd cheered Brutus, now 81 years old, as he approached the podium holding a placard which said, "Blind Obedience is Embarrassing". He fought alongside Nelson Mandela to end apartheid in South Africa, and spent time in jail with him. Brutus now teaches peace studies in the U.S. and had come specially to address the march. Another speaker was Father Thomas Kocherry from India, who is known for his work in the fishing community in Kerala. He claimed that colonialism had never ended and that the Bank and IMF are a product of that colonial legacy.

"Globalisation is an extension of the conquest of colonial powers over Asia and Africa. For me, the Bank and IMF are their agents," he told IPS. Among the marchers was Naureen O'Conner, a Washington resident who had come with her husband Rick, six-month-old daughter Rose and five-year-old son Daniel. As she and the other protestors prepared to march, she held up her daughter and said, "It is her first rally". Roger Conant, who had joined the march from Massachusetts along with several others, said that he was there to express "opposition against the war" and to say that "IMF and World Bank policies are just not working."

Leslie Matthews, another protestor, said, "We must announce to the world that not all Americans are in favour of what their government is doing in Iraq and elsewhere. Yes, the Bank and IMF and White House are all here in DC, but so are we and we say that enough is enough. We refuse to be part of this unjust war on the poor both through economic and military means."

Saturday's events were the culmination of a week of activities, featuring, among other things, a mock wedding of the World Bank to the Pentagon, with an activist portraying World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz as the presiding minister. Activists claim that Pentagon and the Bank and IMF work in unison to promote what they term as "economic apartheid". According to Aniket Desai, an Indian who had joined the march as part of a South Asian street theatre group, "The fact that Paul Wolfowitz is the president of the World Bank is a reflection that military and financial institutions are connected. They are both controlled by the rich." Wolfowitz, who was appointed as the head of the Bank earlier this year, was the deputy secretary of defence under President George W. Bush from 2001-2005 and the chief architect of the Iraq war.

Aniket was walking inside a big plastic balloon bearing the slogan: "Future Scenario: Privatised Air". "They have privatised water. What is next?" Aniket asked. "It is going to be air and everything that a person needs to survive. They will do anything for profit." In view of the recent criticism of the U.S. government in handling the disaster in New Orleans, several protestors expressed their anger over resources being spent in Iraq. They also demanded that better health and education services be provided to U.S. citizens rather than spending money on war.

In a statement, the organisers said, "Instead of draining our national treasury for endless war, we demand that our tax dollars be used to repair the damage done to Iraq and to fund services in our communities." "We call for an immediate end to our government's assault on immigrants, the unethical pressures on our young people to join the military, and the undermining of democracy through relentless attacks on everyone's basic rights." Thousands of people also marched through central London Saturday to demand that Prime Minister Tony Blair withdraw British troops from Iraq. (END/2005)

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[US Aid] Political Strings Tie Up U.S. Aid

Sanjay Suri
BONN, Sep 24 (IPS)

That the U.S. Administration under the presidency of George W. Bush is the bad guy of the world of development aid has become something of a truism of the times. The Bush administration has placed security above development, but amid fears that it might not contribute to either, and that it is in fact making matters worse on both fronts.

And so when something like 600 experts sat down to debate the relationship between insecurity and development in Bonn Sep. 21-24, the Bush administration proved popular as a punching bag. Coming just after the UN summit in New York where the United States pushed the millennium development goals further down the agenda than many wanted, the U.S. administration has been asking for it. The Bonn conference on insecurity and development, organised by the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), became just another international ring for the punching.

The Bush Administration is not disconnecting security from development; an expert view is that it is just making the connections in ways somewhat different -- but not that different -- from most of the rest of the world. ''There is no question that the United States has progressively moved away from support for international economic development, particularly through United Nations and other multilateral agencies, and has a very militaristic approach to the world in general,'' Selig Harrison, director of the Asia programme at the Centre for International Policy, a leading think tank in Washington, told IPS.

''The size of foreign economic aid has diminished if we define aid as politically neutral development assistance,'' Harrison said. ''Our biggest economic aid has gone to some of our political clients like Israel and Pakistan.'' That has made U.S. development assistance ''basically a regime support system rather than any meaningful economic support programme.'' Take Pakistan, Harrison says. ''The liberal economic approach that the U.S. has displayed to Pakistan since 9/11 in terms of debt rescheduling, resumption of IMF (International Monetary Fund) programmes and bilateral help has certainly helped stabilise the Pakistan regime,'' he said. ''It has therefore served the political purpose of the U.S., in securing Musharraf's limited but what the U.S. considers important support for its fight against al-Qaeda.''

But that has not added up to development in Pakistan. ''I don't think we can say that U.S. aid has been reaching the poor of Pakistan. So we should be very cautious about claiming the economic progress of Pakistan because although it is more stable in the world economy largely as a result of U.S. aid, the internal political economy is not stable.'' When the United States is faulted, people usually think Iraq and not Pakistan, or even Afghanistan. The opposition to Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was a far too transparent pretext to get to its oil. Most people believe it was oil first, but not everyone thinks it was oil alone.

''If you ask the question what are they doing in Iraq, there are no doubt multiple motives,'' Simon Maxwell, director of the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) told IPS. ''Oil maybe, beacon of democracy in the Middle East, revenge for Gulf War Iàa whole lot of things are going on there. What people do is to then generalise from Iraq and construct an ideology.'' Perhaps the United States should not be judged by Iraq alone, and people in the world of development have been summoning the generosity to look at the half full part of the U.S. aid glass.

''In Sudan I don't know whether the U.S. did this for reasons of its own security or not, but they invested a lot in bringing about the peace in southern Sudan,'' Maxwell said. ''It seems for the time being to be a relatively successful process, and it brings to an end the war that has killed millions of people.'' So the U.S. does see that link between security and development, and it does work to bring the two together. That this area too has oil could of course mean something for the U.S. Administration. ''I suppose all countries try to marry their security interests and their development interests,'' Maxwell said.

Despite the holier-than-thou rhetoric from the Europeans, few believe European development policy is the same thing as altruism unmindful of self-interests. ''If you go back to the (British) Labour Party manifesto of 1997 which is when New Labour came to power, the development contribution to that started out by saying that there are reasons for doing development,'' Maxwell said. ''The first, for poverty reduction reasons, and that matters on its own account. The second reason given was, just look at the risks if we don't. Security-related risks, but also risks like disease, migration, climate change intensification.''

The United States makes those links under the Millennium Challenge Account under which it gives out development assistance. The aid ties U.S. security needs with development of those countries, perhaps understandably. ''If you believed that peace - freedom, to use their word -- was a necessary condition for development, what would you do?'' Maxwell said. ''You would emphasise issues like good governance in your dealings with all countries, you would invest quite heavily in building peace, and democratic states.''

The Millennium Challenge Account seeks to do that, he said. ''The account is quite large, and is organised in such a way that countries are rewarded for good governance on a range of indicators, of which quite a lot are to do with good governance and accountability, low corruption, a commitment to health and education,'' Simon said. ''There's certainly a great deal of investment by the U.S. in fragile states.'' But there are lots of things about U.S. development policy that Europeans find incredibly hard to understand,'' Maxwell said. ''They are obviously very directed in the way they use aid, for political purposes and to reinforce democracy,'' he said. And questions had arisen about ''the way aid was used to buy support for the invasion of Iraq.''

But while questions arise about the links the United States makes between security and development, ''I don't think we help ourselves if we assume that everything they do is wrong,'' he said. ''There are lots of people, even in the U.S. government, who are very strongly committed to development goals.'' The differences are naturally over what shape that commitment takes. There is perhaps the narrow and direct sense of serving self-interest, and the broad and indirect one that might well be more effective.

''Basically military security in the long run depends on equitable economic development in which the gap between rich and poor countries is steadily diminished, and among rich and poor within countries,'' Harrison said. ''So an economic support system motivated by client-state relationships and not by development criteria reduces the security of the world and certainly reduces the security of the United States.''

While the U.S. military was represented at the Bonn conference, Harrison said that might not mean much. ''I'm sure that the Pentagon would like to monitor a conference like this, but I wouldn't attach too much importance to it,'' he said. ''The U.S. monitors conferences all the time to see what's going on and to get ideas, but that's a long way from saying that this will have any direct impact on U.S. policies.'' But the United States has something to learn from Europe in the world of development, Harrison said. ''Europe has a collective consciousness of the need for sustainable development in the Third World, and holds out the hope that Europe will play a more positive role than the U.S. is playing at the present time in promoting bilateral and economic multilateral economic development.''

Europe has a dynamic for development ''that is diminishing in the United States and Japan,'' he said. But while the United States may not listen to voices within Europe, as at this conference, ''if Europe plays a more positive role, that will by force of example draw a response in time.''

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