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| and still more on the G8 |
| 07.12.05 (6:23 pm) [edit] |
Africa's new best friends
The US and Britain are putting the multinational corporations that created poverty in charge of its relief
George Monbiot
The Guardian, July 5, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g8/story/0" title="http://www.guardian.co.uk/g8/story/0" target="_blank"http://www.guardian.co.uk/g8/...,13365,1521412,00.html
I began to realise 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 privatise 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 colours, 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 organisers 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 US 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 US "foreign policy interests". In return they will be allowed "preferential treatment" for some of their products in US markets.
The important word is "some". Clothing factories in Africa will be allowed to sell their products to the US as long as they use "fabrics wholly formed and cut in the United States" or if they avoid direct competition with US
products. The act, treading carefully around the toes of US 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 US 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 US 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 US products will be limited." The US state department has put it in charge
of training African governments and businesses. The CCA runs the US 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 labour, 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 marvellously 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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| more reason to say FUCK G8! |
| 07.07.05 (5:26 pm) [edit] |
FROM IRAQ TO THE G8: THE POLITE CRUSHING OF DISSENT AND TRUTH
John Pilger
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related "global" events has been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul; the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Reading the papers and watching television in Britain, you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings, which produced the most searing evidence to date of the greatest political scandal of modern times: the attack on a defenceless Iraq by America and Britain.
The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. "We are here," said the author Arundathi Roy in Istanbul, "to examine a vast spectrum of evidence (about the war) that has been deliberately marginalised and suppressed, its legality, the role of international institutions and major corporations in the occupation, the role of the media, the impact of weapons such as depleted uranium munitions, napalm, and cluster bombs, the use and legitimising of torture . . . This tribunal is an attempt to correct the record: to document the history of the war not from the point of view of the victors but of the temporarily anguished."
"Temporarily anguished" implies that, even faced with such rampant power, the Iraqi people will recover. You certainly need this sense of hope when reading the eyewitness testimonies which demonstrate, as Roy pointed out, "that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq."
The most shocking testimony was given by Dahr Jamail. Unless you read the internet, you will not know who Dhar Jamail is. He is not an amusing Baghdad blogger. For me, he is the finest reporter working in Iraq. With the exception of Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and several others, mostly freelancers, he shames the flak-jacketed, cliché crunching camp followers known as "embeds". A Lebanese with American citizenship, Jamail has been almost everywhere the camp followers have not. He has reported from the besieged city of Fallujah, whose destruction and atrocities have been suppressed by western broadcasters, notably by the BBC. (See www.medialens. org/ alerts).
In Istanbul, Jamail bore his independent reporter's witness to the thousands of Iraqis tortured in Abu Ghraib and other American prisons. His account of what happened to a civil servant in Baghdad was typical. This man, Ali Abbas, had gone to a US base to inquire about his missing neighbours. On his third visit, he was arrested without charge, stripped naked, hooded and forced to simulate sex with other prisoners . This was standard procedure. He was beaten on his genitals, electrocuted in the anus, denied water and forced to watch as his food was thrown away. A loaded gun was held to his head to prevent him from screaming in pain as his wrists were bound so tightly that the blood drained from his hands. He was doused in cold water while a fan was held to his body.
"They put on a loud speaker," he told Jamail, "put the speakers on my ears and said, 'Shut up, fuck, fuck, fuck!' He was refused sleep. Shit was wiped on him and dogs were used on him. "Sometimes at night when he read his Koran," said Jamail, "(he) had to hold it in the hallway for light. Soldiers would come by and kick the Holy Koran, and sometimes they would try to piss on it or wipe shit on it." A female soldier told him, "Our aim is to put you in hell . . . These are the orders from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell."
Jamail described how Fallujah's hospitals have been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching the hospitals. Children were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.
The two men responsible for this, George Bush and Tony Blair, attended the G8 meeting at Gleneagles. Unlike the Iraq Tribunal, there was saturation coverage, yet no one in the "mainstream" - from the embedded media to the Make Poverty History organisers and the accredited, acceptable celebrities - made the obvious connection of Bush's and Blair's enduring crime in Iraq. No one stood and said that Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" at best amounted to less than the money the government spent in a week brutalising Iraq, where British and American violence was the cause of the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown (Unicef).
In Edinburgh, a shameless invitation-only meeting of Christian Aid supporters and church leaders was addressed by Britain's treasurer, Gordon Brown, the paymaster of this carnage. Only one person asked him, "When will you stop the rape of the poor's resources? Why are there so many conditions on aid?" This lone protestor was not referring specifically to Iraq, but to most of the world. He was thrown out, to cheers from among the assembled Christians.
That set the theme for the G8 week: the silencing and pacifying and co-option of real dissent and truth. It was Frantz Fanon, the great intellectual-activist of Africa, who exposed colonial greed and violence dressed up as polite do-goodery, and nothing has changed, in Africa, as in Iraq. The mawkish images on giant screens behind the pop stars in Hyde Park beckoned a wilful, self-satisfied ignorance. There was none of the images that television refuses to show: of murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood streaming from their heads, cut down by Bush's snipers.
On the front page of the Guardian, the Age of Irony was celebrated as real life became more satirical than satire could ever be. There was Bob Geldoff resting his smiling face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his jester. Elsewhere, there was an heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world's poor while lauding "compassionate" George Bush's "war on terror" as one of his generation's greatest achievements; and there again was Brown, the enforcer of unfair rules of trade, saying incredibly that "unfair rules of trade shackle poor people"; and Paul Wolfowitz, beaming next to the Archbishop of Canterbury: this is the man who, before he was handed control of the World Bank, devised much of Bush's so-called neo-conservative putsch, the mendacious justification for the bloodfest in Iraq and the notion of "endless war".
And if you missed all that, there is a downloadable PDF kit from a "one Campaign" e-mail to "help you organise your very own ongoing Live8 party". The suppression of African singers and bands, parked where Geldoff decreed, in an environmental theme park in Cornwall, in front of an audience of less than 50 people, was described correctly by Andy Kershaw as "musical apartheid".
Has there ever been a censorship as complete and insidious and ingenious as this? Even when Stalin airbrushed his purged comrades from the annual photograph on top of Lenin's mausoleum, the Russian people could fill in the gaps. Media and cultural hype provide infinitely more powerful propaganda weapons in the age of Blair. With Diana, there was grief by media. With Iraq, there was war by media. Now there is mass distraction by media, a normalising of the unmentionable that "the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people", wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, "and so the evidence has to be internally denied."
Deploying the unction of Bono, Madonna, Paul McCartney and of course Geldoff, whose Live Aid 21 years ago achieved nothing for the people of Africa, the contemporary plunderers and pawnbrokers of that continent have pulled off an unprecedented scam: the antithesis of 15 February 2003 when two million people brought both their hearts and brains to the streets of London.
"(Ours) is not a march in the sense of a demonstration, but more of a walk, " said Make Poverty History's Bruce Whitehead. "The emphasis is on fun in the sun. The intention is to welcome the G8 leaders to Scotland and ask them to deliver trade justice, debt cancellation and increased aid to developing countries."
Really?
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.
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| Inside The Murky World Of The Uk's Make Poverty History Campaign |
| 07.03.05 (6:44 pm) [edit] |
Inside The Murky World Of The Uk's Make Poverty History Campaign
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&" title="http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&" target="_blank"http://www.zmag.org/content/s...;ItemID=8181
by Stuart Hodkinson
June 28, 2005
Red Pepper
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For a sun-soaked Friday in late May, there was an unusual air of panic at the British Trade Union Congress (TUC) for the monthly members' assembly of Make Poverty History (MPH). Officials hurriedly briefed reception with some last-minute security instructions: "You must make sure that only assembly members are let in," one instructed. "The meeting is open to the public, but only public members of Make Poverty History."
The nerves were understandable. Two damning stories about MPH were about to break in the British national press. The cover story of British centre-left weekly, New Statesman, 'Why Oxfam is failing Africa', had exposed deep anger among members of the MPH coalition at Oxfam's 'revolving door' relationship with UK government officials and policies, accusing it of allowing Britain's two most powerful politicians, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown, to co-opt MPH as a front for New Labour's own questionable anti-poverty drive.
The right-wing Sunday Telegraph, meanwhile, had given notice of its shocking exclusive on how large numbers of the ubiquitous MPH white wristband - the very symbol of the campaign - had been knowingly sourced from Chinese sweatshops with Oxfam's blessing.
Inside MPH, however, the embarrassing revelations were no surprise. For the past six months, some of the UK's leading development and environmental NGOs have been increasingly vocal in their unease about a campaign high on celebrity octane but low on radical politics. One insider, active in a key MPH working group, argues there "has often been a complete divergence between the democratically agreed message of our public campaign and the actual spin that greets the outside world". He is angry:
"Our real demands on trade, aid and debt, and criticisms of UK government policy in developing countries have been consistently swallowed up by white bands, celebrity luvvies and praise upon praise for Blair and Brown being ahead of other world leaders on these issues."
This is surely not what campaigners had in mind back in late 2003 when Oxfam initiated a series of informal meetings with charities and campaigning organisations to consider forming an unprecedented coalition against poverty in 2005 to coincide with the UK presidency of both the G8 summit and EU, the first five year evaluation of progress on the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed in 2000, the 6th WTO Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong, and the 20th anniversary of Live Aid.
In September 2004, the Make Poverty History coalition was officially launched as the UK mobilisation of an international coalition, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (G-CAP), led by Oxfam International, Action Aid and DATA - the controversial Africa charity set up by U2 frontman, Bono and multi-billionnaires, George Soros, and Microsoft's Bill Gates, the world's second richest person with a fortune of just under $50 billion.
Since then, MPH has become an impressive campaigning coalition, boasting over 460 member organisations including all the major trade unions and the TUC, development NGOs, charities, churches as well as several faith and diaspora groups. Its successful mix of celebrity backers and anti-poverty message has captured the attention of both politicians and mass media, encapsulated in the near-hysteria following the annoucement by veteran rock star and Africa campaigner, Bob Geldof, that a series of free concerts in London, Paris, Philadelphia, Rome, and Berlin would take place under the banner 'Live 8' to coincide with the MPH campaign to lobby the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland in July.
But despite the success, there is widespread unhappiness within the coalition over the campaign's public face and its cosiness to Blair and Brown. Critics argue that on paper at least, MPH's policy demands on the UK government are fairly radical, especially its calls for "trade justice not free trade", which would require G8 and EU countries, notably the UK, to stop forcing through free market policies on poor countries as part of aid, trade deals or debt relief. MPH also says rich countries should immediately double aid by $50bn per year and finally meet 35-year old promises to spend 0.7 per cent of their national income in development aid. More and better aid, meanwhile, should be matched by cancellation of the "unpayabale" debts of the world's poorest countries through a "fair and transparent international process" that uses new money, not slashed aid budgets. With additional calls for the regulation of multinationals and the democratisation of the IMF and World Bank, John Hilary, Campaigns Director of UK development NGO, War on Want, has a point when he asserts that MPH's policies "strike at the very heart of the neo-liberal agenda."
The problem, however, is that when these policies are relayed to a public audience, they become virtually indistinguishable from those of the UK government. This was brought home back in March this year when Blair's deeply compromised Commission for Africa set out its neoliberal proposals for the corporate plunder of Africa's human and natural resources under the identical headlines used by MPH - 'trade justice', 'drop the debt' and 'more and better aid'. In return, most MPH members, led by Oxfam and the TUC, warmly welcomed the report's recommendations. As Ghana's Yao Graham makes clear in July's Red Pepper, African civil society is far less enamoured with the Commission's report, which he argues lays out a brueprint for "the new scramble for Africa".
Thanks to the New Statesman exposé, much of the blame is placed on the leadership of Oxfam - the UK's biggest and most powerful developent agency. Despite its pro-poor image around the world, over the last two decades, Oxfam has become a feeder school for government special advisers and World Bank officials and has a particularly close relationship with New Labour. Blair's special advisor on international development, Justin Forsyth, was previously Oxfam's campaigns manager. Forsyth's opposite number at the Treasury is Oxfam board member, Shriti Vadera, a former director at the US bank, UBS Warburg, and specialist in public-private partnerships, a policy that litters the Africa Commission's report. Less well known is John Clark, who left Oxfam for the World Bank in 1992 to join the World Bank where he was responsible for the Bank's co-optation strategy with civil society before advising Tony Blair in 2000 on his "Africa Partnership Initiative" that directly led to the New Parternship for Africa's Development (NEPAD) in 2001. At the heart of MPH is Oxfam's Sarah Kline, a former World Bank official who champions the organisation's 'constructive dialogue' approach with the IMF and World Bank.
Oxfam's political independence from neoliberal governance is also compromised by the £40m or so of its annual income that comes from government or other public funds. Nearly £14m alone originates from the Department for International Development (DfID), which is a major champion of privatisation and its benefits for UK companies in developing countries. In this, Oxfam is of course by no means alone - almost every development NGO in Britain is on DfID's payroll. While it is possible to take and use government money progressively while being critical of the donor's policies, such large amounts of government funding inevitably influence how far Oxfam will stick its neck out politically and risk future funding cuts.
Oxfam's unrivalled financial resources and existing public profile make it by far the most powerful organisation in the MPH coalition. Last year, Oxfam's annual income surpassed £180m - three times the amount received by its nearest rival, Christian Aid, and dwarfing more social movement-oriented development NGOs like WDM and War on Want who punch way above their weight on just over £1m each. Such wealth disparity inevitably translates into the direction taken by the coalition, especially its public image. Oxfam's army of press officers, researchers and campaign officers can naturally take advantage of the huge media opportunities generated by the campaign.
But making Oxfam the scapegoat for MPH's co-optation by New Labour misses the key role played by Comic Relief and its celebrity co-founder, the film director, Richard Curtis. As one of Britain's most prolific and brilliant comedy writers, Curtis shot to fame in the 1980s with the TV series Blackadder, and his since penned hits like Mr Bean, The Vicar of Dibley, and the blockbuster movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral. With wealth and fame has come enormous political clout. In 2001, British centre-left daily broadsheet, The Guardian, ranked him the 10th most powerful person in the UK media industry, ahead of every national newspaper editor, except Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail.
Curtis's personal commitment to raising money for Africa goes back to 1985 when, at the height of the Ethiopian famine, he visited refugee camps as a guest of Oxfam. It was a life-changing experience and on his return to London persuaded showbiz friends to set up Comic Relief, the celebrity-led charity that uses the medium of comedy to raise both awareness about poverty, famine and disease in Africa, and huge sums of money to such causes.
Despite its incredible success in bringing in the bacon - over £337m since its inception - Comic Relief's live televised shows every two years are also criticised for their distinct lack of politics and innaccurate portrayal of Africa as a continent-come-country ravaged by natural disasters and warring tribes - the roles of colonialism, IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programmes and Western corporations don't get a look in.
Comic Relief's apolitical approach to Africa is deeply important to the fractious debate inside MPH. For while Bono and Geldof get the limelight and Oxfam dominates the policy agenda, it is Richard Curtis who is in the driving seat of MPH's all-important publicity machine.
Curtis's power partly lies in the financial and human resources he brings to the campaign. He has personally ensured the bankrolling of MPH, convincing Scottish multi-millionnaire business tycoon, Sir Tom Hunter, to donate a £1m to the campaign, and advertising executives to donate more than £4m of free airtime. This helped propel his 'Click' advert worldwide in which global film and music mega-stars, like George Clooney, Bono and Kylie Minogue, kitted out in full white T-shirt and wristband regalia, click their fingers every three seconds to mark another child dying in Africa. Curtis has used his unrivalled celebrity address book to ensure that MPH's platforms, events and entire PR strategy are dripping with celebrities.
While most MPH members gratefully accept that Curtis's celebrity support has been integral to the campaign's phenomenal marketing success (sales of the MPH white wristband are nearly 4 million and the website gets thousands of hits a minute), some believe it has come with too heavy a price. First there's the dubious role of Sir Tom Hunter, no ordinary sharp-dressed philanthropist. Worth £678m, his Hunter Foundation charity is an evangelical force behind public-private partnerships and child entrepreneurialism in Scotland. Since 2001, it has helped fund the Scottish Executive's Schools Enterprise Programme in which the private sector helps groom children as young as five in the wonders of business.
Ewan Hunter, CEO of The Hunter Foundation, rejects this characterisation of the scheme as "completely erroneous", and claims it is "a world leading initiative" to support a "can do" attitude in children: "For the record we consult widely with the relevant trade unions, councils, governments, teachers and children before agreeing any investment in education." Note he doesn't actualy refute the business-child relationship.
Tom Hunter recently caused a storm even in the right-wing tabloid press when he began selling special edition charity Live 8-MPH white wristbands stamped with the logos of six global fashion brands, including Hilfiger Denim whose owner, Tommy Hilfiger Corporation, is accused by labour right campaigners of sourcing its clothes from anti-union sweatshops in Latin America and the East Asia.
According to Stephen Coats, Executive Director of the Chicago-based US/Labor Education in the Americas Project that monitors and supports the basic rights of workers in Latin America, Hilfiger's labour record falls short of minimum standards:
"In our experience, Tommy Hilfiger is at the bottom of the list in demonstrating refusal to accept responsibility for the way workers are treated."
Back in October 2003, the company was accused by labour rights campaigners of cutting and running from its responsibilities to workers when evidence was uncovered of labour abuses at the Tarrant blue jean factory in Ajalpan, Mexico.
The revelations have once again left Make Poverty History campaigners angry at the contamination of their high-profile symbol by its association with anti-labour companies.
War on Want's John Hilary speaks for many inside MPH when he says that unless Hilfiger had suddenly reformed without them knowing "it's not the sort of company we'd want to be associated with".
Then there's Abbot Mead Vickers (AMV), the UK's largest advertising agency that has previously worked for Comic Relief and has been brought in to help with the campaign's communication strategy. Among AMV's many 'politically incorrect' proposals rejected by incensed MPH members was a high-profile billboard campaign in which images of Ghandi and Nelson Mandela would sit alongside Gordon Brown, with the caption '2005...?'. The ad's message was clear: this could be the year in which Brown himself becomes a 'man of history', cajoling the G8 into the ultimate sacrifice of dropping Africa's debt to take his place alongside two martyrs of anti-colonialism.
Unsurprisingly, this ridiculous proposal to draw an equivalence between those whose lives were dedicated to fighting white supremacist imperialism, and a man who wants to turn Africa into a giant free trade zone on behalf of Western multinationals, was blocked by several incensed Make Poverty History members. But such insensitivity comes with the turf: AMV's corporate clients not only include Pepsi Cola, Pfizer, Sainsbury, Camelot, and the Economist but also, ironically, Diageo, the drinks multinational which happens to own the Gleneagles Hotel where the G8 leaders will be meeting, and is a major investor in Africa.
According to Lucy Michaels from UK-based research and campaigning organisation, Corporate Watch, Diageo has a track record of lobbying OECD and G8 countries to push for greater investment liberalisation in developing countries and its PR activities in Africa are deeply controversial:
"Diageo aggresively promotes its products in Africa by attacking one the continent's key micro-scale industries - home brewing. It recently released its 'Corporate Citizenship Report for East Africa' in which it labelled unbranded alcohol as posing severe 'health and social risks', despite evidence from the International Centre of Alcohol Policies, incidentally funded by Diageo, that 'illicit' brew' is generally of good quality and is vital to the household and local economy."
But the most destructive aspect of Curtis's involvement, critics argue, has been his personal intervention in the public communications of MPH to ensure that the politics are routinely buried by the personality as part of his own personal and completely unnaccountable strategy to change G8 policy: "Richard's philosophy has become painfully obvious to everyone in MPH," one critic argues. "He believes that we should support the efforts of the UK government to bring other G8 countries into its line on aid and debt, and is adamant that Brown and Blair should not be criticised."
A few months ago, tensions came to a head when members challenged the discrepancy between MPH's agreed position and the campaign's pro-government public face. The response from a key Comic Relief official was that Curtis "found it difficult" to turn against the government because of his personal friendship with Gordon Brown. The extent of the Curtis-Brown relationship was revealed on primetime national television on Saturday 25 June in Curtis's BBC 1 film, The Girl in the Café (bizzarely announced as being shown across Africa).
A love story between Gina, an idealistic young campaigner, and Lawrence, an adviser to a tough but caring Gordon Brown-style Chancellor, who helps his new lover get an audience with world leaders at a pretend G8 summit in Iceland and inspires the UK government to insist on 'making poverty history'. Brown even attended the Scottish première of the film in May at an event organised by MPH paymaster, Tom Hunter, who has since been knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours List.
Against this background, it is little wonder that a number of NGOs in MPH have recently felt forced to try to undermine the Oxfam-Curtis-Brown axis by making their displeasure known to the press. The ensuing fall out led to MPH members agreeing to quickly distance the coalition from the government by rushing forward by several weeks a report criticising UK government policy. However, the respite was only temporary. The coup de grâce came in a recent announcement that Gordon Brown has been invited to the 2 July rally in Edinburgh.
Frustration would not perhaps be so intense if there was real pluralism and democracy in MPH's organising practices. But as the G8 draws near, MPH apparatchiks have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that come the 2 July rally in Edinburgh, only the branded, monolithic message and speakers of MPH are seen and heard.
MPH's website fails to even acknowledge the other protests, events and groups like Dissent, Trident Ploughshares and G8Alternatives, but who themselves are actively encouraging everyone to go and support the MPH rally. The MPH Coordinating Team, which includes Oxfam, Comic Relief and the TUC, has also twice unanimously vetoed the Stop the War Coalition's (STWC) application to join MPH on the Orwellian grounds that the issues of economic justice and development are separate from that of war, and STWC's participation in Edinburgh on 2 July would confuse the message. It will be interesting, then, to see if Oxfam bans itself - it is currently leading a global campaign for an international arms treaty on the basis that "uncontrolled arms fuels poverty and suffering".
STWC has since been banned from even having a stall at the MPH rally. A leaked email in late May to MPH from Milipedia, the 'ethical' events management company helping to organise the MPH rally, asks the coalition to "consider the desirability / strategy for removing people from our event who are setting up unwanted stalls, ad hoc events, facilities etc" and to draw up a list "of the likely infiltrators and decide what we're prepared to tolerate and at what point we draw the line and what action we want to take". This followed a tip-off that the Socialist Party (formerly Militant Tendency) is planning to sell its newspaper on the Edinburgh rally, shout slogans through megaphones and wear red MakeCapitalismHistory T-shirts and wristbands (Red Pepper, incidentally, will be wearing 'Make the G8 History' T-shirts on the day).
The email also recounts how, in response to Stop the War's announced intention to lead a break away rally at 4.30pm on 2 July, the local council, the police and MPH organisers are working together to ensure that STWC would be denied their own stage in order to retain "our ownership of the event and our key messaging".
This is not just about political domination. Part of MPH's concern lies in the perceived threat to its monopoly of all commercial trade taking place on the day - the coalition has taken out a market traders licence for the 2 July that will solely benefit the coalition's members and empowers MPH to move illegal traders, including political activists, off the site. Comic Relief has also registered the MakePovertyHistory slogan as a trademark with the European Union and is threatening to take action against "any misuse or alleged of the Trademark".
But concerns about MPH lie much deeper than the political divisions within the UK development scene. The most obvious question, increasingly on the lips of even mainstream journalists, is where are the voices of African civil society, and other social movements of the Global South, in a campaign that is supposedly about them?
Kofi Maluwi Klu, a leading Ghanian Pan-African activist and international coordinator of Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign in the late 1990s, is angered by MPH's lack of representativeness: "We have a saying in the African liberation movement - 'nothing about us, without us'. Make Poverty History is a massive step backwards in this regard, even from Jubilee 2000.The campaign is overwhelmingly led by Northern NGOs and its basic message is about white millionaire popstars saving Africa's helpless. The political movements still fighting for liberation on the ground are completely erased".
The absence of the South in the leadership of MPH inevitably translates into the campaign's politics. For instance, Southern NGO's and movements are generally critical of making demands on the G8: "The G8 is a completely illegitimate and unnaccountable body of global governance; its governments and corporations are historically responsible for most of the problems of developing countries, and remain so today" say Nicola Bullard, of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, the respected international non-government policy research and advocacy organisation. "Lobbying the G8 contradicts the very clear call made by hundreds of social movements, NGOs and trade unions from the South and the North at this year's World Social Forum to mobilise protests against the G8 summit."
The same is true for MPH's policy demands. While Southern movements welcome MPH's more holistic development agenda to Jubilee 2000's single issue campaign for debt relief, they argue that its position on debt contradicts what grassroots African and other Southern campaigners are demanding: "MPH is calling for 100 per cent cancellation of the unpayable debts of the poorest countries - but so is the UK government," explains Jubilee South's Brian Ashley. "This does not address the 'illegitimacy of the debt' in the first place, the fact that many South countries' debts were either a hangover from colonialism or came from the huge hike in interest rates during the 1970s and 80s, and have been paid back many times over, making the South the creditor of the North. We demand the total, unconditional and immediate cancellation of all Southern country debts, not just those of the very poorest as MPH requests."
For Southern debt campaigners, the debate is almost identical to the one that led back in 1999, to the North-South split in the Jubilee 2000 movement and the creation of the Jubilee South network, which today brings together more than 80 debt campaigns, social movements and peoples' organisations from more than 40 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia/Pacific. Jubilee South's founding principle was to create stronger South-South solidarity, to strengthen the collective voice, presence and leadership of the South in the international debt movement and lay the basis for global social transformation from the bottom-up.
While MPH is part of the Global Call for Action on Poverty (G-CAP) that has a Southern dimension in its leadership, dozens of Southern-based groups, including Jubilee South and Focus on the Global South, have refused to be part of G-CAP, declining's Oxfam and Action Aid's invitation to the September 2004 Johannesburg meeting that eventually launched the coalition. "Jubilee South decided not to go for the fairly simple reason that you don't launch a campaign on behalf of the South without fully briefing, consulting and working with Southern networks first," says Brian Ashley. Nicola Bullard concurs, adding: "Focus on the Global South saw the Jo'burg meeting as a way to get a lot of radical groups and grassroots movements to give legitimacy to a pre-determined, Northern-led campaign. We believe you have to mobilise and construct movements from the bottom-up".
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of MPH's blending of its message with that of the government's, and its exclusion of critics North and South, is that it enables the state and media to draw a sharp line in the sand between the 'good protester' attending the 2 July Edinburgh rally, and the 'bad protester' - anyone who is contemplating engaging in civil disobedience against what is, after all, an illegitimate institution and set of governments responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people each year.
Those UK development NGOs unhappy with MPH's direction know this only too well, but refuse to publicly walk away from a campaign that is actively derailing the global justice movement. Although it may sound cynical, the reason is simple: MPHistory is a money-spinner. "Although we hate the message and the corporate branding, some NGOs are making thousands of pounds through the wristbands," one arch critic admitted. "We have loads of new people on our database interested in our campaigns, and because the issues of trade, debt and aid are now suddenly sexy again, we have new funding bodies approaching us to do projects and research. MPH is paying for my job for the next 3 years."
This, at the end of the day, is the NGO bottom-line and that is what MPHistory is all about - helping the world's poor in ways that guarantee your own organisational survival. By riding the MPH money-spinning tiger in the hope of becoming stronger, the UK's most respected development NGOs like Christian Aid, War on War and World Development Movement, are themselves in danger of becoming completely detached from their African comrades at a crucial time for unity against the New labour, the G8 and their plan to carve up Africa's natural wealth for Western corporations.
This must not be allowed to happen. It is still not too late for Make Poverty History's dissenting voices to quit en masse and use this symbolic power to inspire the millions of Make Poverty History members to resist the G8, and push Geldof, Bono, Curtis and co to at least use their media influence to criticise G8 policy. Otherwise, the only thing they are likely to be consigning to history is Africa itself.
Stuart Hodkinson is the Associate Editor of Red Pepper and an activist-researcher. He can be contacted on stuart@redpepper.org.uk <mailto:stuart@redpepp er.org.uk> This is a longer version of his article 'Make the G8 History', which will shortly appear in Red Pepper's forthcoming July special edition - 'G8: the New Scramble for Africa'. Other articles include: respected Ghanaian political economist, Yao Graham, on the G8's neo-colonialist agenda for Africa, Lucy Michaels of Corporate Watch on the disreputable corporations lobbying behind the G8 and Commission for Africa, Melanie Jarman on why the G8 won't be solving climate change, Oscar Reyes on the need for the UK left to mobilise its own cultural strength in the wake of the celebrity-led Make Poverty History campaign, Red Pepper's guide to the G8 protests, and much, much more. Red Pepper is also running a live web blog throughout the G8 summit. Check out www.redpepper.org.uk <;http://www.redpepper.org.uk&g...;
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| G8 and Live 8 |
| 06.20.05 (11:22 pm) [edit] |
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So G8 leaders have decided to give poor countries a debt relief. Great. Is this a cause for celebration? Well maybe not. Except for one thing I guess: Bob Geldof, the man behind the Live Aid concert a long time ago which also brought us the anthemic Do They Know Its Christmas is organising Live 8, featuring among a list of bands a reunited Pink Floyd - yes with Roger Waters! It's being planned to materialise in Hyde Park. Enjoy the concert, luv.
The concert will certainly celebrate 'the humanity' of the G8 for giving debt relief to those poor countries, and again everyone will laud the effort of Sir Bob Geldoff to celebrate it (it's easier to do that than call him an ignorant). But then you'll realise, 'huh that's why they ended up as musicians, not political analysts'. Even Bono isn't that politically sharp anymore. But hey, they're easier to forgive because they sing well and continue to make new music, unlike politicians who simply sing the same old tunes. Eh?
But ever wonder why Radiohead wouldn't be in that concert? Or Billy Brag? Because they probably know better and would most likely stick their middle finger in the faces of the G8 leaders. That this – is just one big fucking media spin.
So IMF-WB will be giving those poor countries a debt relief. Great. They've been asking for that a long time ago. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago. But IMF-WB said, no, not without our conditions. Liberalise and privatise. Exterminate corruption. Bend down low and we'll bang you from behind.
Now that G8, through IMF-WB, have appropriately exploited those countries for such a long time, they'll set them free. It's time to move on (to other countries). And what better way than turning it into a media spin that will put halos in each of their finance minister's head, meanwhile enticing another 24 poor countries to apply for debt relief? Yes, with all the conditionalities that BBC won't even attempt to print.
Debt relief without conditions, luv, is the only kind of release. With or without grease.
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