Comments

Debt Campaigning in a Changed World
John Harris, Convenor

The Jubilee Campaign is in a changed situation after the Millennial Year and September 11th. On the financial front all the different campaigning sectors - Jubilee Plus, the Jubilee Debt Campaign and ourselves - have all been scrambling, and even competing, for scarce financial resources. We should be all the more pleased that we are still in business. There is an appropriate irony that those who are fighting to free others from debt slavery should find themselves in financial thralldom. Such are the ways of our Twenty-first Century world!

Post September 11th, the politicians are burying the bad news. While the British Government continues to make the right noises about debt relief, in reality they are doing next to nothing and are trying to gloss over it as if the issue had been resolved already. While I respect the integrity of Gordon Brown, I have come to believe that he has actually been beaten by the World Bank and the IMF and his opposite numbers in the G7. Hence all the high sounding talk about a Global Health Fund to combat AIDS and poverty reduction by 2015, to distract us from the debt issue. He has still to tell us what is the point of giving money to a Global Health Fund, or any other poverty reduction initiative, while still demanding debt repayments.

Prior to the Millennium the Jubilee 2000 was hailed as an historic movement, to be compared with those for the emancipation of slaves of the enfranchisement of women. The Jubilee 2000 campaign caught the imagination of people across the world in north and south. Campaigners from the South have said that we in the North were naïve to think that we could deal with such an entrenched issue so quickly. While what was achieved by Jubilee 2000 was beyond everyone's wildest dreams, it falls to us to continue the campaign in much more trying circumstances until the job is finally done. The horrendous events of September 11th distracted the world from the debt campaign and provided politicians everywhere with a smokescreen. We must not be distracted, and we must keep up the pressure on politicians at every level. If truth and justice are on our side, we cannot be the first popular world movement to fail. It may take time, but we cannot give up. The debt crisis - alongside the Palestinian one - has to be one of the defining issues of the Twenty-first Century.