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Jubilee Relay article #1: A race for commonwealth.
Fancy leaving March winds behind and setting off for Canada, the West
Indies, the Caribbean, Africa, Australia, Oceana, Asia and India? That’s the route for The Queen’s Jubilee Baton Relay, an expanded version of the traditional prelude to the Commonwealth games, which will link the
Manchester Games with the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations.

A specially designed Jubilee Baton containing a message from the monarch starts its journey through 23 Commonwealth countries on March 11 from Buckingham Palace. From Canada to Malta it will be passed hand to hand for 86 days by thousands of runners: athletes, celebrities and ordinary folk, before returning to the UK on 6th June to start its tour of the British Isles.

“Commonwealth” and “Jubilee” have come to be celebration words which, like “fireworks” and “champagne”, are now part of the vocabulary of special occasions and serve as sure signs that yet another big party is in the offing.

However these ideas have deeper roots in weightier and more serious issues. The hugely popular Jubilee 2000 Debt Campaign took its title and campaign framework from the biblical custom of “Jubilee” whereby every 50 years slaves were freed and debts cancelled. The millennium year 2000 provided a fitting deadline for the Jubilee project.

It’s a pretty safe bet that on 25th July a runner will turn into the City of Manchester Stadium at exactly the right moment, hand the Jubilee Baton to the Queen and the fun of the 2002 Commonwealth Games can begin. By way of stark contrast the debt campaigners’ Jubilee race saw no such clear conclusion in the year 2000. In fact it still goes on. In Scotland the campaign continues as Jubilee Scotland.

This is not to say that the success of the debt campaign should be
underestimated. The issue has gained huge public support and noisy
campaigners undoubtedly had a hand in forcing debt cancellation onto the agenda of the summits of the world’s richest countries, the Group of 7. By 1999 the IMF and World Bank had taken the apparently bold step of promising to cancel a third of the unpayable debts of the poorest countries. Individual G7 countries were also persuaded to take unilateral action: the UK Jubilee 2000 Campaign approached its millennium deadline with an announcement from the Chancellor Gordon Brown that Britain would cancel many of it’s own (bilateral) outstanding poor country debts.

However, of the $100 billion relief promised by the World Bank and IMF only $13.2 billion has so far materialized, less than 5% of the backlog of
unpayable debt. The process is slow and complex and will leave many poor countries with unmanageable debts after completing it. The poorest countries in the world simply cannot wait 6 years for such limited respite. In Malawi, for instance, the average life expectancy is now 37 years. Life is already too short. And getting shorter as money which is badly needed for education, health and clean water continues to be eaten up by debt repayments to rich countries.

Can the idea of a meaningful “Commonwealth” be sustained while such economic colonialism is so obviously alive and well? Sixteen of the poorest indebted, and three of the largest creditor nations, are Commonwealth members. A real commitment to the “common weal” of both poor and rich nations demands much more than a four yearly sporting extravaganza, more than an invite to the street party, more even than a sought after place at the discussion tables for poor nations.

“Commonwealth”, the well being of all, is exactly what the debt campaign is about: it is a powerful notion which if taken seriously, could, and should, have life saving implications on an immense scale. It would be wonderful if the message in the Jubilee Baton was of such force to herald a real cause of jubilation for the poor of the Commonwealth and beyond.

This series of weekly articles will follow the progress of the Jubilee Baton as it is carried through some of the most amazing places on earth, and will explore some of the debt-related issues which we find along the way. Join us next week in the Caribbean.
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Hester Ross is a writer who lived and worked in Malawi from 1988-1998.