I had noticed throughout the speaker tour that the more confrontational and technical his interlocutors, the more Ardi rose to the challenge, and this meeting was no exception. He refused to be intimidated by the plutocratic architecture of Canary Wharf – ‘the elevator is speaking to us’ he remarked with a smile as we disembarked on the 13th floor of Exchange Tower – and repeatedly brought the discussion back to the core concerns of our campaign.

Ardi stressed the difficulty the people of Indonesia had in finding their feet when around 60% of their taxes went to debt repayments. He did not beg, but stressed the growth of a strong grass-roots movement in his country that was increasingly pushing the Indonesian government to de-recognise it’s illegitimate debts. Within this context I suggested that the Jubilee ‘Lift the Lid’ campaign, with its emphasis on an international and multilateral consensus on odious debts, was worthy of their serious attention.

It’s difficult to gauge how much of this serious attention we got. Certainly the meeting room was stuffed with officials of some seniority, including the CEO – Patrick Crawford. We encountered some of the usual red herrings – including the obligatory statement that it is pointless for the UK to clean up its own act when China behaves in the way it does. We were also told that standards had improved in the last few years, and that no new deals are being made to Indonesia.

While these last statements are possibly true, they are impossible to verify as long as so many ECGD-backed deals remain shrouded in commercial confidentiality. And while it felt exciting to expose this most business-minded of departments to the views of a campaigner from the Global South, it will clearly to be difficult for our campaign to make headway while the accounts of this secretive organisation remain closed to the public. To lift the lid, in other words, it may first be necessary to open the books.

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The post Jubilee Scotland and Jubilee Debt Campaign meet the ECGD appeared first on Jubilee Scotland.

Most of the ECGD debt cancellation that occurs is through the HIPC initiative.  HIPC only includes countries that qualify as having ‘unsustainable debt’ as calculated by the World Bank & IMF. So far only 23 countries qualify as having had unsustainable debt. This process is part of the big debt relief deal agreed in 1999 in the wake of the Jubilee2000 campaign.

The forum for ECGD debt cancellation is the Paris Club  an informal creditors club that meets to decide the fate of country’s debt problems. This forum includes all the export credit agencies owed debt by the country under consideration as well as other governmental representative. For the UK this includes someone from Dfid, FCO and the Treasury.

The debt cancelled at the Paris Club under HIPC owed to the ECGD is then counted as ODA by the UK government. This goes towards the government’s target of aid spending as a proportion of Gross National Income. By including debt relief as ODA the UK government (as well as many other EU governments) inflate the amount they spend on aid and by a huge amount. click here to see the UK aid chart and the proportion of this as debt relief

ECGD debt cancellation should not come from the aid budget! Not only is this a massaging of the aid figures and denying poor countries more aid but at the same time it subsidises UK exporters for their operations in the developing world- not for reducing poverty. Why should this come out of the aid budget? The biggest industry that the ECGD subsidises is the arms industry. For example the ECGD is owed over US$1billion by the Indonesian government for tanks and jets sold to Suharto in the 1990s.
Military debt cancellation is also not supposed to be counted as ODA even though about 45% of ECGD’s business concerns the arms industry. For more information on this see the Blog entry on NigeriaTherefore the UK government is moving towards its aid target at the expense of those that its aid is supposed to benefit. This is all despite constant calls from campaigns such as Jubilee Scotland but the OECD whose Development Assistance Committee (DAC) analyses ODA levels actually allows this practice to continue.

In 2005 there was international recognition that global aid spending needed to be increased by at least US$50 billion a year to meet anti-poverty targets(the Millennium Development Goals). THIS FIGURE DID NOT INCLUDE DEBT RELIEF.

However in the same year,the UK as well as other creditors implemented two of the biggest debt relief deals outside of HIPC. Debt cancellation for Iraq and Nigeria. Iraq’s situation was spurred by reconstruction efforts after the war and calls by the US administration for debt relief. In Nigeria the government threatened to default on their debt payments resulting in partial cancellation in return for a one-off payment. Most of the debt owed to the UK by both countries was through the ECGD.

This has meant that the UK and global aid figures are even more inflated than usual:

“ODA was exceptionally high in 2005 due to large Paris Club debt relief operations (notably for Iraq and Nigeria) which boosted ODA to its highest level ever at USD 107.1 billion. In 2006, net debt relief grants still represented a substantial share of net ODA, as members implemented further phases of the Paris Club agreements, providing USD 3.3 billion for Iraq and USD 9.4 billion for Nigeria. Excluding debt relief, ODA fell by 0.8%.”

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/7/20/39768315.pdf

|In the UK 24% of ODA was spent on Iraq and Nigerian debt cancellation in 2006 http://www.concordeurope.org/Files/media/internetdocumentsENG/Aid%20watch/1-Hold_the_Applause.FINAL.pdf

For more information here is a few links to reports on Export Credit Agencies and debt.

http://www.whiteband.org/resources/issues/debt/debt-cancellation/Export%20Credit%20DEBT(final).doc <http://www.whiteband.org/resources/issues/debt/debt-cancellation/Export%20Credit%20DEBT%28final%29.doc>

http://www.eurodad.org/

Other organisations that scrutinize Export Credit Agencies

ECA Watch www.eca-watch.org <http://www.eca-watch.org/>

EURODAD www.eurodad.org <http://www.eurodad.org/>

The cornerhouse www.thecornerhouse.org.uk <http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/>

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The post ECGD – The UK government’s debt generator appeared first on Jubilee Scotland.

Jubilee Debt Campaign, Jubilee Scotland and the Anti-Debt Coalition Indonesia are calling on the UK government to cancel £525 million of illegitimate debt owed by Indonesia from loans made to former President Suharto, who died on Sunday 27th January

Much of Indonesia’s debt to the UK was contracted in the 1980s and 1990s to buy British arms, including tanks, water cannon and aircraft. At least 75% of the £705 million Indonesia owes the UK – which is still being repaid – is known to relate to arms sales [1]. Suharto’s use of arms to suppress his own people, such as in East Timor, is notorious.

Ben Young, of Jubilee Scotland, said:

“Indonesia is still paying the UK millions in debt every year from arms loans made to Suharto. Rich countries including the UK knowingly lent this dictator billions of dollars, to fund arms sales including Hawk jets and Scorpion tanks. It’s time the Indonesian people stopped paying for their own oppression.”

Yuyun Harmono, of Koalisi Anti Utang (Anti Debt Coalition Indonesia), said:

“The Indonesian media are maintaining that Suharto had no faults; they need reminding that he was a dictator and has committed many crimes. Suharto took out many loans from the multilateral institutions, and from the UK, the US, Australia and Germany. These loans were not taken out by Indonesia, but by a dictator. We’re saying that the Indonesian people will not now pay the loans back.”

Sarah Williams, of Jubilee Debt Campaign, said:

“After the fall of Saddam Hussein there was clear international agreement that whatever the reasons for the original loans, the Iraqi people should not have to repay their dictator’s debts. Yet ten years after the fall of Suharto, the Indonesian people are doing exactly that, while more than half the population live below the poverty line.

“Suharto’s death is a chance for the UK and other rich countries to take the lead in cleaning up international lending – by cancelling Indonesia’s illegitimate debts.”

The following letter by Ben Young of Jubilee Scotland was published in the Glasgow Herald in response to the Herald’s obituary on Suharto:

Your obituary of General Suharto rightly emphasises the extraordinary brutality of his rule, but overstates the economic development over which he presided. Human development indicators such as life expectancy, child mortality and education improved steadily in the decades after the Second World War; Suharto’s rise to power is not marked by any acceleration in the rate of improvement. This suggests that development was actually initiated by President Sukarno and continued despite, not because of, his successor’s deeply corrupt rule.

Nor should we gloss over the predicament of most Indonesians today, half of whom live under the $2 per day poverty line. The country also has colossal debts, spending three times as much servicing them as it does on health and education combined. Suharto’s estate, meanwhile, contains up to $35bn stolen from the public purse. This is the legacy of the man who styled himself “father of development”.

Ben Young, National Co-ordinator, Jubilee Scotland, 41 George IV Bridge, Edinburgh.

 Also published was a letter by James Picardo of Jubilee Scotland in response to The Independent’s report on Suharto’s death 

The justice we owe the Indonesians

 It is true that the Indonesian people will never have the satisfaction of seeing the dictator Suharto brought to justice (report, 28 January). But there is still a hope for some measure of justice from the international players who were willing to fund his murderous regime – a roll of shame which includes the UK.

The £500m the UK government lent to Suharto was not only used for tanks and planes to shore up his vile reign, but is still being paid off by the Indonesian people, and hobbling their steps towards development and democracy. Civil society groups in Indonesia have long called for the cancellation of this odious debt. To listen to them now – and act on their wishes – would be to make some small amends for our past role.

James Picardo

Jubilee Scotland, Edinburgh

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