Campaign to abolish Third World Debt
Genocide victims pay for machetes
Colette Braeckman From the closure of the Clabecq steelworks in Belgium to the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, most of the struggles of the end of the century found a tribune and an attentive audience at the one-day event entitled "Eleven hours against neo-liberalism and for humanity" organised in Brussels on 25 January by the Committee for the Cancellation of Third World Debt (COCAD).
Discussions included child labour, the sex industry, and the dead-end which gloInterview with Eric Toussaint, event organiser • Surely cancelling third world debt is not enough to thwart the neoliberalism you denounce?
Our catalogue of alternatives is much larger! The northern assets of the corrupt regimes of the south, like Mobutu's fortune, should be expropriated, and the funds distributed to the population. We support the "Tobin tax" - one Nobel prize winner's suggestion on how to "put a grain of sand in the infernal machine of financial speculation" by imposing a progressive tax on financial transfers. We support all tax measures which would enable states to have enough room for manoeuvre to reduce the weight of their foreign debt. Professor Max Frank of the Université Libre de Bruxelles has suggested an exception tax on wealth. The social aspect should set the priorities! • Sounds utopian
The implementation of these alternatives requires a balance of forces which doesn't exist at this time neither electorally, nor in social terms. So, our modest, but important contribution is part of the wider project to modify the balance of social forces. Through initiatives like our "eleven hours against neoliberalism" actors from North and
South come together to establish what kind of resistance can be built to oppose neo-liberalism. This is our third initiative of this kind here in
Belgium. Source: Le Soir, 25 January 1997, p2.
balisation leads to. Swiss genetician Albert
Jacquard denounced the way universities are increasingly obliged to adapt their work to the orders of industry; producing productive workers rather than independent intellectuals.
The phrase "profit-fodder" will certainly catch on, as "cannon-fodder" did in its time.
Pierre Galand, president of Belgium's council of development NGOs (CNCD) has just returned from Rwanda, where, together with Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky, he investigated the foreign debts of a country facing impossible challenges: rebuilding national consensus after the genocide, absorbing a million refugees, judthe crimiging nals... and reimforeign bursing debts of about one billion US dollars, or 90% of the total value of goods and services produced in the country last year. Interest on these debts repre-
46% of sents
Rwanda's export earnings.
This foreign debt increased dramatically in the 1990s, during the preparation and execution of the genocide. Pierre Galand's research in the archives of the deposed genocidal regime revealed evidence that loans from the World Bank, and balance of payments loans from a range of financiers, including Belgium and the European Union, were diverted from their official purposes, and used, in 1993, to buy cut-throat razors, axes, saws and machetes. Half a million blades...
Matching funds provided through "aid"
programmes were used not to support small scale projects or peasants, but to buy weapons and uniforms from Belgium and other first-world countries. One Belgium
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Belgium/Rwanda * company delivered 20,000 pairs of army boots. The invoice, for $500,000, has just been re-presented for payment to the new Rwandan government.
Galand denounces a double failure. "The Rwandan partner did not use the funds for the agreed purpose. But the financiers did not carry out the normal, specified checks. They were negligent. Why should today's Rwandans, those who escaped the genocide, pay for the machetes which were the instruments of that great crime?"
After the defeat of the "genocidal" regime and the victory of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, which installed a government of national unity in Kigali, supporters of the previous regime fled into Zaire, where they created, in Goma, a "branch" of the National Bank of Rwanda, which continued to place orders for arms and other supplies, and guarantee payments. A number of foreign banks accepted these orders made by the "government in exile," which they considered more legitimate than the new authorities in Rwanda itself. Galand cites CitiBank, Dresdner Bank (Germany) and BNP (France). Some other institutions, like the Belgian bank BBL, suspended all dealings with the exiled regime.
Galand's presentation was one of the best-attended parts of the COCAD event, which denounced the fact that Rwanda now faces $155 m./year interest payments as "illegitimate" and "hateful". "Cancelling this debt is not a question of generosity, but is a duty to this nation of victims." * Source: Le Soir, 27 January 1997, pб. "Le Rwanda doitil payer une "dette odieuse"?
* COCAD, Plantinstraat 29, 1070 Brussels, Belgium © +32.2.5234023
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