Principles

Our starting point is Jubilee not debt. The announcement of Jubilee as an indictment of ALL unjust social and gender structures, the liberation of the entire web of human relationships and the restitution of the missing global community by moving forward in social justice.

Marginalised people everywhere – the oppressed of the Global South – demand and require a political and solidarity framework. That is, one based on recognition of the political primacy of those who suffer and struggle, of the survivors and those who resist˜this means, the people of the South. Nothing about them without them. We should take our lead from them and from the movements and organisations they have spawned.

At stake is not simply the debt "issue" but the future of development aid itself highlighted by the cruel people-sacrificing advocacy of providing "support" only to "well run" countries. As if people should be punished further for having bad governments; as if it has not been shown over and over again that the neoliberal "well run" seal of approval leads to impoverishment, no matter what the statistical manipulation.

Jubilee, if true to its core message, will contest Washington‚s determination to remake every other economy and culture in its own image. We need to denounce (not engage) these and any other pretexts to further abandon moral imperative and political responsibility of the rich governments and societies to redress the impoverishment in the South and have a closer look at the origins and environmental implications of obscene wealth concentration.

We feel it fundamental for Jubilee/debt campaigns to deal with the ecological debt of the North with the environment and the South. The recognition that the North has benefited from the natural and human resources of the South, and continues to do so by pushing a development model that entails the destruction of habitats, extinction, impoverishment and marginalisation of peoples, principally in the South.

The conditionality is a trap designed to sell civil societies, North and South, on the benefits of Northern-defined conditionality, both political and economic, at the expense of an already dwindling sovereignty and hence democratic self-determination. Let us not contribute to the further loss of control of policy-making – the issue is not simply economic, it is political and at stake is critical processes and paths of identity, including the right to be different.

It is time we recognise that creditors, including the G-7, cannot be trusted to redress the crisis that they created. The G-7 has not delivered. They failed to deliver on pledges in Cologne, just as they failed to deliver in Río, Copenhagen, Cairo and Beijing. Let us distinguish therefore between failed policies and failed politics. Because their policies will go unmodified unless we seriously review our politics, including the underlying power analysis.

G-7 failings as a whole make it imperative for campaigns in the North to focus on 100 percent unilateral cancellation by creditor governments to maximum number of poor countries.

This is not a question of relief but of justice: to put an end to the amply documented net transfers of wealth from the South to the North at the cost of intolerable suffering and sacrifices.

To recognised that the transfer of resources is effected both by debt and unfair trading practices. Proof enough that the G-7‚s New Internationalism proclaimed to be based on values and that justifies "humanitarian" intervention does not carry over into the economic order.

The debt of the South has been amply "repaid". Nothing is owed! Cessation of debt payments is meaningful only in a framework of an end to structural adjustment programs and the introduction of taxation of financial transactions.

Jubilee campaigns everywhere should point out in no uncertain terms that debt "relief" that leaves structural adjustment conditions in force or reinforced is nothing less than unmitigated hypocrisy. No negotiation framework that countenances structural adjustment is morally engageable. Any mobilisation effort must have such assumptions explicitly at its core. Because unless a mass movement is explicit in its demands and paradigm challenges, it can be subject of confusion and disillusion harmful to future education and hence sustained mobilisation for fuller changes in the global economy.

Cologne spelled the extension of HIPC and the reinforcement of the plundering power of the IMF. It

was not a step forward or getting half way. There, the announced cancellations amounts to a maximum of US 25 billion, about 1 percent of the total world debt (US2030 billion, excluding the Eastern bloc, according to the April World Bank report)˜or no more than 12 percent of the 41 poorest countries‚ debt (41 billion). Our mobilisation was successful in getting debt on the G-7 agenda; it was not successful in getting the G-7 to seriously tackle it.

At least G-7 governments recognised the need to respond to citizenry and to urgently address the debt question, however inadequately. In contrast most governments in the South have enjoyed an undeserved free ride. Our bureaucrats and technocrats are happy to have the Jubilee movements act as their professional lobbyists, at no cost to themselves. However people‚s movements in the South know better than to plead on behalf of mostly incompetent and corrupt governments. Which is why an entirely different "debt repudiation" movement is gaining ground at the level of people that are putting not only their governments, but also NGOs and Churches in the North and South to the test.

It is up to us˜the Jubilee movements˜not the Bretton Woods institutions, not the G-7, not the governments of the South, to define the better deal for our people: the profound vision of justice embodied in the Jubilee ideal.

Shaping a New Mobilisation Strategy

Campaigns and movements need not be in contradiction. Campaign focuses on what are termed achievable goals tend to be focused and short-lived. But it is often forgotten that a campaign is one small piece of a larger picture of justice and structural change. Campaigns must contribute toward, and not detract from, movements.

The practice of human solidarity should not be conditioned on or by the generation of compassion, press campaigns or celebrity mobilisation. Jubilee cannot afford to become subject to charity fatigues, episodic and superficial press management or fickle or trivialising media extravaganzas. Elite strategy and lobbying has its role, its limitations and above all its dangers: the danger of becoming morally implicated in the consequences of pseudo-reform.

Language is critical, and we are all challenged to review our own language in along with our methods of trying to achieve justice. Moral posturing is not acceptable. Jubilee South calls for the unapologetic and explicit defence of the primacy of the people‚s political over the other corporate political that go under the guise of the technical. In terms of engagement, there is a need from both but the ethical and moral cannot be subordinated to the "viable" and the "pragmatic", let alone the technical and the macro-economic.

The thematic axis of a Jubilee campaign should link external debt with social debt and odious debt, as part of neoliberal adjustment policies. This means linking of Debt Campaign and movements with the ATTAC Movement (Action for Taxing Transactions on behalf of Citizens) as connected and complementary campaigns.

Support for national and regional campaigns calling for public audits, debt tribunals and popular referendum as a strategic targets in the South; lobbying G-7 members may be a subsidiary target in South debt movements, but technical evidence and shame alone will not change policies.

It is not for campaigns in the South to be integrated into predefined campaigns in the North. If singly platforms are to be created they must respond primarily to the South. Campaigns in the North should dialogue extensively with counterparts in the North before assuming public positions in regard to so-called positive conditionality. Jubilee as a whole must be configured, politically and strategically, to deal with the integral challenges so as to not win partial concessions (on debt) at the expense of larger issues (trade and conditionality).

Credibility with the bankers and governments cannot come at the expense of credibility with the excluded. Working toward "sustainable debt" and "co-responsibility" are non-starters, historically and morally. Those who invented debt bondage will not be the ones to deliver us from it. It is high time for the G-7 and other rich countries to abandon the assumption that they know what is best for those they have impoverished.

We need a focused campaign that can relate to the integrity of struggle and consciousness – as people do not neatly divide their lives according to campaign "issues", To think of movements that spring campaigns and continue to grow, as opposed to temporary campaigns where we lose sight of the prophetic Jubilee call for structural transformation. Review not only debt, but also systems of finance, trade, production and consumption.

Different campaigns will and must respond to their domestic conditions, and must define their contributions accordingly. One thing is a respectful division of labour and complementing, where complementation is possible.

Forget about "debt management" and "debt relief". Let governments and bankers work on that. For the North, Jubilee should begin or continue to focus on the cancellation of morally uncollectable debt˜and not be afraid to address it as such.

As for the South, we should accelerate and support new and old movements for outright unilateral debt repudiation as demanded democratically by people. Where we can ally ourselves with governments let us do so, and where we cannot let us stop following creditor and agency prescriptions for civil society and government covenants.

We must confront (not "dialogue") the new wave of G-7 WB/IMF arguments linking "relief" and even "aid" to the pursuit of "sound economic policies" and "good governance". Flawed by selective data and politically conditioned methodology, these studies reflect pre-existing biases, as though social costs human misery can ever be reduced to numbers.

We call on Jubilee movements to mark their distance now from a "debt relief" and even "debt cancellation" framework where decisions are almost entirely made by creditor governments and client states.

Let us not again assume the risk of asking too little and then face the prospect, once again as in Cologne, of being demanded we congratulate the G-7. Let us learn to distinguish between those who say that they are on our side and those that also say but really are not. We are accountable to the former, never to the latter. Let us say who we are.

A new Millennium gives birth to a New Hope˜the hope for eradication of debt and indebtedness. We must not defraud that hope. We should be loyal to that mobilisation. This is the new paradigm.

A New Beginning for Jubilee 2000

We in the Jubilee movements unite out of sense of renewed possibilities. Our sense of hope is not a simple by-product of inspiration and faith. It is the product of analysis, of proximity to people‚s suffering but especially of the of the multiplication evidence of resistance North and South. We must reflect and consequently reinforce the increasing receptiveness to the critiques of corporate capitalism in all of its global and local manifestations.

Jubilee must pick up the pieces, gain new adherents and humbly seek the understanding of those whose commitment never had a time limit. The struggle for global economic and social justice has no time limit.

We in Jubilee South call on all forces and campaigns, North and South, not to give up. To continue to work with even greater determination and with the courage to discern between what can and cannot be sacrificed in our drive toward economic justice. We in the South demand that campaigners do what you constantly say you want to do. At the same time recognise, there can be no effective redressing of North/South relations or effective debt action if the people of the South are not directly involved. This is less a question of influencing governments than it is of following the poor.

If Jubilee is to become a global movement, it requires a vision and a program. A vision that comes from Jubilee and from the heritage of anti-colonial struggle, including anti-neo-colonial and to resistance today to neoliberal globalisation. This means total, unconditional and immediate cancellation of the debt.

Our challenge is to build bridges to build that global movement that will take us to the vision. We know that the times are not good for such movement-building, but that only makes it more necessary to build, and to build by educating and mobilising in stages of increasing complexity.

If we have been somewhat successful at mobilizing we have been less successful at educating, particularly in the North, in generating consciousness of the links between debt and the other manifestation of economic oppression, and the resistance to those manifestations (Tobin tax, ESAFs, capital liberalization, MAI, WTO). This in part is because we have not made our moral/historical arguments with sufficient force.

Hence the centrality of a shift toward a strong "illegitimate/immoral debt" strategy especially in the North accompanied, especially in the South, by a parallel push toward repudiation. Refusal to pay seen as the moral and logical outcome of something illegitimate or reprehensible. We in the South will continue to say that the debt has already been paid. We urge our counterparts in the North to insist that any payment is immoral because it could not be done without the imposition of ethically sanctionable hardship. North repudiation strategy is of a different nature, perhaps, than repudiation in the South. They complement each other although they are not the same.

International solidarity is not an act of charity. It is an act of unity among allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objectives. The foremost of these objectives is to aid the development of humanity to the highest level possible. - Samora Moisés Machel