WARC Urge: After G8 and Live8 are Over Remember the Victims

Notable figures from the international religious community have called on the world to remember the deeper meaning beneath G8 and the Live 8 concerts: the victims of global poverty.

Setri Nyomi, general secretary of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, reminded churches that their attention must remain firmly on those who are still suffering in the world’s poorest nations.

The WARC is a fellowship of around 75 million Reformed Christians in 218 churches and 107 countries worldwide,

Nyumi, speaking at a special service on the Make Poverty History campaign during the Assembly of the United Reformed Church at Warwick University on Sunday, praised the Make Poverty History campaign for launching such pressing humanitarian issues firmly into the public consciousness.

He also went on to stress, however, the years of hard work by so many members of the religious and faith community to bring such issues into public awareness over the years, highlighting not only the good analysis of the issues they have provided but also real active engagement.

"This week the world’s attention will be focused on the very public gestures that are being made in connection with the G8 leaders’ meeting with initiatives attributed to the British government. The media will make us believe what a wonderful bunch they are. We will focus on how good the producers and artists in the Live8 concerts are.

"But let us not forget that very conscientious people of faith have been working tirelessly through churches, Christian Aid and others for a long time and that if the world had been listening we could have made poverty history decades ago."

The Alliance leader also went on to highlight the fact that the debt and related structural adjustment programmes imposed on the poorer countries of the South by the richer North are a cause in themselves of limited access to basics like clean water or a decent education and health care.

"We have millions consigned to prison of poverty, joblessness, lack of access to health and education. They will remain in these jails because of the world we live in unless the analysis goes deeper."

Nyomi also called for fellow members of the religious community to continue a firm drive against global injustice and poverty: "Let us commit ourselves to exposing the distortions inherent in the unjust world in which we live and act out of faith together...and expose those who consign fellow human beings to prisons of poverty and injustice.

"Poverty will not be history unless you and I take our analysis deeper. Poverty will indeed be history if you and I dare by faith to remove the distortions in our world and help bring fullness of life to all."

Echoing these sentiments, the General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and Convenor of Inter-Faith Action for Peace in Africa (IFAPA), Rev. Dr Ishmael Noko, has pleaded for the debt relief program for poor countries announced last month to be pushed even further.

In a letter to Gordon Brown, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequor, Noko said that although the recent acceleration in commitment to debt cancellation was a "significant breakthrough", it was "not yet a solution".

He urged Brown to continue the fight against poverty even after G8 is over: "If the momentum which it has created can be built upon and the wider dimensions of the problem addressed, a more complete and sustainable resolution of the debt crisis may yet be within reach."

In an agreement secured last month, finance ministers from the world’s wealthiest nations, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, wiped the slate clean of US$40 billion owed by the world’s 18 poorest nations to major financial institutions.

The 18 countries, which include Rwanda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, have all completed the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries program (HIPC). The program, developed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, was launched in 1996 as the first genuine effort to reduce the external debt of the poorest contries.

Noko stressed the need of many more countries’ debt to be cancelled, some of which are not part of the HIPC, if they are to stand any real chance of fulfilling their Millennium Development Goals. He asked for total debt cancellation for the world’s poorest nations, saying "all of the countries that need debt cancellation should receive it."

He expressed particular concern for Latin American countries, many of which "owe more to the Inter-American Development (IADB) than to other international institutions."

He added that, despite this fact, "the IADB debts of the countries concerned do not appear to be included in the agreement." According to Noko, a solution to the debt of many countries to private commercial entities also had to be found.

He also urged that "debt relief should be de-linked from the adoption of economic liberalisation policies," which require cuts in public spending, privatisation of public utilities and services and the opening of domestic markets.

Such exposure to the neoliberal forces of the global market simply has a severe destabilising effect on an already fragile domestic economy. For this reason he denounced "the new debt cancellation agreement ... predicated on the HIPC process, which continues to require the adoption of such policies as a condition for debt relief."

Noko concluded by urging for the development of an independent body to monitor the legitimacy of debt, saying that "the new debt cancellation agreement is still founded on the calculation of how much a country can afford to pay, and does not consider the legitimacy of the debts."

An independent body would be responsible for identifying any legitimate debt and also for its just resolution, "mediating and resolving debt difficulties before they become humanitarian emergencies," he said.

Nyomi prophesied rather sceptically, however, that it is first and foremost the religious and faith bodies that will see this action against poverty through to the end.

"The Live8 and G8 will come and go but it is the inspiring work of the churches and ecumenical organs that will need to remain vigilant in our standing with victim of injustice before we can see the back of poverty."

The G8 summit will be taking until Friday of this week in Gleneagles, Scotland.