An irresistible force

Sojourners, May/Jun 2000 by Wroe, Martin, Coode, Judy

JUBILEE 2000 has surprised people with its phenomenal success. A ok at hew and why it caught fig-ail what's around tie bend.

It might seem odd to describe Hamsatou, a 13-year old girl in the West African country of Niger, as lucky. A mysterious flesh-eating disease known as "the Grazer" has consumed the left side of her face, leaving a gaping hole at the side of her nose, through which you can see her pink, unprotected tongue. She shields her head in embarrassment in her village, has no prospect of marriage, and rarely walks further than the nearby well. "When I go to the market," she says, "I'm ashamed of myself. I cover my face so people won't stare at me and laugh."

But Hamsatou is lucky because she is alive. One in three children in Niger, the world's poorest country, do not reach S years of age. And while the Grazer will kill 120,000 children in the world this year, a $3 mouthwash would have ensured she need never have succumbed to its ravages. Unfortunately the government of Niger does not have $3 to spare. Three quarters of its annual tax revenue is spent on servicing its $1.4 billion international debt.

CUT TO NAIROBI, KENYA, where Anthony Minghella, Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, is working with a team of six local actors on a short film. Minghella is acutely aware that many pictures beamed from developing countries into the homes of richer countries have lost their emotional power. "We have been saturated by images of starving children surrounded by flies, calculated to elicit sympathy. They don't speak to us anymore." But when Minghella-and his friend Richard Curtis, the writer of Four Weddings and A Funeral and Notting Hill-met the British Chancellor Gordon Brown, as part of the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel Third World debt, they realized that maybe a film could tackle the underlying structures of povertywithout anaesthetizing the viewer. The result, an hors d'oeuvres to last summer's Hollywood blockbusters in British cinema, opens with an African family scratching a living from selling peanuts and making model planes from coat hangers. At days end, the family members pool their meager earnings. Leaving their house they are transported-by the magic of film-to Waterloo Bridge in London and thence to a suburban street. Here they knock on the doors of strangers, introducing themselves-and giving back to these people the money they owe them.

"I am only a filmmaker," says Minghella. "I'm the least qualified person to talk about world debt. But if someone who obviously didn't have enough money to live on knocked on my door and said, `Here's some money,' I'd say, `No thanks, I don't want it.' But that is what we do every day by doing nothing about the unpayable debts of poor countries."

Final cut, this time to a nightclub in Rome. It's mid-September, 3 a.m., the room is heaving with groovy young Italian clubbers, the music thunderous. Bono, of rock band U2, . is partying the small hours away before heading out to the airport and an early flight to Washington, D.C., where he will lobby the IMF. Fellow debt-cancellation campaigners such as former rock-star turned media-mogul Bob Geldof, record producer Quincy Jones, Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, and Anne Pettifor, who heads up the London campaign group Jubilee 2000, are sleeping the sleep of the just. It was a good day. They met the pope at Castle Gandolfo, his summer residence, and he gave the campaign a ringing endorsement. Better still, Bono came out of the meeting to pronounce to the assembled press that the Holy Father was a "funky pontiff' who had pinched his trademark fly-shades. The pictures and soundbite sped round the globe: Riding side-saddle went the news that it is time for the rich countries to liberate poor countries from their unpayable burden of debts. Mission accomplished.

"As long as the massive debts of these countries remain, they are effectively imprisoned by the rich countries in a modern 'debtors prison,'" explains Bono during a break in the music. "In the 19th century, if someone couldn't pay back a debt, their families might be put into debtors prison. In the 20th century, the practice was abolished for individuals, but not for countries. Now they are held ransom for the mistakes of previous regimes.

"A country like Niger, with a life expectancy of 47 years, spends more paying off their debts than on health and education combined. This is an obscenity."

UNTIL THE JUBILEE 2000 campaign came along, it was an obscenity about global fiscal policy, historic international loans, and compound interest, an obscenity that was too complicated to unravel. But by the end of last year, a rag-tag movement of churches, development organizations, and trade unions, sprinkled with the fairy dust of celebrities like Bono and Muhammad Ali, had persuaded leaders of the richest countries to wipe out $111 billion of debts of the poorest countries. That's about one third of the total the campaign is demanding.

And it has been the churches, grasping a biblical vision of release to economic captives, that has inspired the movement. As Will Hutton, one of Britain's leading economic commentators, put it in The Observer: "I doubt many readers know the Old Testament books of Leviticus, Exodus, and Deuteronomy any more than I do, but without them there would be no Jubilee 2000, no debt campaign, and no international public pressure. At the end of an increasingly secular century, it has been the biblical proof and moral imagination of religion that have torched the principles of the hitherto unassailable citadels of international finance."