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So far 43,000 e-mails have gone to world leaders urging them to DROP THE
DEBT! This is good but not good enough. Let your voice be heard. If you have not signed the on-line petition, please stop by www.dropthedebt.org
today (it only takes a few seconds). Jubilee 2000 is urging any webmaster to post the message from Bono (below) prominently on their website in support of the campaign. You can also obtain banners and logos (several styles are available) from their website at http://www.dropthedebt.org/banner.html. Also you will find the latest press release from Jubilee 2000. Beneath the Press Release you will find the 'Island Mentality' Report mentioned in the Press Release. Thanks to everyone who has supported this campaign -- let's keep the momentum going.
MESSAGE FROM BONO:
-----Original Message-----
From: bono@xxxxxxxxxxxx [SMTP:bono@xxxxxxxxxxxx ]
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2000 4:11PM
To: Jubilee 2000
Subject: A Message From Bono
Hi, Bono here.
How's things? I believe the leaders of the richest nations want to drop the debt. But they seem stuck. They need a big virtual e-push NOW. Please do this action and forward to your friends.
4 love and peace, Bono.
In less than a minute, YOU can help save the lives of the 19000 CHILDREN WHO DIE EACH DAY IN AFRICA. These children die because money that should go on clean water and medicines is STILL being used to pay off foreign debt to rich countries.
Just send one email to the address below and it will go STRAIGHT TO BILL CLINTON, TONY BLAIR and the other leaders of the 7 richest countries. If enough people do this, the leaders will cancel the debts when they meet in Japan on 21st July.
1. Email G7leaders@dropthedebt.org now. Put "Drop the Debt Now" in the subject line.
2. Forward this message to at least six people who care about this. (Or even better, copy and paste into a new email to avoid lots of >>s)
Visit to see the result of your action and to find out why Bono, Muhammad Ali and the Pope back the Jubilee 2000 campaign.
You will receive an acknowledgement but your email address will not be stored or passed on.
JUBILEE 2000 PRESS RELEASE, 3 JULY 2000
BLAIR HEADS TO FANTASY ISLAND WITH CLINTON AND OTHER WORLD LEADERS
Tony Blair and the world's most powerful politicians are running away to a remote island in the Pacific for their annual G8 summit (July 21 - 23)rather than face peaceful protestors, says a new Jubilee 2000 report published July 3. "Island Mentality" accuses the G8 of trying to escape the tens of thousands
of Drop the Debt campaigners which have dogged them at their last two summits in Birmingham and Cologne by forming massive human chains around their conference centres. The G8 have chosen Okinawa, a tiny island in Japan, surrounded by shark infested waters.
The reason, explains the report, is that since the promises made by the G8 in front of 50,000 people in Cologne last year to cancel billion of the debts of the poorest countries, not one country has received debt cancellation. Africa continues to pay million in debt repayments each week.
The cost of debt cancellation is not the problem, reveals the report. It would cost only a year for each citizen in the west to cancel all the debts of the poorest countries. There is unprecedented wealth in the west -
Nintendo's predicted earnings from Pokemon products this year in the US alone is enough to write off the entire debts of both Rwanda and Niger.
While enjoying the island of Okinawa, the G8 have a choice. Using historical examples from Rwanda to the Falklands, Jubilee 2000 shows that if the G8 choose to sit back and do nothing, the price paid later will be much higher. The alternative is to make up for lost time, and act decisively on Okinawa to finally write off the debts of the poorest countries to give one billion people a fresh start.
For more information or to arrange interviews with the author of the report, Jubilee 2000's Deputy Director Adrian Lovett, please contact Lucy Matthew on +44(0) 20 7739 1000 ext. 242 or mobile +44 (0)7970 175 324.
Note:1. The report is launched the week of the Finance Ministers meeting of the G8 summit which takes place on July 8. The Heads of State Summit meeting is on July 21 - 23.
Lucy Matthew, Press Office
Jubilee 2000 Coalition, 1 Rivington St, London EC2A 3DT
Tel: +44 (0)20 7739 1000 ext 242 Mobile: +44 (0)7970 175324
Fax: +44 (0)20 7739 2300 Email: lmatthew@jubilee2000uk.org
For the latest information on debt and the Jubilee 2000 campaign, visit www.jubilee2000uk.org or www.dropthedebt.org
Island Mentality Report - Executive Summary
Full report available form www.jubilee2000uk.org/
The world's most powerful leaders meet this summer on the Japanese island of Okinawa. After years of meeting in major cities, increasingly besieged by campaigners calling on them to cancel the unpayable debts of the poorest countries, the G8 leaders are retreating to an island.
Okinawa is a very long way from anywhere, the epitome of a faraway island. But the G8 cannot escape the reality of their mounting failure to show leadership and cancel debts in the millennium year. Relaxing on their island, the world's most powerful men will be able to pretend, if they want to, that they are dealing with the great issues of the moment. Or they can choose a different path. They can cast off their island
mentality and face the single issue that most demands their attention as they meet in this millennium year. The world's leaders could leave behind their fantasy island and agree to cancel the debts of the poorest countries now.
The betrayal of Cologne
Ten countries will have begun to receive debt relief promised at last year's G8 summit in Cologne by the time of the Okinawa summit, though only one will actually have had debt cancelled. The ten countries' total debts will eventually be reduced by 34 per cent, with annual debt payments falling on average by 27 per cent. The ten countries will continue to pay over a third more on debt than they are spending on health. Of the debt cancellation promised in Cologne, by the end of 2000, just will have been cancelled. By 2005 or later, the total will reach, 42 per cent of those countries' debts. The remaining promised will never be cancelled.
The fate of those countries that do not even qualify for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative is worse still. Nigeria has so far been ruled out from receiving HIPC relief, despite having income per head less than and a debt to export ratio of over 250 per cent. Nigeria's fragile steps to full democracy remain undermined by the lack of resources the government has available to spend on its people, many of them among the world's poorest. In Latin America, Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, also urgently needs debt cancellation.
The 100 per cent club
It is very possible that the G7 will use their meeting in Okinawa toannounce the cancellation of 100 per cent of the debts owed to them by countries qualifying for the HIPC initiative. This announcement is not new. The broad commitment by the G7 to cancel 100 per cent of their bilateral debts is welcome - but it is tied to the discredited HIPC initiative with its IMF economic austerity programme - and also fails to cover the World Bank's and IMF's own loans.
Political leadership and the lessons of history
The world's leaders face a choice. They must decide whether to do nothing, or to act. The case for political action is made simply:
* Every day, is transferred from the poorest countries to therichest in debt repayments.
* Every day, 19,000 children die as a result of money going to foreign creditors instead of basic health, education and clean water.
* Previous attempts to deal with the problem, right up to and
including the initiative agreed last year in Cologne, have failed.
* History shows that at similarly significant moments in the past, the price of political inaction has been high. Three case studies illustrate this:
* In Rwanda, the cost of the action that could have been taken at a brief moment in early 1994, which may have averted genocide, was about. The cost of the politicians' inaction over Rwanda was the lives of one seventh of the population and countless millions of dollars in reconstruction, reconciliation and health and education costs.
* After the First World War, the victorious Allies chose not to act to reduce or waive the punitive reparations that had been imposed on Germany. The cost of taking this action would have been about -8bn. The cost of inaction and the instability and turmoil it helped to cause was ultimately the Second World War - trillion (,000,000,000,000) in direct military costs alone.
* In 1982, in spite of the increasingly hostile atmosphere over the disputed Falkland Islands, the British government failed to negotiate a diplomatic solution. It then withdrew, for economic reasons, a strategically important naval ship that patrolled the waters around the Falklands. Historians believe that if this action had been taken, at a cost of £3m per year, the Argentine military action would never have been launched. The cost of the war that followed was more than £3bn - one thousand times more than the action the British government failed to take - as well as 1,000 Argentine and British lives.
* This is the moment
* The world's leaders now face a choice not unlike those historical
examples: to do nothing or to act. There are three reasons why action is necessary and urgent:
* Debt creates a human catastrophe that is getting worse - three
million children have already died as a result of the debt crisis in the new millennium.
* The wealth of the rich world and inequality between rich and poor is unprecedented - for example, the amount Nintendo expect to earn this year on sales of Pokemon products in the United States could write off the entire debts of Rwanda and Niger.
* The millennium moment is a one-off opportunity that will not be
repeated - a huge coalition is assembled in support of action this year.
The world's leaders should therefore take three steps:
1. Stop taking payments from the poorest countries immediately and ringfence the money for the poor.
2. Commit to the cancellation of 100 per cent for all the
poorest countries from all the creditors, including the World Bank and IMF, this year.
3. Agree to find a new process to deal with lending and
borrowing to prevent another debt crisis in the future. Action of this kind would be a fitting way to mark the millennium. Further inaction by the world's leaders would risk the high costs of inaction and impotence that have been seen in the past. Children in the poorest countries of the world cannot wait while the leaders of rich countries sit on their island. The world's leaders must step out into the real world - and drop the debt now.
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