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Activists will mark ‘unhappy birthday’
of bank, IMF
By Emad Mekay
Washington, DC, Apr. 20 (IPS) — Angry at the state of global
affairs, thousands of protesters are trickling into Washington to demonstrate
against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), making
time to party for women’s rights, dance for the environment and
puff on water pipes in the name of peace in the Middle East.
The focus of activists’ protests is the semi-annual meetings of
the, two bodies which critics say work for the benefit of corporations
based in the Group of Seven (G7) most industrialized nations, cementing
the domination of rich states in world affairs.
The meetings coincide with the 60th anniversary of the two Bretton Woods
institutions, so named after their birthplace in New Hampshire following
the Second World War.
Demonstrators are expected to turn out in the thousands, a marked change
from the hundreds who protested here in the mid-1990s, when the anti-corporate
globalization movement was officially born.
Apr. 20, anti-IMF and World Bank protesters took to the streets alongside
human rights and peace campaigners, among others.
Critics of the IMF and the Bank say the institutions have strayed from
their original mandate over the past 60 years, moving towards a form
of market fundamentalism that only considers the profit of northern
powers, blind to human costs.
The IMF’s original mandate was to promote “international monetary
cooperation” and monitor a complex gold-based exchange system between
nations, while the World Bank charter states that the organization should
work to promote development and fight poverty.
Little wonder that one of the planned protest activities is an “unhappy
birthday party” in downtown Washington to highlight the global
debt crisis, which activists say is still partly fuelled by policies
of the two institutions. Protesters plan to distribute “unhappy
birthday’’ cards and cut a sad birthday cake.
Anti-debt organization Jubilee USA, the group organizing the “party,”
says the World Bank and IMF continue to drag their feet on debt cancellation,
using a limited and conditional debt relief program instead.
Thousands of people in the world’s poorest countries continue to
die needlessly from preventable diseases and HIV/AIDS because money
that could be spent on health care is instead servicing nations’
debts, they add.
A new plan in the pipeline at the bank and IMF to review debt burdens
is just a distraction from the real issue of complete debt cancellation,
argue the groups.
“The new debt framework paper looks like another way to bureaucratize
the whole process rather than a real step forward,” said Soren
Ambrose of the Washington-based 50 Years is Enough Network, a group
set up 10 years ago to protest the two institutions’ poor record
in the developing world.
A number of activists from developing nations will also fast outside
IMF and World Bank headquarters to protest the bank’s involuntary
resettlement policy, used to relocate people who live on the future
sites of projects.
Campaigners say that people who lose their homes or livelihoods as a
result of such undertakings should have their standard of living improved,
or at least restored, something that does not happen under current policies.
The World Bank has funded numerous large-scale infrastructure projects,
including mines or dams, which have affected many local communities.
The activists, who plan to fast for three days beginning Apr. 23, include
people from India, Zimbabwe and Paraguay.
Human rights groups, environmental charities, religious leaders and
indigenous peoples will also demonstrate against the international financial
institutions’ misuse of public money via investments in projects
that, among other negative impacts, damage the environment and lead
to human rights abuses while failing to reduce poverty.
The World Bank has been criticized for funding highly controversial
projects like the Baku-Ceyhan gas pipeline — which will cross Azerbaijan,
Georgia and Turkey — and, in the process, funding multinational
corporations like Shell and BP.
“The World Bank gives millions of dollars of taxpayers money to
multinational companies like Shell for projects which lead to climate-change,
damage the environment and lead to human rights abuses,” said Hannah
Ellis of Friends of the Earth, one of many groups that will campaign
during the meetings.
Activists and critics will also demand a positive response to recommendations
from the extractive industries review, a bank-commissioned study released
in January that urges the body to end its support for extractive industries
like gas and oil, and to redirect its money into renewable energy.
In the face of constant criticism, IMF and bank officials have maintained
that their institutions’ advice and loans are designed to ensure
stability and economic growth for both rich and poor nations.
On the official agenda this weekend is a review of the state of the
global economy and the status of the IMF’s economic crisis prevention
efforts. The meetings will also examine the state of multilateral efforts
to curb poverty in the world’s low-income countries.
The naming of the next executive director of the IMF will also be discussed,
amid accusations that the process, which traditionally appoints a European
to the helm of the IMF and an American at the World Bank, is undemocratic.
The spring gathering of finance officials from around the world is normally
smaller and considered less important than the institutions’ full-blown
annual meetings, which take place in the autumn.
Finance ministers and central bank governors from the G7 — Britain,
Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States — will
also gather in the US capital Apr. 24.
Guantánamo question tests equality
in
UN commission
By Gustavo Capdevila
Geneva, Apr. 20 (IPS) -- The United Nations Commission on Human
Rights, which usually avoids putting powerful countries on the defensive,
will see its credibility tested Apr. 22 when it takes up the Cuban proposal
to demand that the United States report on the rights of the detainees
at its base in Guantánamo.
The annual six-week sessions in Geneva of the highest UN human rights
authority were headed calmly towards their conclusion next weekend —
until Cuba shook things up, complicating the debate by challenging the
situation at the US military enclave set in the extreme southeast of
the Caribbean island.
The Cuban government of Fidel Castro is calling on the Commission on
Human Rights to demand that Washington report on the living conditions
and legal status of some 600 foreign nationals detained as “enemy
combatants” at the Guantánamo naval base since the war in
Afghanistan in late 2001.
The censures issued by the Commission increasingly are limited to politically
isolated countries, says Joanna Weschler, a director of Human Rights
Watch, an independent organization based in New York.
The Commission itself seemed to validate that notion Apr. 15 when it
approved resolutions critical of Cuba, Turkmenistan, North Korea and
Belarus, but rejected such censures against China, Zimbabwe (supported
by the African bloc) and Russia for the situation in Chechnya.
This time the “caliber” of the accused is completely different,
because in practice the United States constitutes its own bloc within
the Commission on Human Rights.
Washington opposition prevents consensus on many issues, in particular
those related to the Middle East and to economic, social and cultural
rights, which it systematically obstructs, this year backed by Australia.
In the other corner is Cuba, debilitated by the successful vote last
week against its human rights record. But it was a relatively close
vote on a “soft” censure presented by Honduras, though clearly
promoted by Washington.
Nor does it do Cuba any good to argue that the United States in Guantánamo
is violating the Pact on Civil and Political Rights, one of the foundations
of the UN human rights system.
Cuba, unfortunately, has not ratified that treaty, noted Alfred de Zayas,
a Cuban-US legal professor at the Institute Universitaire des Hautes
Etudes Internationales, in Geneva.
Likely due to its own government’s omission, the Cuban delegation
on Apr. 20 distributed a revised text of its draft resolution on Guantánamo
that eliminated any mention of the United States as a member of the
Pact on Civil and Political Rights.
But De Zayas acknowledged that the United States is in violation of
the pact for failing to recognize that it also applies to Guantánamo,
which he says is a territory under US jurisdiction.
The US Supreme Court heard arguments Apr. 20 in a case on whether the
prisoners can appeal to the US courts regarding their detention. The
government attorney said that Cuba holds ultimate jurisdiction over
the enclave, so it is outside the realm of US justice.
The lawyer for the detainees, meanwhile, referred to Guantánamo
as a “lawless enclave”, and said the case is a test of US
federal courts to uphold the law, according to press reports.
A high magistrate of British justice, Lord Johan Steyn, commented in
Geneva on the situation of the prisoners at Guantánamo and international
principles of fairness.
“The question is whether the quality of justice envisaged for the
prisoners at Guantánamo Bay complies with minimum international
standards for the conduct of fair trials. The answer can be given quite
shortly: It is a resounding NO.”
“I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice,” said Steyn.
The legal status of the detainees also brings up the old problem of
the possession of the land where the United States set up the Guantánamo
naval base.
De Zayas noted during a press conference that the United States leased
the Cuban land for naval stations and coal supplies only, “and
for no other purpose.”
Havana maintains that Washington has violated those terms because it
has used the base for the internment of Haitian refugees and now for
prisoners of war.
Since 1959, when Castro’s revolutionary government had just taken
power, Cuba stopped receiving the lease payment of must over $4,000
a year and informed Washington that it wanted to put an end to the agreement.
But the United States maintains that the charter can only cancelled
by mutual agreement.
With these facets, the Guantánamo question put to the UN Commission
takes on additional importance, said Hardeep Puri, delegate from India.
The matter is no longer reduced to a vote in favor or against the resolution.
As of Apr.20, India had not decided how it would vote, said Puri.
Nor in the European Union was there consensus, and a political decision
was expected from Brussels, because the EU countries represented in
the Commission were divided between voting against the Cuban resolution
on Guantánamo and abstaining.
Meanwhile, the Latin American members of the Commission had a hard time
presenting a united position. Sources close to the delegations from
that region anticipated the possibility that Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay
will once again abstain, as they did a week ago on the resolution condemning
Cuba’s rights record.
The Britain-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International noted
Apr. 21 that for more than two years many have condemned the situation
in Guantánamo, concerned that the United States is setting a
dangerous precedent in its policy of detentions in the war on terrorism.
Other governments might cite the example of Guantánamo to justify
their own abusive practices.
Guantánamo is “a major human rights scandal that has widespread
implications for the whole world,” said Amnesty last week.
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