Daily Press Cuttings

This is the last news summary before the beginning of January. Have a happy Christmas and New Year. John Garrett.

Thursday 23rd December 1999

The FT: Mozambique: President Joaquim Chissano and his Frelimo party will continue to rule Mozambique, according to final election results announced yesterday. But the Renamo opposition has threatened to challenge the results in court, accusing Frelimo of fraud. Frelimo has won 133 parliamentary seats compared with 117 for Renamo in the 250-seat parliament. Congo (Kinshasa): A senior UN official has called on the Security Council to convene a special meeting with the belligerents in the Democratic Republic of Congo, amid growing fears that foot-dragging and a collapsing peace process may lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. The call came from Amadou Keita, senior political adviser to the secretary general's representative to Congo, and reflects the views of officials and diplomats that the world's slow response to the events in Congo is worrying similar to the failure to heed the warnings before the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

The Independent: Venezuela: Official estimates of the number of deaths from the flooding and mudslides is estimated at 30,000, most of them in the northern coastal state of Vargas, which was by far the worst hit area. The search for bodies has been extended but many will never be found, since they were washed out to sea or buried under tons of mud and rocks. 140 000 people are homeless. The cost of reconstruction has been calculated as between $15 billion and $20 billion. The Environment: Global warming is now changing the world's climate and humanity faces a critical position because of it, the chief meteorologists of Britain and the US warn today in a remarkable joint statement. Independent leader comments that thirty thousand people may have died in the floods in Venezuela, while earlier this week the AA had its busiest day this century. From the awful to the ridiculous, you might think; but climate scientists say there is a simple connection. We are changing the climate, by chopping down rainforests and burning fossil fuels. And we are changing it for the worse. We are truly reaping a whirlwind.

The Guardian: Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka's re-elected president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, has been sworn in after winning just over half of the votes in Tuesday's general election. She was still injured from a suicide bomber attack on Saturday, which was attributed to the rebel Tamil Tigers. ECGD/UK/Turkey: Journalist George Monbiot criticises the government for supporting the ECGD-backed project to build the Ilisu dam in Turkey. It will displace 20 000 Kurds, who will be forced from their homes and moved into model villages in which they can be monitored and controlled. Our government, which went to war in the spring to stop ethnic cleansing, is, in the winter, underwriting it. Silenced by Turkey's repression, the Kurds are a half-forgotten, disposable people. Our government has wrapped them up and handed them over to big business. Christmas presents seldom come so generous.

Wednesday 22nd December 1999

The Guardian: UK/Debt relief: Campaigners and religious leaders yesterday welcomed Britains' decision to cancel all the debts owed to it by the world's poorest countries. The head of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn said the British move was “a wonderful start” to the new millennium. Uganda's secretary to the Treasury Emmanuel Tumusime-Mutebile, who attended yesterday's seminar said the cuts to Uganda's loans payments would enable the country to halve pupil-teacher ratios in primary schools from 100-1 to 50-1 in two years and build more classrooms. UK/ECGD/Turkey: UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has overruled cabinet colleagues and left what remains of the foreign office's ethical and environmental policy in tatters by giving the green light to a hydro-electric dam project in Turkey which will be underwritten with £200 million of taxpayers' money. The dam, known as the Ilisu in Anatolia will flood 52 Kurdish villages and 15 towns, restrict water supply to Syria and Iraq and destroy the archaeological town of Hasenkeyf.

The Daily Telegraph: UK/Debt relief: Telegraph leader comment that Gordon Brown's announcement yesterday is to be welcomed. It says that the real case for debt forgiveness is not so much practical, or even charitable, as moral. Many of the old loans may have been stolen or misapplied, but they were often made for political, not economic or humanitarian, reasons. and the West knew the nature of the regimes involved; it was sometimes at fault, too. Both sides have some amends to make, and the Millennium must surely be a good time to make them.

IHT: Latin America: Comment from Tomas Eloy Martinez in the New York Times. Violence in Latin America is being multiplied by an intractable reality—the neo-liberal view of a properly functioning economy. Within the new logic of the market place there simply is no place for those who don't consume. A few years ago, the poor were used at least as cheap labour. Today, those who inhabit this category are meaningless beings, shadows with no place in society. The free market has blindly created a new form of slavery at this century's end, more terrifying than the one abolished 100 years ago. The human being, who then at least was regarded as merchandise, now has been reduced to a not-being, a zero, a hole, the discardable piece of an infinite machine. Five hundred years ago, Latin America was the continent of Utopias. Time has turned it into a Darwinian darkness, where millions of people are condemned to unhappiness and a cruel death even before they are born. USA/UN: Richard Holbrooke, the US representative at the UN, has recently returned from a tour of sub-Saharan Africa. Having seen the civil wars in Angola and Congo and the social and economic devastation of AIDS, he is planning to put Africa at the top of UN Security Council's agenda for January.

The FT: UK/debt relief: Gordon Brown yesterday unveiled details of a plan to write off all debt owed to the government by some of the world's poorest countries. The Chancellor confirmed that Britain would waive the remaining 10 per cent of trade loans outstanding under the terms of a G7 group of leading industrial nations debt relief package . Post cut-off date debt, which had not been eligible in this programme will also be written off. The total cost to the exchequer of eliminating the rest of the debt will be £640 million spread over 20 years.

The Independent: : UK/Debt relief: Gordon Brown made a strong plea to other countries yesterday to match his pledge to written off debt amounting to hundreds of millions of pounds owed to Britain by the world's poorest countries. Justin Forsyth of Oxfam said that “the challenge now is to convince the debt doubters, like Germany, France and Japan to do the same.” Profile of Bolivia, Uganda, Mauritania and Mozambique, the first four countries to benefit in the New Year. Independent leader raises a few reservations concerning past corruption, but concludes by raising a glass of grog to our charitable chancellor. His generosity, after all, is but a welcome use of our money.

The Times: UK/Debt relief: Comment from the City Editor that it was the thought that counted in Mr Brown's offering of gold, morality and spin. It was largely a British thought that we can be proud of. some of the countries forgiven may not get back much cash, but will be relieved of a burden that will allow them to come out of millennium year with more confidence in their future.

The Metro: Jubilee 2000: All debt owed to Britain by the world's poorest countries is to be waived in the latest addition to a relief package worth more than £5 billion, Chancellor Gordon Brown announced yesterday. International Development Secretary Clare Short said much credit for the relief package should go to the “unprecedented” world-wide movement of campaigners—many of whom united under the banner of Jubilee 2000—to demand the writing-off of debts. Other coverage in the Daily Express and Daily Mirror.

Tuesday 21st December 1999

The Guardian: UK/Debt relief: Article by the British Chancellor, Gordon Brown under the title “Smash the chains”. He says that in the year 2000, as the $100 billion debt-write-off begins, the challenge is to establish a new virtuous circle of debt relief, poverty alleviation and economic development. Our first duty is immediate and pressing—to the neediest of the world, the 30 000 children threatened with death every day from preventable diseases, who are among the one billion poorest people trapped in debt ridden countries. He argues that the money saved in debt relief must be spent in reducing poverty and explains the commitment of Uganda, one of the first four countries to benefit from the enhanced programme of debt relief to invest in education. He outlines Britain's financial commitment to help the World Bank and IMF fund their own contribution to debt relief, and says that it is now right for Britain to take an extra step, to eliminate all bilateral debts owed to the UK by the poorest countries. Britain's total debt relief package now totals over £5 billion. The pledge of 100 per cent debt relief is a pledge for a purpose, to encourage other creditor countries to follow this lead. He concludes by saying that in 1999 the world's richest nations finally accepted their obligations to the world's poorest peoples. The task for 2000 will be to transform good will into monumental change.

The Independent: Venezuela: Twenty thousand people are feared to have died in the flooding and mudslides that devastated Venezuela, making the calamity one of the worst natural disasters in South America this century. Vargas, the tiny coastal state once dotted with fashionable Caribbean beach resorts bore the brunt of the devastation. Sierra Leone: Focus on Sierra Leone, where the civil war has turned a nation's youth into a generation of the brutalised.

The Times: UK/Debt relief: Cartoon of a Victorian Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, handing out pennies to beggars from the developing world. In the background is an aid holding an unopened war chest. “To hell with Prudence,” said Scrooge, and there was a new lightness in his step.” UK/Aid: Britain gave £2.37 billion in aid last year, a rise of 14 per cent over the past year. India, Bangladesh, Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania were the largest recipients.

IHT: Russia: With more than 84 per cent of the vote in the Russian parliamentary elections counted, the balance of forces in the new Russian parliament is expected to tilt away from the Communists toward a loose coalition of centrist and rightist forces that have united behind a prime minister, Vladimir Putin, now widely pegged as the man most likely to succeed President Yeltsin in June.