New Year brings calls from the Pope, Bono and Salman Rushdie

Jubilee 2000 received a New Year boost as January 1^st 1999 brought calls for debt cancellation from three very disparate voices.

The Pope in his New Year's address called on world leaders to “make a sincere effort to find a solution to the frightening problem of the international debt of the poorest nations. An immediate and vigorous effort is needed, as we look to the year 2000, to ensure that the greatest possible number of nations will be able to extricate themselves from a now intolerable situation. Dialogue among the institutions involved, if prompted by a sincere willingness to reach agreement, will lead—I am certain—to a satisfactory and definitive solution. In this way, lasting development will become a possibility for those Nations facing the greatest difficulties, and the millennium now before us will become for them too a time of renewed hope.”

(Read the full New Year address )

In contrasting style but similar sentiment, Bono, lead singer with the band U2, wrote in his review of 1998 ( Q Magazine )

“..the most inspiring thought I bumped into last year was the concept of JUBILEE 2000 a call to cancel third world debts going into the next millennium and to give crippled nations a chance to get up off their knees and walk again.”

“ Without a real commitment to do something about the dire circumstances of a third of the population of the planet, all new year's eve 99 will amount to is an up drawbridge scenario, a fancy dress ball at the castle where we all play louis 14 pissing across a moat of champagne on the poor.”

(Taken from Q, February 1999, 149)

And the most radical call came from renowned author Salman Rushdie, who writing in The Guardian on the 6^th January called on “religious zealots” and “god-free secularists” alike to join the call to cancel “the multi-trillions of dollars that keep the poorest countries of the world in hock to, and under the thumb of, the richest.”

He continued “ The Debt must be wiped out, unless we want a third millennium marked by the resentment, violence, fanaticism and despotism that must be the inevitable effects of this global injustice.”

“It's an idea in which our interests and principles coincide, wherever we come from, rich North or poor South; whoever we are, friend or faux. It's a policy that would erase the memory of 1998's shabby Lewinskyings, and put Clinton's presidency into the history books for a genuinely high moral reason.

Cancel the Debt for the Millennium! It's even the Christian thing to do.”

(Read the article in full)