Quotes about Jubilee 2000

 

"One of the saddest of the companions of poverty is debt: the legacy of past help and sometimes of past error. It is a burden that weighs heavily on the poorest people of our planet and one, also, that denies new and greatly needed assistance. Accordingly, both for economic development and for human compassion, there is need, indeed urgency, for debt relief for the poorest nations. This is currently being urged by the most compassionately intelligent people of our time. I join them in the their plea for early and comprehensive action."
Statement by Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, 23^rd September 1999

"Jubilee 2000 is a broad coalition which has moved the earth"
Chancellor Gordon Brown, speaking to the Commons International Development Committee, 20 May 1999.

"Last year 50 000 people gathered in Birmingham, England, to focus international attention on the debt crisis afflicting 41 of the poorest nations. Last week, at the spring meetings of the World Bank and the IMF, speaker after speaker referred to the unsustainability of present levels of unsustainable debt. A few weeks before the Group of Seven summit in Cologne, this human tide is becoming an unstoppable force for debt relief.
The debt crisis is not simply a balance-of-payments crisis or a crisis of repayments. It is a human crisis, a social crisis, and it is a human rights crisis."
James Gustave Speth, administrator of the United Nations Development Plan (UNDP), International Herald Tribune, 7th May 1999

It [Jubilee 2000] has managed to put a relatively arcane issue - that of international finance and development - on the negotiating table throughout the world. The pledges Clinton and Brown have made would not have happened without Jubilee 2000. It's one of the most effective global lobbying campaigns I have ever seen."
Anthony Gaeta, spokesman for the World Bank, quoted in PR Week (16 April 1999)

"Serious economists, as well as pop stars, have supported Jubilee 2000, and urged the cancellation of Third World debt. At the Adam Smith Institute, we have expressed the view that this debt burden is holding back development. These were often ill-considered loans lent by ill-advised banks to illegitimate governments. The capital is gone, in most cases wasted, and repayment comes from what little income these countries generate. By cancelling that debt on a one-off basis, we not only raise the living standards of the desperately poor, but we give them a chance, and the investment, to embark on that upward path which generates growth, wealth and jobs. Cancellation is our interest as well as theirs."
Alex Singleton, Senior Research Economist at the Adam Smith Institute, letter in The Independent, 12 February 1999

“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.”
Pope John Paul II, New Year address, 1999

“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.”
Bono, Q magazine, February 1999

"I am determined that the US play a leadership role in this important moral endeavour, and I wish to thank you, the Catholic church, and the Jubilee 2000 campaign for providing such inspirational guidance to the world community," ... As we approach the millennium, I'd like to assure you that I'm committed to assisting in the effort to improve the human condition in the world's poorest countries by promoting economic reform and expanding the scale of debt relief."
Bill Clinton, in a meeting and letter to Pope John Paul II after the Pope's
visit to St Louis, January 1999

“Even in the most fiscally conservative circles, there is a growing consensus that 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.”
Salman Rushdie, The Guardian, 6 January 1999

For the poorest highly indebted countries of the world we must create a virtuous circle of debt relief, poverty reduction and economic development. We should never leave countries with an impossible choice between paying or defaulting on unsustainable levels of debt. Immovable mountains of debt run up in the 1980s have become impassable barriers to progress for poor countries in the 1990s. It should now be our ambition that every highly indebted poor country will be in the process of debt relief by the millennium.
...I believe 1999 must bring a new urgency to relieving third world debt.
Gordon Brown, speech at Harvard University, 15 December 1998

“Why, as we approach the year 2000, do our children still go hungry, drink dirty water and lack basic health and education provision? Is human development a possibility when so much of Africa's wealth is channelled into debt servicing?”
Julius Nyerere, former president of Tanzania in a recent letter to coalition members Tools for Self Reliance.

“Poor countries have often been misled by advice - from respectable bankers, sometimes more interested in the return of their loans and medium-term prospects than in the level of existing debt.” Michel Camdessus, Managing Director of IMF

"International Campaigns such as Jubilee 2000 are right: It is a moral imperative to put this dismal chapter of economic irrationality behind us"
(Minister of Development Cooperation, Sweden in International Herald Tribune, 5 Oct 1998)

“The campaign to cancel the great debt of the poorest nations that prevents them spending on health and education and basic decency for their people is a wonderful campaign, and I was in Birmingham when people came from all over the country to say to the G8, the leaders of the richest countries, don't forget the poor of the world... That demonstration did have an effect... I want the people who came to Birmingham to know that they did make a difference.”
Clare Short, UK Secretary of State for International Development, BBC Radio 4 `Any Questions', 26 September 1998

The campaign to cancel the great debt of the poorest nations that prevents them spending on health and education and basic decency for their people is a wonderful campaign, and I was in Birmingham when people came from all over the country to say to the G8, the leaders of the richest countries, don't forget the poor of the world... That demonstration did have an effect... I want the people who came to Birmingham to know that they did make a difference."
Clare Short on Radio 4, Any Questions, Friday 25 September 1998, confirming the effect of the human chain:

“Western lenders lend recklessly in good times and when the loans fail, they are bailed out, stringent and contractory conditions are imposed on the borrowing governments, asset prices collapse and a vast majority of the population is made poorer. Foreign investors then walk into market prised open for them by the IMF, and pick up assets cheaply. This modern, bloodless colonialism is very neat.”
Letter to the Financial Times, 2nd Sept 1998, from V Anantha-Nagaswaren, Credit Suisse Private Banking, Switzerland.

“First we are not asking for debt `forgiveness'. To receive `forgiveness' is to acknowledge guilt. But Zambia has been, with considerable diligence and sacrifice, meeting its debt service. Our incurring of debt has not primarily been our fault, and hence `forgiveness' is not what we are seeking but justice!”
Zambian church leaders, August 1998

"I pay tribute to the Jubilee 2000 campaign and its dignified breaking-the-chain demonstration in Birmingham on Saturday. The issue is vast and complex, and it cannot be solved overnight-we have to mix our realism with our idealism."
Rt Hon Tony Blair, Prime Minister’s Question Time, 20 May 1998

I share some of the disappointment of Jubilee 2000 on debt restructuring. I doubt whether we will ever go far enough to meet the full concerns of any group in that respect, but we would have wished to go further."
Rt Hon Tony Blair, Prime Minister’s Question Time, 20 May 1998

“Jubilee is embarking on a final countdown to 2000 and G7 Governments would do well to recognise that their ethical and political number is up.”
Susan George, May 16th, 1998.

“We stand at the threshold of a new millennium. We should pledge ourselves to work vigorously and earnestly in the first instance for the cancellation of the international debt which would give Africa an opportunity for a fresh start.”
Archbishop Ndungane, Accra, Ghana. April 1998

"Jubilee 2000 have done a glorious job in mobilising support in this country and internationally for debt relief for the poorest countries."
Rt Hon Clare Short, Secretary of State for International Development, House of Commons, 29 April 1998

"And I will stay on top of this to make sure that what we’re trying to get done is actually accomplished. Everybody talked to me about it."
President Bill Clinton, Cape Town, South Africa, 27 March 1998

“It's not really about wiping off debt....It's just making sure that these countries can remain good credit risks....The idea of HIPC is in fact to allow you to continue to be a good financial citizen of the world community.”
Jean-Louis Sarbib, WB Vice President for Africa, March 1998.

"I want the millennium to be remembered not just nationally but internationally for the redemption of debt and the reduction of world poverty."
Rt Hon Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Budget Speech, 17 March 1998

“The devastating effects of the international debt crisis are not restricted to the affected countries. British people with family members living in indebted countries have struggled for years to support relatives, financially and morally, who live in its shadow. Black British people have a very real interest in the success of the campaign to cancel unpayable international debt.”
Lee Jasper of the 1990 Trust / National Black Alliance. 1997.

"I thank the church groups and others who have drawn our attention to the opportunity to resolve the problem (of debt) by the start of the new Millennium. I do not claim that making these decisions will be easy, but I am confident it can be done."
- The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Debt 2000: The Mauritius Mandate". 16th Sept. 1997.

"..a coalition of churches, charitable institutions and others, calling itself Jubilee 2000, has come forward with an inspired call to celebrate the millennium with a one-off cancellation of the backlog of unpayable debt. It is a bold and imaginative idea".
Lord Callaghan, 11th September, 1997.

"Christians will have to raise their voice on behalf of the poor of all the world, proposing the Jubilee as an appropriate time to give thought, among other things, to reducing substantially, if not cancelling outright, the international debt which seriously threatens the future of many nations.
The Pope: Para 51. Tertio Millennio Adveniente - the apostolic letter of Pope John Paul 11 on the Jubilee of the Year 2000.

"The Jubilee 2000 proposals are well-devised and realistic. The cost of the debt relief represents an attainable target and one which should be well within the capabilities of the major creditor
countries"
- Bill Jordan, President of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions

"An imaginative initiative to relieve the onerous debt burdens of the world's poorest countries."
- Medical Action for Global Security, and IPPNW, International Movement of Physicians

"It would be truly wonderful to give a fresh start to those around the world who seem to have absolutely no hope. It is a timely proposal with which to celebrate the Millennium."
- Desmond Tutu, former Archbishop of Capetown, South Africa

"This is not an outburst of idealism, but a practical programme of realistic measures. All they need to work is political will."
- Paul Vallely, The Independent, 23rd December, 1996.

"Jubilee 2000 campaign is a step towards a better future and other proposals to celebrate the Millennium are parochial."
- Ros Coward, The Guardian, 6th January, 1997

"The Group of Seven and the Bretton Woods Institutions should aim to end the debt crisis for the poorest countries by 2000. The meagre financial costs contrast with the appalling human costs of inaction."
- The United Nations Human Development Report, 1997

"Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, recently announced a plan called "Debt 2000: The Mauritius Initiative". It is designed to sound better than it really is, but it's a start... There is, after all, something truly absurd about sending aid to poor countries, when they are paying us back in interest than they receive. ... We have piled a mountain of debt on the poorest and most vulnerable countries in the world: countries which, on the other side of the ledger, we regard as being most in need of our assistance. It has become our modern equivalent of slavery."
- John Simpson, Sunday Telegraph, 9 November 1997

"It's not going to go away. And it's a conscience that is definitely holding the financial community's feet to the fire." World Bank official commenting on Jubilee 2000 to International
Business Week, 29th September 1997

Debt as a postmodernist issue...
"The smooth functioning of a ..(civilised) society... is in no way impaired by the fact that because of the structure of the laws of the market that society has instituted and controls, because of the mechanisms of external debt and other similar inequities, that same 'society' puts to death or (but failing to help someone in distress accounts for only a minor difference) allows to die of hunger and disease tens of millions of children .. without any moral or legal tribunal ever being considered competent to judge such a sacrifice... Not only is it true that such a society participates in this incalculable sacrifice, it actually organises it."
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, 1992