c. 2000 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ Capping months of intense lobbying from an eclectic team including religious leaders, legislators and rock musician Bono, President Clinton signed on Monday (Nov. 6) a $14.9 billion foreign aid package setting aside $435 million to ease the debts of some of the world’s poorest nations.
At a White House signing ceremony, Clinton praised the support he received from the religious community’s “Jubilee Year” debt relief campaign.
“When you’ve got the pope and pop stars all singing on the same sheet of music, our voices do carry to the heavens,” said Clinton, surrounded on stage by legislators as well as religious figures such as the Rev. Elenora Giddings Ivory of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and Rev. David Beckmann, president of the Christian anti-hunger agency Bread for the World.
Forgiving the debt owed to the United States by poor countries was “good for our souls,” the president declared.
“By lifting the poorest among us we lift the rest of us as well,” he said. “Global poverty is a moral affront, and confronting the challenge is the right thing to do.”
The $435 million allotment fulfilled Washington’s commitment to an agreement made among wealthy countries to provide relief for some of the world’s most debt-hampered nations. Under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative, the United States promised to contribute roughly $435 million to the effort for the years 2000 and 2001.
But whether Washington would keep that promise remained in question as recently as September as neither the House nor the Senate had given approval for the full amount Clinton sought. Congress finally approved the $435 million on Oct. 25.
The debt relief package’s success is due in large part to the efforts of the nation’s religious community, said Beckmann.
“Not since Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement have religious people at the grassroots been so clearly responsible for raising a justice issue and winning change,” he said. “If we can win a sustained shift in our government’s priorities, I think we could cut world hunger and poverty in half by 2015.”
Giddings Ivory, director of the Washington office of the Presbyterian Church (USA), said debt forgiveness is “an act of justice.”
“In God’s envisioned world, no person, no family, and, by extension, no nation is to be impoverished,” she said. “It would be an act of injustice not to move forward. Debt relief is an act of justice _ it is not to be put into political terms.”
The foreign aid package also paved the way for debt-burdened countries to receive some $800 million in relief from the International Monetary Fund. Other provisions of the package set aside $100 million for Serbia and eased restrictions on U.S. aid to international family planning groups that provide information about abortion. However, family planning groups would not be allowed to receive the funds until next February, after Clinton has left the White House.
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