c. 1998 Religion News Service

LONDON _ Top British church officials sought to use last weekend’s meeting of the leaders of the world’s top industrialized nations _ the Group of Eight _ to press their case for debt relief for impoverished Third World nations.

For the most part, their efforts failed.”The G8 summit provides the last realistic opportunity to authorize more effective and generous action to take effect by the millennium,”Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster and England’s top Roman Catholic official, said prior to last Friday’s (May 15) opening of the G8 meeting.”A start has already been made with the HIPC (the World Bank’s”highly indebted poor country”) initiative. What is needed now is for the leaders of the richest countries to walk the extra mile.” They didn’t. However, they did urge”the speedy and determined extension of debt relief to more countries.” But Ann Pettifor, director of Jubilee 2000, a debt relief campaign supported by all of Britain’s mainstream churches, called the statement”deeply disappointing.” Debt relief for poor nations during the year 2000 has emerged as a key priority for Roman Catholic and Protestant church leaders around the world and the issue is touching a nerve among other activists.

During the G8 summit in Birmingham, England, some 50,000 demonstrators formed a human chain around the center of the city, demanding debt relief.

Under current international financial rules, Third World nation’s whose external debt to international banks and financial institutions rose rapidly in the 1980s are required to adopt rigid economic restructuring programs that drastically cut back on the funds they spend on public services, such as healthcare and education, to qualify for additional loans to service their debts.

The HIPC initiative would allow some countries to ease the terms of their structural adjustment programs.

Hume, writing for the The Times, took note of what he called”increasing anxiety”among aid agencies _ such as CAFOD, the British bishops relief organization, Christian Aid, and Oxfam _ that the so-called HIPC program of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund is delivering too little debt relief too late.”The debt relief granted to Uganda, for instance, will allow an increase in government spending equivalent to only $1 per person per year _ and this is in a country where one in every five children dies before the age of five,”he said.

In addition to Uganda, only five other countries have been declared eligible for HIPC debt relief, and countries like Rwanda and Liberia, just emerging from civil war and considered desperately in need of debt relief, are presently ineligible.

Hume said the issue is a moral one.”Unpayable debt has become directly linked with terrible suffering,”he said.”Church leaders in Africa hear the cry of the desperately poor, and appeal to us in the developed world to be advocates for the voiceless.” Describing the massive and still growing backlog of unpayable debt as”both an economic and a humanitarian catastrophe”, the cardinal said that whatever the responsibility for the situation,”it is the poorest people in the poorest countries who can be blamed the least _ and they have suffered the most.” Hume also said debt relief should be linked to efforts to eradicate global poverty.”We should not be naive about what can be achieved,”he said.”Nor should we forget that providing more generous debt relief is only a precondition of tackling global poverty. If we were to eradicate the unpayable debt problem once and for all, then we could all get on with the rest of the anti-poverty agenda.” Anglican Bishop Mark Santer of Birmingham echoed Hume during an ecumenical service in Birmingham.”As things stand, the rich are robbing the poor, and many times over,”he said.”That is injustice.” Taking his text from the prophet Micah (6:6-8), who said what God wanted was for people to”do justice and love mercy,”Santer said:”Children are being starved of health and education in order to service debts already repaid several times over.”He cited Malawi and Rwanda as examples, saying in those countries, less is spent on health and education put together than on servicing external debts, while their rates for infant mortality in 1994-95 were 133 deaths for every 1,000 live births.”This is not just,”Santer said.

Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey also added his support to the debt relief campaign. In a message to the 50,000 Birmingham demonstrators, Carey said he had been”greatly inspired to see how many people of such different backgrounds have found common cause in this campaign.”

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