EXCERPTS:
"Like Bush, Blair will contemplate anything except restraining the people who are killing the planet." - George Monbiot (item 3)
"the distinction between explosions caused by 'a tiny minority of fanatical extremists' leaving bombs on the underground, and distinguished international statesmen ordering them to be dropped on a city from 30,000 feet, is a fine one." - Edward Pearce (item 4)
"The G8s trade policies, arms exports and military adventures have condemned millions to poverty over the past 30 years." - War on Want (item 9)
"Bono thrilled by G8... Africans left cold" - South African headline (item 2)
"The G8, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have once again left the poor countries in the dirt." - Amadou Tieoule Diarra, president of Mali's Justice and Human Rights League (item 2)
"Why were artists [at Live8] not allowed to slag off Blair or Bush or Brown? (Or to mention Iraq?) These leaders tacitly support the exploitation of resources by Western companies in Africa, unfair trade barriers too, and the immoral arms exports." - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (item 6)
"Nothing new is offered on malaria. For TB there is only the promise of a conference in 2006. Child and maternal mortality are completely ignored... Blair and Brown failed those who truly believed that they wished to make poverty history." - Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet (item 1)
most items shortened
1.G8 has failed to make poverty history
2.Bono thrilled by G8... Africans left cold
3.Blair and climate change
4.Blair and bombs
5.Bob Geldof and the white man's burden
6.Geldof's need to flatter leaders
7.Action for Africa: Business as usual
8.G8 and the art of being fooled
9.G8 turn their backs on the world's poor
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1.Letters : G8 has failed to make poverty history
The Guardian, July 12, 2005
...Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did not do well at Gleneagles. The millenium development goals set specific time-bound targets on Aids, malaria, tuberculosis and child and maternal mortality, and at Gleneagles G8 leaders promised universal access to antiretroviral drugs. But their promise is not backed up by new money or policies. Nothing new is offered on malaria. For TB there is only the promise of a conference in 2006. Child and maternal mortality are completely ignored...
The G8 summit drew welcome attention to the plight of the worlds least advantaged peoples. But Blair and Brown failed those who truly believed that they wished to make poverty history. Diplomacy won over delivery. Let that stand as the shameful epitaph of the G8.
Dr Richard Horton
Editor, The Lancet
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2.Bono thrilled by G8... Africans left cold
Independent Online (South Africa), July 09 2005
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=24&art_id=vn20050709120439823C670387
"The world spoke out and the politicians listened," Bono said...
Dounantie Dao, secretary of the Coalition for African Alternatives to Debt and Development. "They promised a mountain of decisions, but we got a crumb." According to lawyer Amadou Tieoule Diarra, president of Mali's Justice and Human Rights League, "nothing changed, absolutely nothing changed" from the initial proposals made by the G8 leaders. "The G8, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have once again left the poor countries in the dirt. It's yet another crime against these countries."
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3.Blair and climate change
exracted from an article by George Monbiot
The Guardian, July 12, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1526525,00.html
We can't blame only the Americans. While Bush's team has been as obstructive as possible, the UK has scarcely been doing the work of angels. Like Bush, Blair will contemplate anything except restraining the people who are killing the planet. While the UK produces 2.2% of the world's greenhouse gases, companies that extract fossil fuels responsible for over 10% of global emissions are listed on the London stock exchange. One of the reasons they find London attractive is that, thanks to our lax financial regulations, they are not obliged to reveal their potential greenhouse liabilities to investors. Far from doing anything about this, Blair complains that our financial rules are "hugely inhibiting of efficient business".
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4.Letters: The sources of hatred
The Guardian, July 12, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1526317,00.html
Dead people under rubble are as dead, and frightened people above it, as frightened, the world over. And the distinction between explosions caused by "a tiny minority of fanatical extremists" leaving bombs on the underground, and distinguished international statesmen ordering them to be dropped on a city from 30,000 feet, is a fine one.
It was clearly lost on Gavin Essler, who on Newsnight last week tried to shout down George Galloway for stating the obvious: that bombing Baghdad, an arms length abstraction, killing only no-account Arabs, is the fountain source of the London murders. The Bali bombs, aimed at Australians, the killings in Madrid, directed at another Iraq war coalitionist, and Thursday's killings hang together like beads on a thread.
According to a former CIA man on the same programme,"hatred for the west" across the Middle East has been registered by western polling firms at between 80% and 90%. Consequently, little unknown groups spring up pretty well independent of any central command. That hatred has been a long time maturing, through western imposition of the Shah, belief in US complicity in the Iran-Iraq war, and America's long sustaining of Israel in the disinheritance of Palestinians.
The Iraq war was the explosive confirmation of every fear and hatred already there. And, let's be clear, the Iraq war was an act of terrorism, 100,000 dead bodies strong. As the CIA man said, there is only one way out: a complete reversal of US foreign policy, the abandonment of intrusion, manipulation and aggression.
Edward Pearce
Thormanby, York
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5.Bob Geldof and the white man's burden
by YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN
The Independent (London), June 6, 2005
...As Andy Kershaw wrote in this newspaper, only one African act has been chosen for the concerts and protests to shame the powerful G8 nations who have so long neglected and exploited Africa. Others were not good enough, says Bob Geldof, bossman of this event. 'If we had only African musicians how many people would want to come?' Since Kershaw was never suggesting 'only' African musicians should appear, this riposte is ridiculous and revealing.
Joss Stone, a young girlie from deepest rural Devon, unknown until last year, is included (people will come to see her because she can sing and she is a lovely blonde), but the vastly popular Congolese groups that sell out across Europe are not invited (perhaps because, sadly, they are not blonde).
The globally respected Irish firebrand who can move mountains for a cause, who has raised much money for the African continent, is nevertheless unable to drop the imperial template that limits his vision and his imagination. He is the saviour; Africans the saved, or will be, one day when he has his way. His furious morality absolutely condemns doubters. Bob will fix it for the weeping folk in the dark continent. ...he cares but doesn't understand.
Geldof speaks and doesn't listen. He looks but cannot see - not how he is implicated in the enduring and devastating myths of the past. If he understood his own blindness, he could do much to knock down this colonial handicap, which is so destructive to both the ruled and the rulers.
...Geldof's current crusade lacks respect for Africans. If he doesn't turn things around fast, his legacy will be cast. His African critics (ingrates one and all) will brand him a colonial bwana. And he will only get more livid and perhaps ever less effective which, to use his own favourite term, would be a f***ing scandal.
[email protected]
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6.The only thing clear about the purposes of Live8 is Geldof's need to flatter leaders
by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
The Independent (London), 4th July 2005
They care so much about Africa, yet they couldn't share the limelight and day with Africans as brothers in arms. Instead, African musicians had to be grateful for a small and wrenched concession - far away in Cornwall, in the ghetto, they played and learnt to stay in their place...
[At the time of LiveAid] Birhan Woldu, an emaciated Ethiopian child, was shown on our screens. We rushed to give more money. On Saturday she stood on stage, a beautiful young woman who so nearly got buried in the famines all those years ago. But to see her being led on and off by Madonna took away the respect Woldu was entitled to. An African woman with such a story was not enough. A fake blonde celeb had to flank her to make her more attractive to the audience.
Then Madonna, a landowner who resents blameless ramblers walking through her estate, calls for a "revolution". Can you blame me for feeling nauseous?
.... Next question from this sceptic. Why were artists not allowed to slag off Blair or Bush or Brown? (Or to mention Iraq?) These leaders tacitly support the exploitation of resources by Western companies in Africa, unfair trade barriers too, and the immoral arms exports. They infantalise Africans and cannot see them as equals. But please don't dare to mention these small matters, commanded St Bob. Thanks to these unspeakable tongue-tying orders, Blair was not called to account for the viciously cruel deportations of African refugees back into the hellish countries they fled.
And again, should we not ask whether this blockbuster was meant to attack the rich G8 leaders for the state of Africa, or to flatter them into acting now? The answer is sadly that he has gone for flattery rather than rage. How else do you explain the loving photographs of Bob and Tone? And Bob and Gordon?
Finally, how did Africans feel about the projection of their continent by Live8? Every Ugandan, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Sudanese, South African, Zimbabwean, Nigerian, Egyptian, Rwandan, Ghanaian, Cameroonian, Tanzanian, Sierra Leonean, and Congolese African I know found Live8 baffling or offensive or naïve. They admit that bad governance, historic betrayals and trade handicaps have left their continent trailing behind in the global marketplace. They know they cannot turn this round without Western participation. But they feel humiliated by the image of their wondrous continent as lost and in need of white prophets.
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7.Action for Africa: Business as usual
Private Eye no 1136, 8-21 Jul 2005
In the run-up to the G8 summit Tony Blair made a special effort to praise Business Action for Africa, a corporate get-together he called "a new channel to foster vigorous private sector involvement in Africa".
Many of the businesses involved, however, are specialists in vigorously channeling profits out of Africa - sometimes with questionable methods.
Business Action for Africa (BAA) is chaired by Mark Moody Stuart, who also chairs Anglo American, the mining company with many gold and diamond interests in Africa. Earlier this year Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report showing how an Anglo subsidiary had paid the FNI, an armed militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). "AngloGold Ashanti [the subsidiary] provided logistical and financial support that in turn resulted in political benefits to the armed group and its leaders," said HRW.
The FNI is not the legal government in gold-rich Mongbwalu but controls the area, where it routinely tortures, murders and dismembers civilians. The FNI told HRW it gave AngloGold written authorization to investigate gold deposits. In return the firm gave the FNI money, paid "taxes" on cargos, lent out the company jeep, let FNI members ride on AngloGold flights and promised to help build roads and hospitals.
AngloGold told HRW its contacts with the FNI were "unavoidable" and that it paid the FNI $8,000 in January 2005 "under protest and duress". However, FNI's leader, "President" Floribert Najabu, lived in a house on AngloGold property, guarded by child soldiers. The firm said the FNI occupied this and other properties "without either seeking or permission or receiving our approval". None of these incidents persuaded AngloGold to pull out.
...Nestle is particularly dedicated to "business action" in Africa and has been regularly criticised for marketing powdered baby milk in areas without clean water. In 2003 it was accused of marketing milk powder to mothers in Tongo and Burkina Faso in violation of the World Health Organisation code. And in 2002 it faced public fury for trying to sue impoverished Ethiopia for GBP3.7m in compensation over a subsidiary nationalised in 1975.
For British American Tobacco (BAT), African sales counterbalance lost cigarette markets in Europe. But it's hardly encouraging that in 2000 the BBC found that in Gambia BAT was handing Piccadilly cigarettes to youngsters at BAT-sponsored volleyball matches during the school holidays.
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8.G8 and the art of being fooled
David Miller, Scottish Left Review June 2005
http://www.scottishleftreview.org/php/upload/slr-111-SLRI28.pdf
... Also closely involved with the work of the Commission for Africa is Business Action for Africa (BAA), a coalition of over 250 senior business representatives. BAA met with the Commission for Africa prior to finalising its report in February 2005. This followed a "programme of formal consultations between the CFA and the private sector in Africa, Europe and North America". ...The corporations involved can barely contain their excitement. The 'outlook' of the business community is a 'positive one' says one of the CFA commissioners. "It believes Africa is the next frontier for investment".
... we find that the corporations sponsoring the BAA conference are amongst the worst currently engaged in the exploitation of Africa including Shell (oil), Anglo American (mining), Rio Tinto (mining), De Beers (diamonds), Diageo, SAB Miller (both Drinks industry, use vast quantities of water), GSK (pharmaceuticals), British American Tobacco, and Unilever, (food and consumer products).
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9.G8 turn their backs on the world's poor
War on Want PRESS RELEASE
The G8 have today betrayed the 1.1 billion people living in poverty across the world, and the millions who supported the Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign.
John Hilary, Director of Campaigns and Policy at War on Want, said: "When the moment came to act, the G8 turned their backs on the worldís poor.
"What will it take for G8 leaders to take poverty seriously?" Hilary said. "The G8s trade policies, arms exports and military adventures have condemned millions to poverty over the past 30 years. A quarter of a million people hit the streets of Edinburgh and demanded a new start. Yet still the G8 leaders have failed to deliver."
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