'Sister, why has God abandoned us?'

[maireteresa]

I read this letter on a Zimbabwean blog site, please check it out, we need to care about the suffering of these people. The dictator Robert Mugabe is running amok.
Pray for Robert Mugabe, a once-Catholic who was hailed as a great leader, he is gone crazy.
**
This report is written by Sister Patricia Walsh of the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe. Hatcliff Extension. This report is already in circulation, but we at Sokwanele feel it deserves greater prominance and are circulating it to our mailing list as well.

Family and Friends, thank you for your telephone calls, your e-mails and all your support and encouragement in these dreadful days and hours - it is a great help.

The international press says that the police are destroying “illegal structures” in Zimbabwe. Let me share with you a little of what is very legal but has been destroyed.

In 1992 many thousands of people were put into a Holding Camp at a Place called Hatcliffe Extension, they were not allowed to build permanent structures because this was going to be temporary. In 1995 one of our student Sisters, Tarisai Zata who was a student at the School of Social Work and was doing some studies for her degree, one evening she came back Home and said “we must do something to help these people to live like human beings” and that was the beginning of the Dominican Missionary Sisters involvement in Hatcliffe.
(Scroll down the page to find the rest of Sister’s letter).
sokwanele.com/blog/blog.html

 

[David_Paul]

Tragic. A lot of this has to do with blood diamonds and coltran (an ore which peaked at over $700 a kilo a few years ago). Ari Ben-Menashe was on Mugabe’s payroll and using the country as a hidey hole for blood diamonds coming out of the Congo region. Some people have made fortunes from the horror which is Zimbabwe today. Most of the world has a boycott on the regime. Israeli does not. Kibbutz Bet Alfa sold Mugabe a few hundred million dollars worth of armored riot control vehicles and provided mercenaries to train the dictator’s forces. The UN, the EU and the USA have issued statemetns deploring what is happening but the MSM doesn’t pick them up and no pressure is applied to Israel to stop trading with the regime.

One thing everyone could do is boycott diamonds. All of them. Nothing good comes to Africa from the industry. There is a protocol which is supposed to prevent the trade in “conflict” diamonds but it is (this is just my opinion) worthless. Diamonds are fungible and easy to launder. Switzerland is Exhibit #A. That country produces no diamonds of course but exports millions of carats a year. It works like this: fly dirty diamonds into a duty free zone at a Swiss airport. Pay a fee, get a certificate that the diamonds came from Switzerland and fly them right out. They are never imported into the country. The airport is just a laundry.

 

[mpav]

The real hard work in Africa would have to be an international effort, yes, and I doubt the world is willing to police as many places on the continent as need policing. Bob Geldof is organizing massive rallies next month to demand the G8 nations provide more aid to Africa. Some benefit might be gained from that, but it’s like giving money to junkies, they get their fix and guess what, they are still junkies. I don’t know how to solve Africa’s problems, given the world’s short attention span. I suggest it would require military intervention in some places (which would never be supported by national populations for long); in other places huge infusions of money would be almost useless without strict oversight, which would never be accepted by the nations on the receiving end.
This insightful article from today’s Telegraph give a hint of the real problems.
telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/06/05/do0503.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/06/05/ixportal.html

Corruption is endemic: “80 cents of every dollar lent ends up in the secret bank accounts of the continent’s rulers.”

“Charity is therefore not what Africa needs. No country grows rich by the grace and favour of another. What Africa needs is good - which is to say limited - government, as well as more trade. It is likely to get neither, and no number of rock concerts will help to bring them about.
Why is Africa, alone of all the continents, poorer per capita now than 20, or even 40, years ago, despite the fact it has received something like $500 billion from the rich in that time? And why is it always hovering on the brink of chaos? The answers usually given are wrong.”

If any genius out there has answers, the world sure needs them.
Pray for Africa.

 

[Matt25]

cafod.org.uk/get_involved/campaigning/make_poverty_history/mph_briefing

Better aid – what’s the problem?

Just as important as the amount of aid rich countries spend is how they spend it. Is it being spent on the poorest countries? Is it being targeted at the basic needs of the poorest people?

In 2002, only 34 per cent of all international aid went to the 49 least developed countries, such as Zambia, Rwanda and Bangladesh. Of donor countries’ bilateral aid (direct from country to country) only 34 per cent was spent on basic needs, such as water supplies, healthcare and education.

Not only is a worrying proportion of aid not targeting the basic needs of the poorest people, some is actually given on condition that the poor country uses it to buy goods and services from the donor – in effect aid is being used to help increase a rich country’s exports.

In other cases, defence spending is dressed up as aid, such as Australia’s spending on counter-terrorism in Indonesia and the Philippines. Or it is being spent to promote rich countries’ own political influence, rather than to fight extreme poverty. For example, the USA’s top three recipients of aid in 2002 were Egypt, Israel and Russia.[xi]

    **G8 aid spending 2003** 

            (as a percentage of national income) 

            France 

   0.41 

      UK 

   0.34 

      Germany 

   0.28 

      Canada 

   0.26 

      Japan 

   0.2 

      Italy 

   0.16 

      USA 

   0.14 

      Russia 

   N/A 

      Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Development Assistance Committee, April 2004

Aid is often only given with economic conditions attached. For example when Honduras refused to cut teachers’ wages, as instructed by the IMF, it lost half the £40m funding for its “Education for All” strategy[xii].

Donors are also bad at providing all the aid promised, on time, and at making commitments to provide aid for more than one year at a time. This makes it very difficult for poor countries to budget: they can’t employ teachers if they don’t know that they’ll have the money to pay them next year.

More and better aid – what are we calling for?

• All donors must now deliver at least £28 billion (US$50 billion) more in aid and set a binding timetable for spending 0.7% of national income on aid. Aid must also be made to work more effectively for poor people.

 

[Matt25]

oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/debt_aid/mdgs_price.htm

Aid works…

And aid works. Millions of children are in school in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia, thanks to money provided by debt relief and aid. For the same reason, Ugandans no longer have to pay for basic health care, a policy which resulted in an increase of 50 to 100 per cent in attendance at Ugandan health clinics and doubled the rate of immunisations. Roads built with foreign aid mean that Ethiopian farmers have the potential to reach local and international markets to sell their crops more easily, while children in rural areas can travel to schools more easily, and people can reach hospitals more quickly – which is often a critical factor affecting maternal and infant mortality rates. In Bolivia, financial support to indigenous peoples has amplified their political voice – in particular when it supports women’s groups to monitor local government’s implementation of policies to promote equality for women and men. Key demands such as protection against sexual violence and improved standards of reproductive-health care have now been included in local-government plans.

History also shows that aid has been vital in eradicating global diseases. From the late 1960s, more than $100 million was targeted to eradicate smallpox – a feat achieved worldwide by 1980.

And aid has been essential in rebuilding countries shattered by war. In Mozambique, financial support from UN agencies, bilateral donors, and NGOs facilitated a process of national reconciliation, peacefully repatriating nearly two million refugees, disarming 96,000 former soldiers, and clearing landmines.

Countries now considered ‘developed’ would not enjoy their current standards of living if it had not been for aid. After World War II, 16 western European nations benefited from grants from the USA worth more than $75 billion in today’s terms – grants which underpinned their economic recovery and hence created today’s peace and prosperity. US aid also financed mass education and imports of essential goods to South Korea and Taiwan, laying the foundations for their rapid future growth, while European Union Structural Funds have supported growth in Spain and other southern European countries.

But today’s poorest countries – even those where it has been shown that aid can be used productively – have yet to see the necessary aid extended to them. Meanwhile, marginalised from the global economy, their access to other forms of external finance is limited. For the foreseeable future, aid will and should be the means to offset the lack of finance available for the poorest countries and communities. Aid also has intrinsic advantages: if managed well, it can be targeted to those communities that need it most, in a stable and predictable manner conducive to long-term investments in health care, education, clean water, sanitation, and other essential infrastructure.

           … and it could work even better

However, rich-country donors need to make aid work better if poverty is to be significantly reduced. Increases in aid budgets can and must go hand-in-hand with improvements in the way that aid is delivered.

                                            http://www.oxfam.org.uk/images/transparent.gif Almost 30 per cent of G7
                      aid money is tied to an
                      obligation to buy goods
                      and services from the
                      donor country.

                                                                                             http://www.oxfam.org.uk/images/transparent.gif                                               http://www.oxfam.org.uk/images/transparent.gif When aid-giving becomes politicised, poor people lose out – but many donors’ priorities are still determined by their own strategic interests. Two top recipients of French aid – French Polynesia and New Caledonia – and one top recipient of US aid – Israel – are high-income countries. The ‘war on terror’ threatens to divert aid away from those who need it most. Aid is again being used as a political tool, with one-third of the increase in aid in 2002 resulting from large allocations to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the goals of development aid are being redefined to suit the new security agenda: in Denmark, Japan, and Australia, ‘combating terrorism’ is now an explicit aim of official aid programmes.

Too often domestic interests take precedence: almost 30 per cent of G7aid money is tied to an obligation to buy goods and services from the donor country. The practice is not only self-serving, but highly inefficient; yet it is employed widely by Italy and the USA. Despite donors’ agreements to untie aid to the poorest countries, only six of the 22 major donor countries have almost or completely done so.

 

[Matt25]

Ensuring that Southern governments deliver development

Developing countries, as well as donors, have a responsibility to meet the MDGs. And well-functioning and poverty-focused governments can of course make the best use of aid. This means combating corruption, building strong and accountable public sectors which have the necessary staff to deliver vital services, and ensuring that parliaments, civil society, and the media can monitor public spending and act as watchdogs against corruption.

There has been substantial progress in the performance and accountability of many poor-country governments. Democracy is taking root in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, with elections in 44 out of 50 countries in the past decade, while independent TV and radio stations are being established across the continent. And civil-society groups are increasingly calling governments to account: in Malawi, education groups now check whether schools receive the textbooks and chalk promised to them in the government budget, and they report their findings in the media and in parliament.

But obviously in many countries there is a long way to go: developing-country governments, for instance, must increase the amount of money devoted to basic social services, in line with a UN recommendation to spend at least 20 per cent on these sectors. The practice of charging user fees for basic education and health services should be abolished.

Donors can play their part in furthering these developments. This includes not ignoring corruption, but tackling it by investing in a strong and efficient public sector and removing the global incentives – tax havens and weak regulation – that allow corruption to flourish. Creating donor-led structures outside governments, or avoiding certain countries altogether, can be counter-productive – merely serving to weaken them further. And such strategies risk diverting money away from those in the global community who need it most.

All donor members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) should adopt the following measures.

            Increase finance for poverty reduction:

• Cancel 100 per cent of the debt of the poorest countries where relief is needed to enable them to reach the MDGs: both bilateral debt, and the debts owed to the World Bank and African Development Bank.

• Provide at least $50 billion in aid immediately, in addition to existing aid budgets, and set binding timetables in 2005 to ensure that the 0.7 per cent target is met in all donor countries by 2010.

• In addition to giving 0.7 per cent of national income as aid, support innovative mechanisms such as the International Finance Facility (IFF) and international taxation to ensure immediate and sustainable development financing.

           Make aid work best for poverty reduction:

• Fully implement Rome Declaration commitments to improve the delivery of aid and completely untie aid, including types of assistance omitted from DAC recommendations, namely food aid and Technical Assistance.

• Restrict the use of conditions to requirements of financial accountability and broadly agreed goals on poverty reduction and gender equity.

           The World Bank and IMF should take the following               actions.

• Cancel 100 per cent of the debts owed to them by the poorest countries where relief is needed to enable them to reach the MDGs; finance this measure by revaluing IMF gold reserves and using the resources thus generated.

• Restrict the use of conditions to requirements for financial accountability measures and broadly agreed goals on poverty reduction and gender equity.

           Developing-country governments should take the following               measures.

• Demonstrate their commitment to poverty reduction by meeting the UN recommendation to spend 20 per cent of public budgets on basic social services, and transparently directing the money to benefit poor people.

• Institutionalise, through legislation if necessary, parliamentary and civil-society participation in the making and implementation of policies that will benefit poor people, also guaranteeing civil and political rights to free and fair elections, freedom of expression, and the rule of law.

 

[maireteresa]

Thank you for your knowledge, Matt25.It is sad that we rich countries are happy to ‘help’ poor countries, but are not happy if these countries actually get richer.

I saw a little live drama once about this; the poor country lay on the ground, crying over and over ‘I want to get up!’ while the rich countries walked about the poor country, looking worriedly at it, and went away to form committees, and came back and gave it money, all the time ignoring the cries of ‘I want to get up!’ from the crippled country. Nobody really wanted the poor country on it’s feet.

About Zimbabwe, I am trying to raise awareness about suffering. Because the MSM (at least here in the USA) are more concerned about the Michael Jackson trial than about anything else right now, be it Iraq, Sudan or other troubled places.

 

[Catholic29]

maireteresa:

Thank you for your knowledge, Matt25.It is sad that we rich countries are happy to ‘help’ poor countries, but are not happy if these countries actually get richer.

I saw a little live drama once about this; the poor country lay on the ground, crying over and over ‘I want to get up!’ while the rich countries walked about the poor country, looking worriedly at it, and went away to form committees, and came back and gave it money, all the time ignoring the cries of ‘I want to get up!’ from the crippled country. Nobody really wanted the poor country on it’s feet.

About Zimbabwe, I am trying to raise awareness about suffering. Because the MSM (at least here in the USA) are more concerned about the Michael Jackson trial than about anything else right now, be it Iraq, Sudan or other troubled places.

Yeah, it is deplorable that the mainstream media appears more concerned about the plight of one man, who happens to be one of the richest in the world. Than the countless millions of innocents in poor and backward countries, who suffer worse fates day in and day out than if Jackson were to be found guilty.:nope: