U.S. Lawmakers, NGOs Call for Haiti's Debt Cancellation
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (IPS) - Three weeks after Haiti's devastating earthquake, nearly 100 U.S. lawmakers joined with key civil society groups here Thursday to urge the Group of Seven (G7) leading western nations to commit to cancelling all of the Caribbean country's multilateral debt.
On the eve of Friday's meeting by G7 finance ministers in Iqaluit, Canada, 94 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that also called for "the provision of assistance to Haiti in the form of grants so that the country does not accumulate additional debts."
That call was echoed by a several non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including Oxfam, Jubilee USA, and Avaaz, which said they plan to deliver hundreds of thousands of individual signatures on petitions appealing for debt cancellation from across the world to this weekend's ministerial meeting.
"(While) the international community has acted rapidly and generously to provide for Haiti's immediate emergency needs," said Emma Seery, Oxfam's campaign manager, "the G7 must now also make sure that Haiti is not left saddled with crippling debts as it recovers and rebuilds." "They must agree to all new financial support being in the form of grants, not loans, and commit to a clear plan to cancel what remains of Haiti's debt," she said.
The push on the G7, which, in addition to the U.S., includes Canada, France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan, comes as Haiti struggles to clean up and begin recovering from the cataclysmic Jan. 12 earthquake that is estimated to have killed at least 150,000 people, and possibly tens of thousands more. In addition to damaging much of the country's infrastructure, the quake, the most lethal in the Americas' recorded history, also rendered nearly one million of its nearly 10 million people homeless, creating unprecedented challenges for the government of President Rene Preval, humanitarian NGOs and foreign aid groups, and more than 20,000 U.S. troops and U.N. peacekeepers.
With the vast majority of the population living on less than two U.S. dollars a day before the earthquake, Haiti has long been the western hemisphere's poorest country. The quake was the latest in a series of natural disasters, including devastating hurricanes in 2008. Last June, 1.2 billion dollars in Haiti's external debt, including that owed to the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), was cancelled after the Preval government completed a three-year Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) programme.
Over half of that debt had been incurred by Haiti's dictatorships, notably the Duvalier dynasty that ruled the country from 1957 to 1986. But the cancellation covered debt incurred by Haiti only through 2004. In the last five years, the country has received new loans - some of them to help it recover from the floods and other hurricane damage - totalling another 1.05 billion dollars. Some two-thirds of that total is owed to multilateral agencies, including some 447 million dollars to the IDB, 39 million dollars to the World Bank, and some 165 million dollars to the IMF.
Same Paramilitary Abuses in Colombia; New Faces, New Names
BOGOTA, Feb 7 (IPS) - A leading international rights group urged the Colombian government to take action against what it called the "successors" to the far-right paramilitary militias, which continue attacking civilians and human rights defenders. In its new report, "Paramilitaries' Heirs: The New Face of Violence in Colombia", Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the 2003-2006 demobilisation of the "brutal, mafia-like, paramilitary coalition known as the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia)" was a failure, despite repeated government claims that the paramilitaries no longer exist.
The 122-page report, the result of two years of fieldwork, says that after the demobilisation process had come to an end, new groups almost immediately "cropped up all over the country, taking the reins of the criminal operations that the AUC leadership previously ran." "The emergence of the successor groups was predictable, in large part due to the Colombian government's failure to dismantle the AUC's criminal networks and financial and political support structures during the demobilisations," adds the report, which was released in Bogotá Wednesday.
"The successor groups are engaged in widespread and serious abuses against civilians in much of the country. They massacre, kill, rape, torture, and forcibly 'disappear' persons who do not follow their orders. They regularly use threats and extortion against members of the communities where they operate, as a way to exert control over local populations," it says. The appearance of the successor groups has also likely contributed to a significant rise in the number of internally displaced persons nationwide since 2004, HRW says. According to official figures, the number of people forced to flee their land dropped to less than 229,000 in 2004, before increasing each year to a total of 327,600 in 2007.
The groups "are quietly having a dramatic effect on the human rights and humanitarian situation in Colombia," says the report, which adds that they often target human rights defenders, trade unionists, displaced persons, victims of the paramilitaries who are seeking justice, journalists, and community members who do not follow their orders.
HRW Americas director José Miguel Vivanco said "death threats against labour leaders and other social activists from these groups have increased drastically. Threats are very effective and sadly allow (the groups) to control the population under their influence." AUC, which emerged in the 1980s and was heavily involved in the drug trade, according to its own leaders, was blamed by United Nations human rights officials for 80 percent of the atrocities committed in Colombia's four-decade civil war.