The emphasis is on fun in the sun."Members of MPH's coordinating team had to face down efforts from within to secure a positive reaction to the G8 communiqu?According to one insider, this came after weeks of pressure on some NGOs to "clear delicate stories with the Treasury", and attempts by Justin Forsyth, Oxfam's former policy chief turned Downing Street adviser, to pressure leading NGO officials "to refrain from criticising the Government". "A serious occasion was turned into a celebration of celebrities." Instead of criticising Blair and Brown, MPH spin doctors and their cast of celebrities went out of their way to praise them. The news that MPH was organising a massive demonstration in Edinburgh on the eve of G8 was quickly corrected by MPH as a "walk .. to welcome the G8 leaders to Scotland ...
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But this time, the unhappiness at how MPH has been manoeuvred so closely to New Labour by leading charities and celebrities stretches beyond the coalition's radical fringe."The campaign has been too superficial," argues Christian Aid's head of policy, Charles Abugre. Four months on, MPH's silence is deafening.The coalition has not disbanded, though - at least not yet. MPH's international umbrella, the Global Call to Action against Poverty, will carry on after the Hong Kong WTO ministerial meeting in December, while the signs are that MPH will not last beyond January.Members feel unable to cope with the strain the coalition places on time and resources.In the depressing aftermath of Gleneagles, the political disagreements that gripped MPH - between the powerful right-wing grouping of government-friendly aid agencies and charities effectively running MPH (led by Oxfam and including the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, Save the Children and Comic Relief) and the more progressive yet smaller NGOs such as War on Want and the World Development Movement - have escalated. For Geldof to stand there and say that conditionality is over was a lie." The same is true of trade. Contrary to Geldof's announcement, the G8 did not decide that rich countries would no longer force through neoliberal trade policies.Despite nearly a year of lobbying for G8 countries to change course to meet the UN's millennium development goals, Gleneagles, according to Claire Melamed from Christian Aid, was a "grave disappointment". Senegalese economist Demba Moussa Dembele, of the African Forum on Alternatives, is more forceful: "People must not be fooled by the celebrities: Africa got nothing."Geldof and Bono's endorsement of the G8 deal came as a blow to many within Make Poverty History, ensuring that the issues of Africa, poverty and development disappeared from the spotlight within days of the summit's end. For every dollar received in debt relief, poor countries will lose a dollar in aid.As Eric Toussaint, of the Belgium-based Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt, argues: "This precious funding will only be returned if countries meet 'specific policy criteria' - more long years of privatisation and liberalisation ... The 20 countries also earmarked for debt cancellation must also submit to the HIPC process.
To put this in context, African countries have $295bn debt stock, having already paid back $550bn in interest on $540bn in loans between 1970 and 2002. In 2003, developing countries paid out $23.6bn in debt servicing.Despite the G8's promise that debt relief would be "unconditional", the 18 countries selected had just completed nine years of neoliberal structural adjustment under the IMF/World Bank's Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) scheme. In reality, the G7 only agreed to take over the debt repayments of those countries to three of the world's 19 multilateral creditors - the IMF, World Bank and the African Development Bank (ADB) - meaning that they would continue to be saddled with crippling debts owed to the other 16.And the $55bn would be worth little more than $1bn a year - the amount paid in annual interest payments to the World Bank, IMF and ADB by the 18 countries together. Worse, as Yifat Susskind, associate director of the US-based women's human rights organisation, Madre, explains, Bush's "millennium challenge account", praised by Bono and Geldof, "explicitly ties aid to co-operation in the US's 'war on terror'".The much-lauded June G7 (G8 minus Russia) finance ministers' "$55bn" debt deal, in which 18 countries - 14 of them African - would receive "100 per cent multilateral debt cancellation", with 20 more countries soon to follow, was a similar pop-star-veiled deception. More than half of the promised $50bn (£28bn) in aid - which wouldn't kick in until 2010 - wasn't new money, but a dishonest amalgam of old pledges, future aid budgets and debt relief.
