Africa and the rest of the former colonies
don't owe western banks and governments anything. Why should the hardest working people in
the world beg for debt 'relief' while the IMF and World Bank are organising the robbery of
their every resource, forcing them to work even harder?
To highlight this, the African Liberation Support Campaign (ALISC), with the
support of the African United Action Front, has recently launched the IMF & World Bank
Wanted for Fraud Campaign. The campaign's aims are to expose the so-called debt as a
fraud, to build a grassroots movement against paying the so-called debt, to develop
refusal and alternatives to structural adjustment, and to advance the aims of the Global
Women's Strike against globalisation.
The Campaign includes African People's Liberation Organisation, Black Women for Wages
for Housework, Committee for the Unification of the Revolutionary Left (South Asia),
Eritrea Community in UK, Latin American Solidarity Organisation, and other groups. Tony
Benn MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Cllr Iris Josiah (Haringey), George Monbiot, and Susan George
are also supporters. The IMF Wanted For Fraud Campaign comes out of ALISC's
organising against the re-colonisation of Africa.
Conditions on so-called loans, which governments of the former colonies implement, are
the main method that western banks and companies use to undermine the political
independence won after a struggle of many years and many lives lost, and to impoverish and
starve people, for example by forcing up food and water prices. Many charities, media,
mainstream academics and development organisations, present a picture of war, famine and
debt without acknowledging the debt owed to people of the former colonies.
We say "IMF and World Bank Wanted For Fraud" because loans to Third
World rulers enrich the elite, the banks and the multi-nationals — the money never
gets to the people. Millions of lives and enormous wealth stolen from Africa, Asia and
Latin America, under slavery and colonialism, and continuing under globalisation, is
robbery with violence. Debt repayments fall heaviest on women and girls, who grow 80% of
the food consumed in Africa, and do 50-90% of rice cultivation in Asia. Yet movements for
change rarely acknowledge this.
But Julius Nyerere, of Tanzania, described women in the villages working
"harder than anybody else in Tanzania."* The same applies to other
countries. In supporting ALISC’s campaign, Black Women for Wages for Housework say,
"Every community impoverished by debt repayments depends particularly on rural
women's work to survive. The banks don't count this as work because they don't directly
profit from it, and don't care if we live or die. We are owed billions for this, and for
generations of unwaged and low-waged work under slavery and empire. We owe nothing."
This is why women in the South and the North welcome the 2nd
Global Women's Strike, International Women's Day, 8 March 2001. Key demands include ending
debt repayments, and payment for all caring work, in wages, land and other resources. So
far 70 countries are taking part. The IMF Wanted For Fraud Campaign backs the
Strike and women's call to down tools, at home, in the fields or at waged jobs, for one
day or for five minutes, as long as they can.
The IMF Wanted For Fraud Campaign is an international campaign led by
activists from the former colonies and elsewhere. We call on everyone interested in ending
global injustice to join us.
Press statement issued jointly by
IMF Wanted For Fraud Campaign 020 8749 7179
International Black Women for Wages for Housework 020 7482 2496
IMF Wanted For Fraud Campaign 020 8749 7179 dawit@eritreauk.com
ALISC in Sheffield on 0114 222 7942 or 0114 266 4468 Email: b.garvey@sheffield.ac.uk
Information on the Global Women's Strike and Black Women for Wages for Housework
Tel: 020 7482 2496 Fax: 020 7209 4761
Email: womenstrike8m@server101.com Web: http://womenstrike8m.server101.com
* From Strangers and Sisters:
Women, Race and Immigration, by Selma James