Whatever happened to making poverty history? - Q-News July 2006, Issue 367

From Live 8 to the G8, last year’s Make Poverty History was supposed to make history. It didn’t. Derailed by the London bombings, the Gleneagles meeting ended in disappointment. A year on, activists working in the world’s poorest countries know that enough hasn’t been done. On the eve of the CIVICUS World Assembly, the largest global civil society gathering held this year in Glasgow, chair of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty Kumi Naidoo spoke to Abdul-Rehman Malik about a dream deferred.

“The Global Call to Action Against Poverty, the global arm of Make Poverty History, has described what came out of last year’s G8 summit as, “The people roared and the G8 whispered”. We were conscious that there was not enough urgency being shown, and I think much progress has been made over the last year in terms of the global poverty agenda, certainly in terms of public awareness. It put politicians on the defensive. They needed to show that they were delivering something not just to the international community but for their own citizens who were demanding action.

The fact that the London bombings happened in the middle of the G8 obviously took away a lot of attention from the core agenda that was on the G8 as well as public attention. The temptation is for governments to elevate the concerns of security and understanding security solely in ‘national-security’ terms rather than understanding security in broader ‘human-security’ terms. What I mean is that, if we look today at the issues that make people feel insecure and unsafe, terrorism is but one concern. People’s lives are insecure because they do not have jobs, they cannot feed their families, they cannot educate their children, and they cannot address pandemics such as HIV/AIDS and malaria. So there is a lack of vision on the part of many governments right now in the way that they’ve prosecuted the ‘war on terror’.

If you want to understand conceptually what’s going wrong here, it’s a badly skewed understanding of what constitutes and confirms the security of ordinary people around the world. Unless governments can avoid using narrow, ‘national-security’, military approaches and look at security in its entirety where, as a colleague of mine from India says, “Hunger is the most powerful weapon of mass destruction used against millions of people around the world”. We need a more nuanced way of thinking about security in all its aspects. Whilst it’s true that poor people do not a have a particularly high propensity for anti-social violence or anything of that sort - we have to be careful not to suggest that - obviously people who are economically vulnerable are potentially more vulnerable to recruitment and this needs to be addressed.

The challenge right now for the world as a whole is to give more stake to people about what’s happening to the planet. The sad thing is that people are not having enough of a political or even social stake in what’s happening in their communities and the world as a whole.

In terms of the broader state of democracy in the world and particularly in terms of the opportunity for civil society organisations to participate in public life, the world since 9/11 had become significantly more difficult.

The response to the tragedy of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ it was a strategic, tactical and ethical error. Terrorism’ is a tactic. How do you wage a war against a tactic? This is not clear to most people. Also, when does this war end? Is it a never-ending war which allows us to live in state of democratic uncertainty?
What you have when you call it a ‘war on terror’, is giving more legitimacy to the acts and those carrying out the attacks. You are driving more people into the hands of those that seek to engage in acts of terror.

The more chilling effect is that in the name of the so-called ‘war on terror’. We have succeeded in undermining democracy in fundamental ways. We have legitimised detention without trial, house arrest, extraordinary rendition, torture - all things that go against the fundamental tenets of democracy. So if governments who profess to be democratic are behaving in these ways, we are essentially saying that terrorism has become such a powerful force that we are willing to shed away central tenets and core values of democracy, which is not the kind of message we should be sending.

A test of democracy is not whether you can refrain from detention without trial, torture or this horrible new invention of extraordinary rendition when everything is more or less going well in your society. The question is, can you maintain those standards in contexts when you are under attack? This has led to is a situation where we have countries, like Robert Mugabe’s in Zimbabwe for example, that uses the ‘war on terror’ discourse to justify his attacks on democracy and on civil society organisations. He is in a privileged position where he can say, “I haven’t done Abu Ghraib. I haven’t done Guantanamo Bay”. Thus, the situation in terms of the economic justice demands on G8 is not good. In terms of political justice we are seeing negative trends too.

The CIVICUS Assembly gives us an opportunity to take stock of the state of global civil society. After the end of the Cold War there was a lot of optimism and people were talking about a peace dividend - diverting military expenditure to tackle the real challenges facing humanity.

Sadly, that optimism has not been delivered on. If you look at military expenditures, (with a few exception) they are not actually decreasing. So the mood of optimism that you had 10 years ago with democracy coming to South Africa and other parts of the world is now certainly less.

People are concerned. On economic justice, people are concerned. On the debt cancellation agenda, we don’t have the kind of aggressive movement that we want. On aid the countries are still dragging their feet over the quantity and quality of aid. Importantly, on trade justice, particularly rich nations of the world have betrayed their own citizens by pushing forward an agenda that severely compromises poor countries at the interest of already developed countries.

Thinking about global trade, we do not have a level playing field. It’s fair for rich countries to say, “Everybody needs to do the same thing and if we only make a few adjustments here and there then everybody could be starting on the same playing field”. But we’re not starting from a level playing field. There is no justice in denying poor countries the same economic instruments as rich countries in order to develop their own economies. For example, the United States has been heavily funding its cotton producers, making it no only impossible for farmers in West and North Africa to export their products, but we actually have the dumping of these heavily subsidised products in developing country markets.

Given the support we saw for Make Poverty History in the G8 countries, we know that there is significant political support by ordinary citizens for their governments to act decisively and in a just way about this. So there’s a sense of frustration at the lack of vision of show by these governments.

Civil society has to build on its successes move on our social justice agenda. We might have more space because our work is not so dependent on what governments do - I mean it is dependant on what governments do and don’t do, what they say and don’t say - but I think there is space there to make movement even when governments are hesitant.

Overall, the mood of global civil society is one of concern - for colleagues in prison and for the shrinking of civil and democratic - but not pessimism. They approach it as the best challenges and concerns require looking for inevitable solutions which is what and innovative campaigning and strategies will do - to generate some new ideas that we can practise on the ground. Civil society is populated with the most inspirational people that do work in far-flung areas out of the public eye, in poor communities and sometimes in places where powerful institutions have depleted local resources. We need to be inspired by people doing a diversity of different things to try to make the world a better place.”

Kumi Naidoo is secretary general and CEO of CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, dedicated to strengthening citizen participation and civil society worldwide. He grew up in South Africa and was later a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, from which he holds a PhD.