Unpayable debt - have they understood?
by Peter Selby

In the June 2000 issue of The Witness I tried to paint a picture of people's faces in the Jubilee 2000 demonstration at the G7 Summit in Birmingham, England in May 1998. They wore the expressions of liberation. Economists they might not be; nor politicians either; nor people who constantly attend demonstrations of one kind or another. But in substituting a human chain for the chains of debt they demonstrated a deep understanding of what freedom in Christ might be like. It's like breaking the chains of debt, throwing off a burden you could no longer carry.

In their tens of thousands they understood that. They understood that some of the debts of the poorest countries had been unjustly incurred. They understood that many of them had been paid off many times over because of the hugely increased interest charges of the last two decades. They understood that having two thirds of the world impoverished by trade systems that produce debt was no way to run the world, and in the end no way to achieve our prosperity. They understood that in Birmingham in 1998 and in Cologne at the summit of 1999. And it looked as though the politicians were really having to take that popular movement on board and make policies on the basis of the same understanding.

So what has gone wrong? And why has the 2000 Okinawa summit produced so little as to be insulting to the aspirations of the campaign and, even more, to the desperate needs of the world's poorest? Basically the problem is that a movement around justice has been turned into an economics of grudging charity. The so called HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) program is run by creditor nations who have the power to impose conditions on the economies of the poorest for the alleviation of debt.

Of course we want any debt relief to be channelled into improved life conditions for the poorest people -- so do the poor themselves. But that is not the same as insisting that the poorest countries take on board the requirements of late capitalism: low public spending, trade liberalisation, a free market in money. Those orthodoxies of western economics at the end of the 20th century are neither what the poorest nations want nor what will produce real gains for the poorest of their populations. Imposing that kind of "structural adjustment" leads to poorer education and health care, and the steady "trickle up" economics that enrich the elites. That is not what the demonstrators of Jubilee 2000 at Birmingham, Cologne and Okinawa understood so well, and that is the understanding we have yet to convey to our political leaders.

Ann Pettifor, the forthright director of Jubilee 2000 here in Britain, has always said the campaign ends in December 2000: "Other people may want to make a career out of this, but I don't," she once said. And so the national office will surely close. But it is already clear that there is a groundswell in favor of a continuing campaign for genuine jubilee. There is much debate about the form that will take, and as far as Britain is concerned it will be a while before it is clear how that will evolve.

But what cannot be in doubt is the need to build on the popular understanding that is Jubilee 2000's greatest achievement. We have generated a greater commitment to international development than has ever been there in the past. And we have conveyed something of the real character of liberation as the redeemed in Christ have understood. Many Christians who had no idea that the Bible was so strong on economic justice know it now, and many who knew nothing about Christianity know at least that it has something profound and trenchant to say about usury and jubilee.

So where do we go, we who want that wider and deeper understanding to be shared? I suggest we take the route of making connections. The fact is that in our wealthy countries are millions also living under the burden of unpayable debt, and the economically well off know deep within themselves that a life built on credit (what is credit but the huge debt of wealthy people?) is a house built on sand. We need a movement for the relief of debt -- at home as well as overseas. We need to get people to talk honestly about economic enslavement -- of the rich as well as of the poor, and of the burdens they cannot afford to carry.

"I've never talked about money in church -- except when the church needs money." Countless people have said that to me, and it has to change. Economic liberation has to change our prayers and our lives. Then the politicians will start to understand what their voters, deep down, already know. That is the campaign we need, on both sides of the ocean.

Peter Selby is the Bishop of Worcester, England. His commentaries are a periodic feature of the "A Globe of Witnesses." This piece also ran in the December 2000 issue of The Witness.