DAVOS FORUM: ‘A World Beyond Iraq Also Needs Reconstruction’

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jan 23 2004 (IPS) - Leaders of the developed countries, gathered for the World Economic Forum in Davos, are being asked to look beyond themselves – and beyond Iraq – to rebuild a new world.

“All sub-Saharan Africa now receives 11 billion dollars a year, while one nation, Iraq, in October was pledged 33 billion dollars until 2007,” the British charity ActionAid said in a statement Friday.

“We are seeing clues to the reasons for this here,” Tony Juniper from Friends of the Earth International told IPS on phone from Davos. “We wonder about the presence of so many oil ministers and executives of oil companies here.”

Iraq is certain to be a major supplier of oil and gas to the West for decades to come, “and we wonder whether the money going into reconstruction of Iraq is a part of a long-term energy policy.”

Politicians and business leaders are meeting in Davos under the banner “partnering for prosperity and security” at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

But the spotlight remains on Iraq for economic and political reasons “while other developing countries are mostly being ignored,” Paul Collins from ActionAid told IPS.

This will have a direct bearing on the Millennium Development Goals, which seek to achieve targets such as improved health and education by 2015, ActionAid says.

“Efforts to halve global poverty by 2015 risk failure as the war on terror diverts aid to serve rich nations’ security and foreign policy interests,” ActionAid said in a note Friday.

The international development agency warns that aid decisions are becoming increasingly politicised and shifting attention away from wealthy countries’ pledges to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

ActionAid points out the case of Pakistan “which cooperated on counter terrorism, then had sanctions against the country dropped and aid increased, despite its military government and authoritarian measures against poor people.”

ActionAid hit out at cuts in aid to developing countries to pay for Iraq’s reconstruction.

“Britain will reduce help for poor people in middle-income countries to help meet the bill,” it says. “United States is spending more on Iraq’s renewal than on its total annual aid budget for the rest of the world.” And American aid to Iraq “depends on the country buying goods and services from U.S. companies for ‘essential’ national security,” it says.

Howard Mollett from the British Overseas NGOs for Development (BOND), a group of 280 British non-governmental organisations engaged in foreign aid projects, says the European Commission has found more than 250 million dollars for Iraq, which is about half of its budget for the whole of Asia and Latin America.

“The big increases in the budget for next year do not go for the ACP (Africa, Caribbean and Pacific) countries, or for Asia and Latin America,” he told IPS. The bigger increase is in funds for Iraq, he said. The European Commission is the executive arm of the European Union.

“We are not against spending money on reconstruction of Iraq,” he said. “But we must analyse the politics behind the massive attention to Iraq in relation to other forgotten crises.”

The EU needs to take another look at its moves to tie development aid to foreign policy, he said.

“We appreciate that development policies and foreign policy need to be coherent, development cannot hide in a ghetto,” Mollett said. “But we are concerned that coherence does not turn into co-option.”

ActionAid says “the European Council of Ministers has talked about suspending development cooperation with poor countries which do not meet their demands over the war on terror.”

The group says it is worried that governments’ human rights abuses in the war on terror may harm anti-poverty struggles in the developing world. In its view Sep. 11 has given many governments “total freedom to deal with political opponents by branding them as terrorists.”

Matthew Lockwood, ActionAid’s head of policy, said: “The forum proclaims its theme with the message that there can be no prosperity without security, but that security cannot be achieved in the absence of prosperity. The question that political and business leaders should ask themselves is: whose prosperity and security?”

Mollett says many people are gathered in Davos to draw the attention of leaders to a wide range of real issues on the ground. “We think the political and business leaders should leave the conference centre and talk to some of the people in the demonstrations, rather than to one another in big shiny conference halls.”