There really is a magic bullet that can make sure Egypt’s revolution triumphs, discovers Eric Walberg
The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts was launched at the
Journalists’ Union 31 October, with a colourful panel of speakers,
including Al-Ahram Centre for Political & Strategic Studies
Editor-in-Chief Ahmed Al-Naggar, Independent Trade Union head Kamal Abu Eita, legendary anti-corruption crusader Khaled Ali, and the head of
the Tunisia twin campaign Dr Fathi Chamkhi.
Moderator Wael Gamal, a financial journalist, described how he and a core of revolutionaries after 25 January started the campaign with a facebook page DropEgyptsDebt. The IMF offer of a multi-billion dollar loan in June was like a red flag in front of a bull for Gamal, and their campaign really got underway after that, culminating in the formal launch this week, just as election fever is rising.
“Just
servicing Egypt’s debt costs close to $3 billion a year, more than all
the food subsidies that the 
IMF harps
about, more than our health expenditures,” Gamal said angrily. “We are
burdened with a $35 billion debt to foreign banks, mostly borrowed under
the Hosni Mubarak regime, none of it to help the people.”
Ali
explained the basis of the campaign, which does not call for wholesale
cancellation of the debt, but for a line-by-line review of the loan
terms and useage to determine: whether the loan was made with the
consent of the people of Egypt, whether it serves the interests of the
people, and to what extent it was wasted through corruption. He
explained that the foreign lending institutions knew full well that
Mubarak was a dictator conducting phoney elections and thus not
reflecting the will of the people when they showered him with money, and
they should face the consequences -- not the Egyptian people.
These
are
the internationally accepted conditions behind the legitimate practice
of repudiating “odious debt”, which
were used
by the US (though mutedly) in 2003 to tear up Iraq’s debt, and by
Ecuador in 2009. “Ecuador had an uprising much like our revolution and
after the next election the president formed an audit committee and
managed to cancel two-thirds of the $13 billion debt,” noted Gamal,
leaving the conferencees to ponder what a truly revolutionary government
in Egypt could do for the health sector and for employment.
Al-Naggar
told
how the loans propped up the economy as it was being gutted under an
IMF-supervised privatisation programme from 1990 on, allowing foreign
companies and Mubarak cronies to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars
and spirit them abroad. Meanwhile, what investment that trickled down
from the loans went to financing prestige infrastructure projects like
the Cairo airport expansion, which was riddled with corruption and
serves only the Egyptian elite. Virtually all the loans from this period
should be considered liable for writing
off.
No government officials deigned -- or dared -- to come to the conference. On the contrary, Egypt’s Finance Minister Hazem Al-Biblawi told Al-Sharouk that it defames Egypt in the world’s eyes, saying, "like the proverb 'It looks like a blessing on the outside, but is hell on the inside'.”
Both Gamal and Al-Naggar criticised Biblawi for
distorting their intent, which is not to portray Egypt as bankrupt, like
Greece, but to shift the burden of the bad loans
to the guilty parties -- the lenders, and thereby to help the
revolution. “It is the counter-revolution that is discrediting Egypt.
And they are the old regime that got the loans and misused them, and are
now trying to discredit the revolution. The international community
should willingly write off the odious loans if it wants the revolution
to succeed,” exhorted Al-Naggar.
The enthusiasm and sense of
purpose at the conference was infectious. Indeed,
this campaign is arguably the key to whether or
not the revolution succeeds. But it requires a political backbone that
only an elected government can hope to muster. The fawning of Al-Biblawi
-- this week he hosted another IMF mission -- looks like the performance
of someone from the Mubarak era, not someone delegated to protect the
revolution. He welcomed the delegation and “the possibility of their
offering aid to Egypt”.
Al-Naggar pointed out that the purpose of
the IMF is not to aid the Egyptian people, but to tie the government to
international dictate. Rating agencies are part of this, downgrading
Egypt’s credit rating after the revolution. Why? Because Egypt is less
democratic? Or because it will be harder to ply Egypt with
more loans to benefit Western corporations, and to keep the Egyptian
government in line with the Western political agenda. “Silence is
golden,” Al-Naggar advised Biblawi, meaning, “If you don’t have
something good to say, don’t say
anything.”
Chamkhi brought Tunisian warmth to the meeting, though
he further incensed listeners as he explained how the Western debt
scheming is directly the result of 19th c colonialism. He told how
France colonised Tunisia, stole the best agricultural land, and then how
the quasi-independent government in 1956 had to take out French loans to buy back the land that the French had stolen,
thereby indenturing Tunisia yet again, in a new neocolonial guise. The
foreign debt really exploded with Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali’s kleptocracy,
just as did Egypt’s under Mubarak. Chamkhi eloquently expressed how
“debts are not for our development, but to make us poor. To create a
dictatorship of debts.”
Tunisia’s first democratic elections
brought the Congress for the Republic, which supports the debt revision
campaign, 30 seats. So far in Egypt, according to organiser Salmaa
Hussein, Tagammu, the Nasserists and Karama support their
efforts, along with
presidential hopefuls Hamdeen Sabhi and Abdul Monem Abul Fotouh.
There
is
an international campaign dating from the 1990s, the 2000 Jubilee debt
relief movement, and the Cairo conference heard a report from London
about efforts on behalf of many third world countries -- now including
Egypt and Tunisia -- by public-spirited Brits. The Arab Spring
success stories now have a determined and politically savvy core of
activists who know what the score is and will be pushing their
respectively revolutionary governments to repudiate the debts from the
corrupt regimes they overthrew at the cost of hundreds of lives. As the
fiery Independent Trade Union head Abu Eita's cried, adding an apt phrase to
Egypt’s revolutionary slogan: “Topple the regime, topple their debts!”
