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Admiral Habibollah Sayari says Iran could easily close the Strait of Hormuz
Anders Kompass on a visit to Bogotá to support the victims of forced displacement. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS
Lethal Trajectories by R. Michael Conley, Beaver's Pond Press, hardcover, 486pp, $24.95.
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Street Scenes of Baghdad: A peek into the life of the average Iraqi citizen.
Like one of those perverse twists in the tales of "The Arabian Nights" (many of which, you will recall, took place in Baghdad and Basra), modern Iraq's greatest source of prosperity—its vast reserves of oil and natural gas—could also be the biggest long-term threat to hopes for democracy.
Yes, on Sunday the Iraqis once again proved bravely, stubbornly, even astoundingly that they won't be kept away from the polls by mere car bombs and mortar shells. But by and large they were voting for the same coterie of politicians who've made Iraq among the five most corrupt nations in the world. The country's near-term future is just about waiting, after the election, for a new government to take shape over the next many weeks. But its long-term future could be haunted by what Stanford professor Larry Diamond calls "the oil curse."
How much oil are we talking about? Even after years of embargo, occupation, and civil war that weakened its production capacity, Iraq was the third-biggest producer in OPEC in January, according to the trade journal Petroleum Economist. The 2.45 million barrels it pumped every day, on average, would have brought in roughly $172 million—every day. In another three or four years, now that development contracts have been agreed with several major Western oil companies, that production could double, racking up income on the order of $125 billion a year. And that doesn't even begin to calculate the billions in revenue from largely untapped natural gas deposits. But …
"Not a single one of the 23 countries that derive most of their export earnings from oil and gas is a democracy today," Diamond noted in an essayearlier this year. Especially in Arab countries, the fabulous riches that come from under the ground tend to create overbearing governments with apathetic citizens. "In these systems, the state is large, centralized, and repressive," Diamond wrote. Societies are usually "intensely policed" because "there is plenty of money to lavish on a huge and active state-security apparatus," and bureaucracies are "profoundly corrupt." They tend to see the money that pours into state coffers as everybody's and nobody's, and therefore more or less free for the taking. The public pays no taxes in the richer states, and in the view of the entrenched potentates no taxation means no need for representation.
Precisely because the Iraqi government is not entrenched, however, there's some hope. "My view is a bit paradoxical," Diamond wrote me in an e-mail. Corruption is indeed "rampant," he said, and the institutions the Americans tried to create in Iraq to deliver better government accountability "have been overwhelmed by the common desire to loot the golden pot." But "there is so much oil wealth—particularly with what's likely to come on stream … that there will be plenty to steal and still some for development."
"I'm not cavalier about this," said Diamond, who served in the early U.S. administration in Baghdad and whose book Squandered Victorychronicled the way good intentions went horribly awry. But if all the major factions and provinces of the country feel they're getting their cut, then Iraq might "keep its political head just above water, though not without recurrent crises and uncertainty," Diamond told me. Not a comforting scenario, he said, but not a return to civil war, either.
In that same vein, oil analyst Ruba Husari in Baghdad tells me Iraqis often talk more about the need for federalism and decentralization than they do about the relative abstraction of "democracy." If they are going to get the basic public services and the jobs they desperately need—the issues that dominated Sunday's elections—the oil money has to be spread around. And Husari says there are positive signs that may be happening. Iraq's 2010 budget law has provisions for a portion of the income from each barrel produced in a given province or "governorate" to be paid back to it. There may be no comprehensive "hydrocarbon law" yet, but the article in the budget "is going to happen," says Husari. "The governorates are going to come at the end of the year and say, 'Where is our money?' "
Even if Iraq's rising oil and gas production does help to buy internal peace, however, it will pose an economic—indeed, a strategic—challenge to its most troubled and troublesome neighbor: Iran.
The government in Tehran already is having serious economic problems, and because embargos and boycotts have cut it off from a lot of Western oil technology, it has a very hard time raising its production of about 3.7 million barrels a day to compensate when prices fall. It wants to make sure that Iraq, which has been exempted from all OPEC quotas, will not start outproducing it, driving down prices and further crippling the Iranian economy. Already, skirmishing has begun behind the scenes at the oil cartel as Tehran tries to make sure quotas are imposed on Iraq before it can surpass Iran and perhaps even start to rival Saudi Arabia (which produces a whopping 8.2 million barrels daily and could go higher).
The more the mullahs feel competitive pressure from Iraq, the more likely they are to meddle in its internal affairs, whether with violence or, more subtly, through a democratic process where they try to control key players from behind the scenes. Getting to Iran's level of oil production in the next three years "will not be a big issue for Iraq," says Husari. "Whether Iran will accept it—that's the big question."
Such are the complications of the oil curse. You can take the petroleum out of the ground like the genie out of a bottle, but you can't be sure where it will take you. Aladdin would have understood.
We live in an unprecedented age of globalisation, where technology, ideas, factors of production, and goods are increasingly mobile across national boundaries. But globalisation is neither inevitable nor irreversible – it is a policy choice. The last era of globalisation was brought to an end by the combined disorder of international conflicts and the Great Depression (James 2001, Findlay and O’Rourke 2007, 2008).
In recent research (Acemoglu and Yared 2010), we examine the political limits to globalisation in the modern era. We explore the claim that changes in domestic political factors might restrict international economic integration by examining the relationship between militarism and international trade flows. The evidence suggests that increased nationalist and militarist sentiments, measured by military spending and size, are negatively associated with trade. A country is less likely to open up to neighbours if the country is also becoming more militarised, and trade between two countries grows less rapidly when both countries become more militarised.
Despite the increasing reach of globalisation, anecdotal evidence suggests that nationalism and militarism remain resilient. Figure 1 shows the evolution of world trade and total military spending since the closing of the Cold War. After declining for a number of years, military spending began climbing from the mid-1990s onwards, suggesting that nationalist sentiments and militarism may indeed be strengthening.
Figure 1. World trade and militarisation, 1988–2007
Notes: Trade share of GDP is average across countries for each year. Military spending is the sum across countries, in 1996 dollars. See Acemoglu and Yared (2010) for details and sources.
Does this trend in military spending suggest a potential threat to international trade? The evidence suggests some reasons for concern. First, between 1985 and 2005, countries that expanded their militaries faster experienced a relative decline in their volume of trade. Second, over the same period, trade between two countries grew less rapidly the more those countries invested in their military.
The first piece of evidence comes from the relationship between the change in a country’s trade share of GDP and its change in militarisation – proxied by log military spending. Regressions, also controlling for log GDP per capita and log population, indicate that a 10% increase in military spending over the two decades is associated with a reduction in the trade share of GDP of approximately 1.8%. Figure 2 demonstrates this strong negative relationship in a residual plot of the change in trade share against the change in military spending.
Figure 2. Change in trade and militarisation, 1988–2005
Source: Plot corresponds to the regression in column 1 of panel A of Table 1 in Acemoglu and Yared (2010).
These results are robust to measuring military size by personnel instead of spending, excluding Asian countries, and allowing for a differential trend between OECD and non-OECD countries. Moreover, the estimated effect is stronger once we exclude countries that were engaged in civil or international wars, which suggests that our results are capturing the relationship between trade and militarism, not the relationship between trade and disruptions due to war. Overall, the cross-country evidence shows a relatively robust association between changes in militarisation and changes in international trade between 1985 and 2005.
The relationship between militarism and bilateral trade is also consistent with these patterns. A regression of the change in a country’s trade with its partner as a share of its own GDP on the change in the interaction of the two countries’ military expansion shows a negative relationship. This approach of exploiting bilateral trade flows is attractive because it allows the inclusion of a rich set of controls for various differential trends, in particular by including a full set of country and partner fixed effects and other interactions.
International trade and international relations are deeply intertwined. Previous studies have examined the relationship between trade flows and armed conflicts, demonstrating how war disrupts trade and increased integration lessens the probability of conflict arising (Martin, Mayer, and Thoenig 2007, 2008). This column presents evidence that increased nationalism and militarism may constitute political limits to globalisation and trade even in the absence of outright conflict.
Of course, it is unclear to what extent these empirical patterns reflect causality, since trade may also affect militarisation, and the two may be related to an underlying third factor. In addition, the causes of the apparent rise in nationalism and militarisation during the last two decades are unclear and require further research. Nevertheless, these trends suggest that there are always dangers for some dimensions of globalisation to run into political limits.
Acemoglu, Daron and Pierre Yared (2010), “Political Limits to Globalization”, NBER Working Paper 15694, January.
Findlay, Ronald and Kevin O’Rourke (2007), Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Findlay, Ronald and Kevin O’Rourke (2008), “Lessons of 1000 years of trade history”, VoxEU.org, 10 March.
James, Harold (2001), The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Martin, Philippe Thierry Mayer and Mathias Thoenig (2007), “Trade and/or War?” VoxEU.org, 4 July.
Martin, Philippe Thierry Mayer and Mathias Thoenig (2008), “Make Trade Not War?” Review of Economic Studies, 75(3): 865-9
On February 20, a 10,000-strong rally, supported by Niger’s largest trade union federation, demonstrated in support of Tandja’s overthrow, Reuters said that day. The protest also called for the junta to hold elections, Reuters reported that day.
However, the junta is unlikely to confront the causes of Niger’s extreme poverty: Western-imposed neoliberal austerity and the environmentally and socially destructive plunder of natural resources, particularly uranium.
This is the fourth coup in Niger since 1974. From a military background himself, Tandja was involved in two of them.
He was elected president in 1999 and re-elected in 2004. His 10-year rule was characterised by famine, ethnic insurgency and human rights abuses.
The latest coup was preceded by a constitutional crisis that began when Tandja unilaterally dissolved the National Assembly in May last year. This was in response to some parties in the ruling coalition crossing the floor to defeat a government motion for a referendum on a new constitution.
Tandja declared a state of emergency on June 26. The constitutional referendum was held on August 4.
An opposition coalition of political parties and unions called for a boycott and rejected the results as rigged. The opposition escalated its campaign of strikes and protests.
On February 14, Reuters said, 10,000 people protested for Tandja to go.
However, the coup ensures that political power remains with the same military officer caste from which Tandja came.
Nigerien sociologist Issouf Bayard told IRIN on February 19 that before the coup, the “likely outcomes were ... a popular uprising, strikes that would have paralysed the country or a military coup”.
Some of the officers in the current junta had been Tandja’s co-conspirators in past coups.
The military domination of Niger’s politics has its roots in the discovery of uranium in the then-French colony shortly before independence in 1960. Independence was conditional on secret agreements giving France preferential access to mineral resources and continued military influence.
Nigerien units of the French colonial army became the armed forces of the nominally independent republic and continued to be trained, armed and financed by France. French troops remained in Niger.
The hand-picked post-independence president Diori Hamani relied on French intervention to stay in power. However, in the early 1970s he attempted to chart a more independent course and negotiated the departure of French forces.
This led to his overthrow in a 1974 military coup.
France is the world’s largest nuclear power generator: almost 80% of France’s electricity is nuclear generated. French nuclear-generated electricity is exported to neighbouring European countries.
France also has a large nuclear weapons arsenal and is dependent on Niger for its uranium supplies.
Niger is the world’s third-largest exporter of uranium. Uranium mining in Niger is dominated by Areva, the world’s largest nuclear corporation that is part-owned by the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). Areva gets 45% of its uranium from Niger.
Exploration licences to mine uranium have also been granted to mining companies from the US, South Africa, China, Canada and Australia.
The neocolonial secret agreements giving Areva below-market prices mean that very little of the wealth from Niger’s uranium remains in the country.
What little wealth is left over is pocketed by the military-based elite. The main difference the coup is likely to make is changing which elite pockets from this wealth goes into.
The United Nations ranks Niger as the fourth-poorest country in the world. Its life expectancy is 43. One in four children die before their fifth birthday and 71% of adults are illiterate.
This poverty has been exacerbated by drought and desertification — problems being made worse by global warming.
Johanne Sekkenes from the NGO Doctors Without Borders told the August 1, 2005 Independent about the effect on Niger of an International Monetary Fund-imposed structural adjustment program: “No sooner had the government been re-elected than it was obliged to introduce 19% VAT [sales tax] on basic foodstuffs.
“At the same time, as part of the policy, emergency grain reserves were abolished.”
In 2008, there were hunger riots.
Niger’s poverty is worsened by environmental destruction from the uranium mining industry, which is concentrated in the arid north of the country.
Pambazuka News said on January 14 that the “use of non-renewable water sources for … underground mines and … leakages of radioactive matter, including the contamination of water, air and soil; the use of lethal radioactive scrap metal for sale in markets; radioactive ore used to build roads; and dumped radioactive tailings (pulverised uranium rock)”.
Health worker Butali Chiverain described to Al Jazeera on August 31, 2008, some of the effects the uranium has on the local population and mine workers: “There are illnesses which people hadn’t seen before. There are also skin diseases with bumps breaking out especially on the feet, which touch the soil.
“In the company there are also respiratory illnesses [and] high blood pressure — people are suffering from hypertension. After a person works 10 years in the company they start suffering from heart problems, coma and these kinds of illnesses.
“Many people have died.”
He said that water in the region had 10 times the level of radioactivity considered safe.
Then-environment minister Mohamed Akotey admitted to Al Jazeera that the government had no ability to monitor the mines. “Today these companies have environmental teams at the mines. At the same time the government does not have the means to make studies at the different locations.”
Read more... Sphere: Related ContentThe campaigners contend that the proposed settlement is unlawful because the SFO did not follow the correct prosecution guidance (including its own guidance) on plea bargains.
They argue that the agreement does not reflect the seriousness and extent of BAE's alleged corruption and does not provide the court with adequate sentencing powers.
The groups also hold that the SFO unlawfully concluded that the factors weighing against prosecuting BAE on bribery and corruption charges outweighed those in favour of prosecution.
Under the SFO’s proposed settlement, BAE would plead guilty in court to “accounting irregularities” in its 1999 sale of a radar system to Tanzania and would pay penalties of £30 million. The SFO would not bring prosecutions relating to alleged bribery and corruption in BAE’s arms deals elsewhere, including in the Czech Republic, South Africa and Romania.
Kaye Stearman, CAAT's spokesperson, says: “The plea bargain in no way reflects the very serious allegations of bribery and corruption against BAE, limited as it is to minor book-keeping offences in one country.”
Nicholas Hildyard for The Corner House says: “We’ve had no option but to seek an injunction. The Serious Fraud Office should not seek legal approval of its proposed settlement with BAE before the courts have had an opportunity to assess whether the decision to make that settlement was lawful in the first place. We believe it was not lawful."
Lawyers acting for the two groups have also requested a judicial review of the SFO’s decision to discontinue its prosecution of Count Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly.
ENDS
Read more... Sphere: Related Content1. Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) works for the reduction and ultimate abolition of the international arms trade. The Corner House aims to support democratic and community movements for environmental and social justice through analysis, research and advocacy.
2. For a summary of investigations into BAE see: www.caat.org.uk/issues/bae/bae_investigations.php
3. The Serious Fraud Office is a UK government department that investigates and prosecutes complex fraud. http://www.sfo.gov.uk/
4. BAE Systems is the world's fourth largest arms producer. It makes fighter aircraft, warships, tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery systems, missiles and munitions. Its foremost markets are Saudi Arabia and the United States. It has consistently denied any wrong-doing.
5. A judicial review is a court proceeding in which a judge reviews the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body. Now that CAAT and The Corner House have lodged papers at the High Court requesting a judicial review, the Serious Fraud Office Director will submit his legal arguments and a witness statement arguing why the decision to offer a plea bargain settlement with BAE was lawful. A judge will then consider the papers from both sides and decide whether to grant or refuse permission for a full judicial review hearing.
The oil row has prompted Argentina to impose new shipping controls
Low clouds scud through a bright blue sky. They seem to bounce off rugged green hills that frame the slate grey channel of Port Stanley.
In the water by a deserted jetty a dolphin frolics, while yards away in the governor's house it's humans who are merrymaking.
Here in the windswept southern Atlantic, a very British garden party takes place: gin and eccentricity flow freely; effervescent children play croquet on the lawn; ladies in large feathery hats mingle.
This could be a summer's day in Berkshire. Instead we're 300 miles from the coast of Argentina, a country many Falkland Islanders regard as a neighbour, but not neighbourly.
Yet few here are worried about shipping restrictions imposed by Argentina in protest at imminent oil drilling by British companies.
Betty Turner, who works in the Islands' social services sector, said: "There's always been a political tension. I was born and brought up with that and it's just still there - it's in the background. It's sad."
"Oil is oil at the end of the day," said Phil Kerney, a vehicle technician, "and governments always fight about oil - no matter where it is in the world."
Argentina claims territorial rights over the Falklands and the seabed around them; similar claims led to war in 1982.
Then, hundreds of British and Argentine troops died fighting over the sovereignty of these islands.
Now it's what may lie off their shores that has sparked another dispute.
Lewis Clifton won't tell me how much oil he thinks there may be. But it's clear he's banking on a bonanza. Mr Clifton is the managing director of Byron Marine, one of several British and Falkland Islands companies involved in the exploration.
He took me to the dock where tonnes of equipment lie stockpiled, destined for the drilling rig which arrived last week and which is now anchored some 100 miles offshore.
Geologists think the South Atlantic could be rich in energy reserves
On the dockside were giant anchors, some made of iron, some yellow plastic.
There were also metal tubes called risers, through which the drill will travel to the seabed and beyond. In a warehouse were huge bags of cement: drill holes will be plugged with concrete when the work is finished. It's expected to last until October.
Mr Clifton says he won't bow to what he sees as interference from Argentina.
"The Argentine government... have attempted an economic blockade for the last six to seven years. They're attempting to tighten the noose further.
"That's not good and it's certainly not good neighbourly relations either - and they won't succeed."
According to the Falklands' government, the islands could certainly use the oil revenue.
"Everybody's been struggling through the recession," said Emma Edwards, a member of the Islands' Legislative Assembly with responsibility for mineral resources.
She told me the islands' investment portfolio lost a lot of money when stock markets plunged, and there were growing concerns about existing industries.
The UK says it wants to co-operate with Argentina on South Atlantic issues
"For the Falklands, it would mean security," she says of potential oil wealth.
"It would mean we'd end up with enough money in the reserves not to have to rely solely on the fishing and the tourism and the farming that we currently do rely on."
Back at the Governor's garden party, a lone piper plays as children dance around him. In the distance the sea shimmers in a perfect blue sky made startlingly bright by lack of pollution. A yacht sails lazily past.
Some here worry if oil starts to flow, people and industry will soon follow, destroying this unique way of life. But in the face of Argentine pressure, they remain stoical and undeterred.
© MMXMetals found in everyday electronics items, such as mobile phones and computers, are being mined illegally in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and funding a conflict that has caused millions of deaths, said Global Witness on the opening day of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Despite a series of high-level UN reports documenting the links between minerals and the conflict, companies that make colossal profits selling mobile phones and other electronic goods have done next to nothing to ensure that the components in their products are not sourced from areas controlled by armed groups.
“It is time for electronics companies to show they are serious about eliminating conflict minerals from their supply chains,” said Global Witness campaigner Daniel Balint-Kurti. “This means requiring suppliers that source minerals from DRC to declare exactly which mine the minerals come from, and carrying out spot checks and audits to back up these declarations. If companies cannot be sure that their minerals are conflict-free, they should not be buying them at all.”
The main warring parties in eastern Congo – including the Rwandan-linked FDLR militia and the government’s own army – control much of the lucrative trade in minerals that produce tin, tantalum and tungsten, as well as gold. These groups regularly commit horrific abuses against the civilian population, including mass murder, rape, torture and forced recruitment.
International smelting firms purchase minerals from Congolese trading houses which source them from zones held by armed groups and military units. Electronics companies could help stop this by demanding evidence from these processors that their products are conflict-free, as a condition of purchase. However few, if any, have taken this step. Some argue that their supply chains are simply too complex to map out, but research by NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and UN investigators disproves this.
The UN Security Council recently passed a resolution paving the way for the imposition of asset freezes and travel bans on companies that support armed groups in eastern Congo via the illicit mineral trade. Given the reluctance of international firms to face up to their responsibilities, Global Witness is urging the Security Council to start using these targeted sanctions against those that have failed to clean up their act.
“Consumers have the right to know that the products they are buying are not fuelling crimes against humanity,” said Balint-Kurti, “Electronics brands and other companies that use conflict minerals now have a clear choice between showing leadership, or facing a public backlash.”
OLYMPIA – An energy policy that relies on green energy is good for the nation’s national security as well as the environment, a coalition of military veterans said Friday in Olympia.
Continued dependence on foreign oil puts U.S. soldiers at risk in unstable, oil-rich countries around the world and helps fund terrorist activities, members of Operation Free said during one of the stops on the Veterans for American Power Tour of 16 states.
Rolling on to the state Capitol Campus in a 45-foot bus, several veterans of the Iraq war joined with state legislators who are military veterans to make the link between fighting climate change and boosting national security through clean energy.
The tour stop comes on the heels of a Department of Defense report that climate change is a strategic threat to international stability. Recent national polls also show that voters see a strong connection between climate change and national security.
“This is everybody’s issue,” said Wisconsin National Guard veteran Robin Eckstein, who deployed to Baghdad shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “Wars of the future will be created by climate change.”
The debate over global warming has moved beyond melting ice caps that threaten polar bears and other environmental threats to a bipartisan issue with links to national security, said state Sen. Steve Hobbs, D-Lake Stevens, a former infantry officer.
“Climate change is a national security threat that destabilizes governments and attracts terrorist organizations,” Hobbs said.
“We’re sending truckloads of money out of the country every hour to buy oil,” said state Rep. Larry Seaquist, D-Gig Harbor, a former Navy warship captain. “We need an energy-independent economy.”
Operation Free is a coalition of veterans and national security groups lobbying Congress to pass climate-change legislation. The two-month bus tour began in January and includes stops in 16 states and 60 public events.
Conservation groups welcome the veterans’ efforts, said Beth Doglio, campaign director in the Climate Solutions Olympia office.
“National security and climate change is not a new issue, but it’s moved up the list of issues we’re highlighting,” she said.
“The public gets it.”
If we are to believe the G7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to getting something it has deserved for a very long time: full "forgiveness" of itsforeign debt. In Port-au-Prince, Haitian economist Camille Chalmers has been watching these developments with cautious optimism. Debt cancellation is a good start, he told al-Jazeera English, but: "It's time to go much further. We have to talk about reparations and restitution for the devastating consequences of debt." In this telling, the whole idea that Haiti is a debtor needs to be abandoned. Haiti, he argues, is a creditor – and it is we, in the west, who are deeply in arrears.
Our debt to Haiti stems from four main sources: slavery, the US occupation, dictatorship and climate change. These claims are not fantastical, nor merely rhetorical. They rest on multiple violations of legal norms. Here, far too briefly, are highlights of the Haiti case.
The slavery debt. When Haitians won their independence from France in 1804, they had every right to claim reparations from the powers that had profited from three centuries of stolen labour. France, however, was convinced that it was Haitians who had stolen the property of slave owners, by refusing to work for free. So in 1825, with a flotilla of warships stationed off the Haitian coast threatening to re-enslave the former colony, King Charles X came to collect 90m gold francs – 10 times Haiti's annual revenue at the time. With no way to refuse, and no way to pay, the young nation was shackled to a debt that would take 122 years to pay off.
In 2003, Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, facing a crippling economic embargo, announced that Haiti would sue the French. "Our argument," Aristide's former lawyer Ira Kurzban told me, "was that the contract was an invalid agreement because it was based on the threat of re-enslavement at a time when the international community regarded slavery as an evil." The French government was sufficiently concerned that it sent a mediator to Port-au-Prince to keep the case out of court. In the end, however, its problem was eliminated: Aristide was toppled from power. The lawsuit disappeared, but for many Haitians the reparations claim lives on.
The dictatorship debt. From 1957 to 1986, Haiti was ruled by the defiantly kleptocratic Duvalier regime. Unlike the French debt, the case against the Duvaliers made it into several courts, which traced Haitian funds to an elaborate network of Swiss bank accounts and lavish properties. In 1988 Kurzban won a landmark suit against Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier when a US district court in Miami found that the deposed ruler had "misappropriated more than $504,000,000 from public monies".
Haitians, of course, are still waiting for their payback – but that was only the beginning of their losses. For more than two decades, the country's creditors insisted that Haitians honour the huge debts incurred by the Duvaliers, estimated at $844m, much of it owed to institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. In debt service alone, Haitians have paid out tens of millions every year.
Was it legal for foreign lenders to collect on the Duvalier debts when so much of it was never spent in Haiti? Very likely not. As Cephas Lumina, the UN independent expert on foreign debt, put it to me: "The case of Haiti is one of the best examples of odious debt in the world. On that basis alone the debt should be unconditionally cancelled." But even if Haiti does see full debt cancellation (a big if), that does not extinguish its right to be compensated for debts already collected.
The climate debt. Championed by several developing countries at the climate summit in Copenhagen, the case for climate debt is straightforward. Wealthy countries that have so spectacularly failed to address the climate crisis owe a debt to the developing countries that have done little to cause the crisis, but are disproportionately facing its effects. In short, the polluter pays. Haiti has a particularly compelling claim. Its contribution to climate change has been negligible; Haiti's per capita CO2 emissions are just 1% of US emissions. Yet Haiti is among the hardest hit countries.
Haiti's vulnerability to climate change is not only – or even mostly – because of geography. It is Haiti's weak infrastructure that turns challenges into disasters, and disasters into catastrophes. The earthquake, though not linked to climate change, is a prime example. And this is where all those debt payments may yet extract their most devastating cost. Each payment to a foreign creditor was money not spent on a road, a school, an electrical line. And that same illegitimate debt empowered the IMF and World Bank to attach onerous conditions to each new loan, requiring Haiti to deregulate its economy and slash its public sector still further. Failure to comply was met with a punishing aid embargo from 2001 to 2004, the death knell to Haiti's public sphere.
This history needs to be confronted now, because it threatens to repeat itself. Haiti's creditors are already using the desperate need for earthquake aid to push for a fivefold increase in garment-sector production, some of the most exploitative jobs in the country. Haitians have no status in these talks, because they are regarded as passive recipients of aid, not full and dignified participants in a process of redress and restitution.
A reckoning with the debts the world owes to Haiti would radically change this poisonous dynamic. This is where the road to repair begins – by recognising the right of Haitians to reparations.
The interview with economist Camille Chalmers was conducted by my partner Avi Lewis for an in-depth report that aired today on Al Jazeera English. The piece, Haiti: The Politics of Rebuilding, offers a deeply compelling portrait of a people who are brimming with ideas about how how to rebuild their country based on principles of sovereignty and equity – far from the passive victims we have seen on so many other networks. It was produced by my former colleague Andréa Schmidt, one of the main researchers on The Shock Doctrine, and is crucial viewing for anyone concerned with avoiding a disaster capitalism redux in Haiti.
The lack of a coherent and committed international approach to tackling the role of natural resources in conflict is costing lives in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and heightening the risk of further unrest in other fragile states such as Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea, according to a new report from Global Witness.
Drawing on Global Witness' experience in Angola, Cambodia, DRC, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Sudan, the report, Lessons UNlearned, aims to promote understanding of, and a strategy for dealing with, the problem of natural resource wealth incentivising, financing, and preventing resolution of conflicts.
The report is critical of the UN for failing adequately to consider the natural resource angle in its peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts, and of Member States for lacking the political will to support UN sanctions and other measures aimed at cutting off warring parties' access to resources.
Mike Davis of Global Witness said: "Despite acknowledged evidence of the central role of natural resources in driving and sustaining war in countries such as Sierra Leone and Angola, the international community has almost completely failed to support actions to address the issue."
"Too often the political, ethnic or geographic aspects of war are considered to the exclusion of its economic drivers. The legacy is conflicts that remain unresolved for years, costing lives and stifling development."
Featuring case studies from a number of countries, the Global Witness report identifies four areas where improvements could be made: sanctions, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding. The key cross-cutting recommendations are: disrupting trade that fuels armed violence, demilitarising control of natural resources, and improving resource governance.
The report also highlights the importance of companies undertaking rigorous due diligence to ensure their purchases are neither directly nor indirectly supporting armed groups or funding conflict. National governments that fail to monitor the behaviour of their companies or hold them to account for unethical behaviour come in for strong criticism.
Davis: "The least we can do after years of failure in war-torn countries around the world is learn the lessons for the future. In countries like the DRC, natural resources must be recognised not only as part of the problem but also as an essential part of the solution to conflict. Vigilance is imperative: otherwise past successes will revert to failures, and pending crises will not be averted."
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