Ethiopian president denouces HIPC as blackmail (fwd)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

Meles lashes out at international financial "blackmail"
Date: Thu May 06 10:25:06 CDT 1999

   ADDIS ABABA, May 6 (AFP) - Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi lashed
out at the "blackmail" of international financial institutions Thursday in
opening a conference of African finance ministers.
   Most debt-reduction initiatives are used as "the whip to enforce
unquestioning obedience of the economic orthodoxy, the so-called Washington
consensus that is being promoted by some international financial
institutions," Meles told the approximately 450 delegates attending the UN
Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) conference.
   "The choice which we are left with under Highly Indebted Poor Country
Initiatives is thus to either abandon all independent and rational thinking
in economic policy-making or wallow in the quagmire of unsustainable debt,"
he said.
   "To use the whip of the debt-overhang to enforce this orthodoxy in
debt-ridden countries is in some ways tantamount to blackmail and is
therefore both unviable and immoral."
   Meles called for a new critical partnership with institutions in charge
of development, saying African governments -- which owe some 350 billion
dollars to the outside world -- were unable to attract enough direct foreign
investment or obtain enough receipts from
exports and domestic savings.
   He urged that realistic economic policies be based on internal
mobilisation of resources and the creation of economic environments designed
to dynamise the private sector.
   The prime minister accused the international community of applying double
standards to Africa "as if the contempt for the of law and of principles of
international law is something that Africa has to live with, regardless of
the consequences."
   Africa has received nothing but "empty sermons, the shedding of crocodile
teas and the vacuous lamentation over the African condition," he charged.
   ECA executive secretary K.Y Amoako told the conference that African
economies needed to grow by an average of seven percent a year to cut
poverty in half by 2015.
   "Our policies must include intra-regional integration," he said.