PANEL ON POVERTY, HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEVELOPMENT
JOINT MEETING OF THE SECOND AND THIRD COMMITTEES OF
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS
Presentation by Douglas Hellinger
Executive Director, The Development GAP
16 October 1998
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I am going to try to be
brief and will be touching on some of the themes mentioned by the
previous speakers. I have to ask myself, to the extent that this is
a discussion about development and human rights that seems to be focused
on the South, why is someone from the North speaking to an international
gathering like this? I have lived in a small town in the South and
our organization works with people across the Third World, but you
can get campesinos, you can get trade unionists to tell you a much
more interesting, a much more knowledgeable story than I could ever
tell you about what is going on in your own countries. I therefore
believe I am here today to help hold Northern institutions, Northern
governments accountable for the roles they play in the maldevelopment
found today across the South and the infringement of human rights
that has almost inevitably followed.
I am not trying to ignore in any way the responsibility that the governments
of the South have to treat their own people with respect. We went
through a long period of dictatorship in a number of countries in
the South during the ‘60s and the ‘70s in which the suppression of
human rights was at times brutal. We learned during that period, and
subsequently, that there is a clear connection between development
and human rights. When people are not getting from the development
process what they need, when they are not participating meaningfully
in that process, and when the government is part of a system that
effectively blocks the achievement of these needs, popular pressure
on the system to yield those results will often lead to conflict and
subsequent repression.
What role do Northern governments and the institutions that they dominate
play today in bringing about such conflicts? For the last 20 years,
powerful forces in the North have imposed an economic system on the
South that has limited the ability of even democratic governments
to support the type of economic development that their people want
and need. In other words, because of the stabilization and structural
adjustment policies that our governments and the international financial
institutions that they control have imposed on the governments of
the South, almost all Third World governments have had to respond
first and foremost to their international creditors and second to
their own people. In so doing, they have created a situation of inherent
conflict. Through structural adjustment and its trade, investment,
labor, credit, fiscal, agricultural and other policies, you increase
unemployment, income inequality, poverty and food insecurity. When
you place a premium on high interest rates to keep foreign capital,
mainly speculative capital, in the country, you are making it very
difficult for small businesses and small farms to keep going, and
they are typically responsible for 70 to 80 percent of a nation’s
employment. And when you have labor policies that are geared toward
the creation of cheap production platforms to allow foreign firms
to sell back to us in the North, you are undermining the basic rights
of workers.
When you have this type of economic repression, it is not surprising
that people are going to react. But governments, even leaders that
have run for office on an anti-adjustment platform, have no choice
when they assume power. I know of national leaders who have gone to
the U.S. Treasury or the International Monetary Fund, progressive
governments that ask for flexibility and leeway to pursue another
set of policies, policies that their people want, and they have been
told in no uncertain terms, actually in quite crude terms, that they
have got to be kidding, that they are going to follow the basic guidelines
of the IFIs. And when those governments cannot subsequently deliver
for their people and people protest, when they strike, when they block
roads, when they fight for their basic rights, you are going to have
repression.
We have been creating such volatile situations over the past two decades.
I am not excusing anybody, but I am trying to hold responsible the
people who supposedly represent us here in the North. It is not as
if they are actually representing our interests; they are representing
the interests of the investors and bankers that finance their campaigns.
You do not have to look any further than the Asia crisis that is now
upon us to see the result of this irresponsibility. That crisis, as
everyone now acknowledges, was a financial crisis that was turned
into an economic crisis by the IMF through the imposition of austerity
policies under the banner of stabilization and adjustment. What you
have had in Asia is economic shock therapy followed by terrible poverty
and some of the worst types of human rights abuses. This is not a
new phenomenon, as the people of Africa could tell you in regard to
the imposition of IMF policies over the past 20 years, and the same
is certainly true in Latin America. So we have created a situation
for which we in the North are not totally, but in large part, responsible.
And these very policies, contrary to what people would have you believe,
are in fact not decreasing debt burdens, but increasing them -- a
country going through structural adjustment is more likely to owe
more money now than it did when it started the program -- and that
gives governments less leeway within their budgets to respond to the
needs of their people.
The speakers before me have said that the answer, the future, needs
to be driven by civil society, an empowered civil society. That’s
what we and many others are trying to do: to try to create space by
getting our governments, our financial institutions, the ones we control,
off the backs, not only of other countries, but of poor people, in
particular, as well as to help empower civil society worldwide to
mobilize and push their own representatives to give them, and allow
them to participate in, the economic programs that they need.
Two or three years ago, a group of NGOs -- now a network of some 1200
organizations around the world, including major trade unions -- engaged
Jim Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, in a program to look
at structural adjustment on the ground with civil society. The governments
of Norway, Sweden, Holland and others are supporting the program,
known as SAPRI. The Initiative is geared, not only to learn about
what has happened under adjustment over the past 20 years, but to
legitimize a voice for civil society in the future planning of economic
policy. Local knowledge is real and critically important. It is not
the only knowledge, but it is the basic knowledge. If we ignore the
peoples’ knowledge of their own reality, we are going to make mistakes
over and over again.
Let me conclude by saying that things have changed very rapidly in
the last year. Today, we not only have a global financial crisis,
but a financial crisis that has created an opportunity for change.
This opportunity is one for people around the world to try to take
control of their own destinies. There is beginning to be an understanding,
even in establishment circles, that IFI policies have failed, so I
call upon the good people and progressive governments around the world,
South and North, parliamentarians and UN agencies to take advantage
of this opportunity to mobilize and press for fundamental change in
the way that the global economy, as well as national economies, has
been managed. Times have changed: it is now safe to use the “s” word
-- structural adjustment -- or critically discuss the “g” word --
globalization -- in official circles. The way globalization is currently
managed, by a privileged few, is not inevitable. We need to manage
it in a different way, in ways that serve the interests of the majority
of the people of the world -- not on behalf of investors and bankers
so they get a 25-percent guaranteed return on their money.
Jim Wolfensohn at the World Bank said the other day, in a departure
from the IMF position, that we should stop imposing policies. What
he would like to see is a relationship develop among the government,
private sector and civil society in every country to determine their
own national economic path and have the Bank and other institutions
support that process and the direction they want to go. I think that
is very optimistic at the moment because you have others, particularly
the IMF and our Treasury, who are still actively limiting the choice,
but I think it’s a start. For somebody of that stature to stand up
and say that this is possible means that we are at the beginning of
a new era. Over the next 20 to 25 years we are going to see the other
side of the curve, the curve up which uncontrolled global capital
has traveled during the ‘80s and ‘90s when it has gone wherever it
wants. Now we are getting a backlash. The next 20 years are going
to be an extremely interesting period for creative change, a creative
challenge for the forces of civil society and its true allies around
the world that bodes well not only for development but for human rights.
Thank you.
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