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03/11/2005:

"Blair challenges world to end 'obscenity' of African poverty"

The prime minister, Tony Blair, today challenged the world to help end the poverty, conflict and disease plaguing Africa, as he launched a major international report on how to ease the continent's problems.

"There can be no excuse, no defence, no justification for the plight of millions of our fellow beings in Africa today. There should be nothing that stands in our way of changing it. That is the simple message from the report published today," said Mr Blair, unveiling the findings of his Commission for Africa at the British Museum in central London.

The 400-page report calls on the international community to immediately double foreign aid to Africa to $50bn (£26bn) and make fighting Aids a priority. It sets 100% debt cancellation as a goal and urges rich nations to drop trade barriers that hurt poor countries. It also says African leaders must move faster toward democracy, stamp out corruption and take other steps to improve how their countries are run.

Mr Blair said he hoped the report would be embraced worldwide as a blueprint for an African renaissance. He has made helping Africa a key priority for Britain's presidencies of both the European Union and the G8 group of wealthiest nations this year.

"In a world where prosperity is increasing and more people are sharing each year in this growing wealth, it is an obscenity that should haunt our daily thoughts that 4 million children in Africa will die this year before their fifth birthday," Mr Blair said, calling for a new partnership between the developing world and Africa "that goes beyond the old donor and recipient relationship". " If we fail to act we will betray the future not only of hundreds, millions of children in Africa but of our own children too. It is unthinkable that we should do so."
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

Bob Geldof: Africa has become a living wound. Now we have the chance to heal it
Eat your dinner, they told me as a boy, think about the poor starving children in India.

In those far-off days the concern of the adult world was for Asia. It had a huge population and gloomy prospects in the eyes of economists.

The people of Africa were poor, too, but they had riches in the form of gold, diamonds and copper - and ground so fertile that plants grew overnight wherever you dropped a seed the day before. Africans earned double what Asians did. Africa would be all right.

Forty years on and things are not all right. Africa has stagnated while Asia has seen an astonishing turnaround. First the tiger economies of east Asia leapt ahead. Now India and Bangladesh have followed. Today Asians earn double what Africans do. And life expectancy in Africa is now 17 years less than in India. Why has Africa fallen so far behind?

What we have done on the Commission for Africa - as our declaration in The Independent today tells the world - is analyse the situation, define the real problem and come up with a plan for change.
Full Article: independent.co.uk

Wow. Bob Geldof formulating policy for Africa, and Bono a candidate to head the World Bank! It all lends a certain hallucinatory aspect to the farcical quality of all this chest-beating, conscience-stricken concern for the plight of Africa.

Now the Great White Hope is going to charge forward to 'fix' Africa, without a whisper of the 500 years it has ravaged her, and in fact what it is here proposing is merely a 3rd millenium 'kinder, gentler' form
of ravaging. The West takes more resources out of the continent than it did under colonialism, and nobody is proposing changing that.

And due to the corruption of governments that these sudden saviors in every respect set the scene for, 'Africa' will go right along.

As Chancellor Brown proclaimed, it is time for Europe to 'stop apologising' for colonialism, as if 'sorry' were sufficient, as if it ever even said 'sorry' in the first place.

Blair turns the idea of 'conscience' into a universal moral gesture, sidestepping the particular reasons why the Brits might have good cause to lose a bit of sleep over 400 years of wicked behavior.

They think they can avoid a reconcilement with history. They can't. They use straegies of amnesia and silence to cushion this festering wound, and like every supremacist white, believe they will be remembered as the great heroes of this tawdry old story. Blair is looking to his legacy, and that is about all this report of his amounts to, an empty ceremony, devoid of substance, just another arrogant testimony for the ages, put forward by small people for their own narrow purposes.

The emotionalist rhetoric tells the whole story. "It's so ghastly, how can we as decent humans bear it?" Well, we have been bearing it for a long time now, and continue to be more than happy to directly benefit from Africa's suffering.

In books and speeches and articles, with floods of words, theories are spun about the incomprehensible mystery of the 'haves' and 'have nots' on this planet. It's their climate, it's the animals they domesticated or not, their forging of steel weapons, their germs, their naivete, their ignorance. But never never the simple bottom-line fact: the rich are rich because the poor are poor. The Incas were not starving before Pizarro came and sucked the silver out of their mountains: Europeans however, were. The 'open veins' of the non-white world hemorrhaged its wealth into Europe. Period.