Founding Statement of The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts

[Image from jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk] [Image from jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk]

Founding Statement of The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts
“You Pay, You Monitor”

Founding Statement

The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts was conceived as part of the January 25th Revolution, and affirms the right of the Egyptian people to assert collective control over all matters related to their life and the future of coming generations.

This is a popular movement that aims to facilitate Egypt`s economic independence from the many forms of exploitation, subordination and resource misappropriation that were imposed upon the people of Egypt during the past decades by the regime of the ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak and his collaborators abroad.

The economic policies applied by Mubarak’s regime have left us with enormous internal and external debts. The regime borrowed extensively in order to pay off its debt premiums and interest. Real solutions would have entailed searching for alternative mechanisms to finance government expenditure – such as wealth and income taxes – towards the goal of creating a more just economy. But instead of seeking ways to address the structural issues at stake, policymakers attempted to sustain a failing economic model by borrowing both internally and externally. The resulting debts have left the Egyptian people captive to lending countries and institutions.

The interest on these debts represents one of the biggest items of public expenditure in Egypt; this means that significant amounts of money are channeled towards already-wealthy financial institutions rather than toward guaranteeing that every Egyptian can achieve a dignified standard of life.

Decisions about the basic principles of the Egyptian economy have, for too long, been restricted to a select group of experts. It is time that the people reclaim the fundamental right to participate in determining their country’s economic priorities, for they are the first to be affected by economic policies and presently bear the burden of paying from their very own pockets for the mistakes of the previous regime. The transfer of power over economic policy from elites to the people must be an integral part of the democratic transformation in Egypt.

In the light of all these reasons, a group of civil society organizations and individual Egyptians concerned with the public good and with the future of social justice in the country have decided to launch a public campaign to pressure lending countries and institutions, both locally and internationally to drop Egypt’s debts.

The campaign demands that:

1) All loan agreements signed during Mubarak’s rule must be reviewed by an independent Egyptian commission that will evaluate the use of the loans and the degree to which the Egyptian people benefited from them. All debts that are determined to be illegitimate must then be dropped by the lending country/institution.

2) As a general rule, the campaign disapproves of debt swap mechanisms. Debt swaps create new debt burdens, whose legality and benefit are not checked by the people. In cases where debt swaps are used instead of audit and cancellation, the campaign adopts the following stands:

  • Debt agreements should be reviewed to determine the legitimacy of the swapped debts.
  • The conditions of debt swap should be discussed in a manner that guarantees integrity and transparency in the decision-making process.

3) Although the campaign does not approve of resorting to debts as a quick fix option, in case of any future loan agreements the campaign demands that:

  • All contracts and conditions be subject to popular participation and discussion in a manner that guarantees transparency and accountability.
  • The legislature implements freedom of information laws that require full public disclosure of all contracts and other information related to loans and debts, with no exclusions save what is stated by law.

It gives us great honor to invite members of the Egyptian public and civil society organizations to join the Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts. We invite you to support the Campaign’s agenda in order to preserve the gains of the Egyptian Revolution that enable the economy to be built in accordance with the will of the people, free of pressures imposed by economic colonization and the organized plunder of public money through debts.

Follow us on: Twitter: @DropEgyptsDebt

Drop Egypt’s Debt الحملة الشعبية إلسقاط ديون مصر :
https://www.facebook.com/groups/232399976792797/

Page of the universal day for Egyptian External Debt Audit and Cancellation: 
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=274119772601919

To join or for more information, please contact us:

Samer Attallah: 0101162412
samermatallah@gmail.com

Amr Ismail: 0127793243
amradly@eipr.org

Salma Hussein: 0123118939
salmaahussein@gmail.com

 

[The Arabic version of this founding statement can be found here.]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412