Interim Government Obtains Four Times the Loans Obtained during Mubarak's Time

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Jan 20, 2012 Egypt
[Image from jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk] [Image from jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk]

Interim Government Obtains Four Times the Loans Obtained during Mubarak's Time

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was released by The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt`s Debt. It was translated into English by Khaled Nagy.]

Press Release by The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt`s Debt

Interim Government Obtains Loans Four Times as Much as Those during Mubarak`s Time

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan issue is looming again in the Egyptian horizon, a few months after the rejection of a similar loan. It was claimed that the first loan was rejected because its conditions were unacceptable, however, such conditions were never revealed to the public.

Dr. Fayza Abu el-Naga, Minister of International Cooperation and Planning, who previously rejected the first loan, refered to conducting positive consultations with the IMF, confirming that this time, the loan is “conditionless”. She further stated that negotiations are necessary to get a three billion US dollar loan from the IMF to support Egypt`s budget.

Only three months earlier, Dr. Abu el-Naga had stated that Egypt was not in need of any loans to support its budget and its economy was instead in need of new investments to expand and create more jobs. Yet, today, she is talking about getting a loan to cover the budget deficit, although this step would not help efforts to achieve economic recovery, boost growth rates or create new jobs.

Why was the previous IMF`s loan rejected at first when Egypt’s credit rating was much better than now and its negotiating position with the IMF was much better? The IMF gives low-interest loans under arrangements that stipulate economic or political conditions. Yet why are we witnessing the conduct of negotiations regarding the same loan, today, when Egypt is in a bad negotiating position, in light of its deteriorating political and economic circumstances? Who is responsible for such confusion and lack of sound vision?

Over the past two decades, the IMF has been involved  in drawing up and implementing the main economic and financial policies of Egypt, which led to low living standards, high poverty rates, and a deterioration in public services and human resource development, as recen World Bank and United Nation Development Program reports state. Policies supported by the IMF resulted in the richer getting richer at the expense of the poor, as well as a downsizing in public spending on health services and education once offered to the majority of Egypt`s citizens.

Yet, today, the government is negotiating again with the IMF to get a fresh loan under the pretext that the budget deficit reached unacceptable levels. The government ought to have reviewed the budget after the revolution to be able to restructure it, taking into consideration the requirements of social justice and human resource development. Instead it has applied the same old policies as the former Mubarak regime and its Minister of Finance who allocated more than nineteen percent of public spending to subsidize fuel. The majority of this subsidy goes to capitalists and does not benefit the poor. One fifth of the budget also went to service the public debt,  while sums allocated for health, education, and social security remained the same.

Rejecting or approving the IMF loan is not the problem. The concern lies in the absence of public participation and lack of transparency in the Egyptian economic scene. 

The transitional authority purposely uses the scarcely announced financial data to serve its own interests by either scaring the public about the revolution or alternatively giving a rosy picture of the economy. The absence of transparency, lack of adequate data, and the publication of misleading information manipulated by the government or the ruling authority are all still going on.

Another dilemma points to the fact that the current interim government`s economic team belongs entirely to the former regime and its dissolved party. Such a government does not have the legal right to get such huge loans that would lead to further burdens on future generations, without any public authorization or real parliamentary monitoring or any measure of transparency that would allow the public to see for itself the benefits and obligations it would have to fulfill due to such interim governmental decisions. The same applies to the international commitments made by the Egyptian government after Mubarak was toppled. All lack transparency regarding the amount of the loan, its sources or its beneficiaries.

The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts has monitored Egyptian foreign debt and has found that it rose from thirty-five billion to thirty-six and a third billion US dollars in the past year, as reported by The Economist. This increase comprises loans obtained during the reign of the interim governments without any public authorization, political legitimacy or full disclosure. 

The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts stresses the fact that the current IMF loan for Egypt is an odious one as the current government does not represent the Egyptian people for whom it is supposedly negotiating for, despite the fact that even donors realize that the current government is not a legitimate one.

In the event the Egyptian government gets a three billion US dollar loan from the IMF, the sum of loans obtained over the past year would be around four billion, which is four-fold above the average annual loans obtained during the Mubarak`s era. This would pose a huge burden on the Egyptian people for years to come and thus would have to be addressed by the elected parliament and government.

In view of the Egyptian experience regarding past loan-related conditions imposed by the IMF, The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts insistingly rejects getting any IMF loan and finds it necessary to identify better alternatives to cover Egypt`s current budget deficit.

The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts hereby calls on the interim government to provide complete data regarding the economic conditions of Egypt, including the precise amount of funds in the country`s foreign reserve, the current budget deficit, the economic basis for getting external loans, and all political and economic conditions associated with the current IMF loan.

The Popular Campaign to Drop Egypt’s Debts also calls for the involvement of the elected parliament, not the Security Council of Armed Forces, immediately and without any delay, to reviewi the loan agreement in detail and consideri whether to approve it or not. We believe this is the least to be done. 

www.dropegyptsdebt.org

https://www.facebook.com/DropEgyptsDebt

https://www.facebook.com/groups/232399976792797/

@dropegyptsdebt
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Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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