The NSSP (Sri Lanka section of the Fourth International) has been running a tsunami relief fund since the country was devastated at the end of last year.
One of the responses of the government has been to ban fisherpeople - 70 per cent of those displaced - from resettling within 300 metres of the coast. 100 metres will be left empty for safety reasons - but the other 200 metres will be used for tourist developments!
The main objectives of the NSSP programme are
To provide immediate relief of food, shelter, medicines and drinking water for its supporters and also for those, especially Tamils and Muslims who have not received sufficient relief from the government
To help those people reconstruct their houses and buy essential household goods
To launch an awareness programme about the rehabilitation programme - including the government's tendency to limit the democratic rights of the people under the shadow of this programme.
They have been able to provide a large amount of immediate relief in different parts of the country, thanks to the generosity of friends inside the country and internationally.
At the same time the party has organised many meetings and demonstrations around the political aspects of the disaster, and its leaders have appeared on many television discussions. The key demands that they have raised in this programme have been
• Rehabilitate the displaced with land to the tiller and the coast for the fishermen
• Stop the "development" scheme of big business that increases the debt repayment and threatens human rights
• Stop state repression and chauvinist discrimination against Tamils and Muslims
• All foreign troops out now
• For a living income for all
• At a practical level, the key issue now is to be able to reconstruct people's homes. But unfortunately all the first wave of donations was spent on immediate necessities. It costs around
£1,500 to build a simple home.
Please think if you can make
further one-off donations or reglation is, then, a simple matter of political will. So much for the G7's bluster.
Their bluff has to be called. The G7 leaders have a hidden agenda - to keep the 42 HIPC and the other developing countries (165 in all) in debt so as to dictate their neo-liberal policies. Only a few HIPC, the most docile or those of strategic importance, will continue to receive any significant debt reduction.
But one thing is sure: the G7 has no intention of freeing them of their debt burden, which would mean giving them the chance to carry out economic and social policies that go against the neo-liberal creed.
As for the rest of the developing countries (89% of the poorest populations of the world are in countries other than the HIPC), the G7 is not offering any reduction measures - not even for the countries worst hit by the tsunamis of 26 December last (such as Indonesia or Sri Lanka).
All they are being offered is a laughable one year moratorium.
In Porto Alegre on February 1, at the end of the 5th World Social Forum, all the international movements campaigning against the debt, including CADTM, demanded: "the immediate and unconditional cancellation of the illegitimate external debt of the countries of the South, starting with the countries hit by the tsunami and other disasters and crisis in recent months".
Only a radical change of attitude will provide a solution to the debt problem. Today, because of the G7's repeated failures, the problem remains undiminished. Gordon Brown's posturing should fool no-one.
• Millet and Toussaint are the co-authors of The Debt Scam, VAK Publication,
Mumbai, 2003 and Who Owes
Who? 50 questions on World debt, Zed Books, London,
2004.