60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

ehind most mass violence lurk economic interests 275
of public policy. Malawi’s agriculture collapsed; in 2004/5 the country
experienced mass famine when the rains failed. However when
the Malawian government found the courage to defy the World Bank
and IMF and introduced farm input subsidies Malawi turned, litrally
overnight, into a food-surplus nation, which now exports to the likes
of Central African Republic. Structural adjustment policies not only
deepened poverty but killed people in droves, reduced tolerance between
peoples and made democratisation even more diffi cult
These days it is customary for the IMF and the World Bank to pronounce
that they accept some responsibility for failed policies. Yet
they are not held to account in the way that individuals perpetrating
mass killing in Rwanda or Sierra Leone or Liberia are. Although the
Paris Framework for Aid Eff ectiveness makes a point about the need
for mutual accountability, it fails to defi ne in concrete terms what
that means when aid agencies infl ict such a degree of harm and death
on recipients ‘forced’ to adopt their policies in return for desperately
needed fi nancial resources.
I could go on chronicling public policy failures in Africa, most of it
externally imposed. My point really is that there is ample evidence
that some genocidal conditions have resulted from economic policies
which were largely externally imposed on hapless, or even complicit,
African governments. The least we can do is stop imposed economic
policies and the use of loan and aid conditionalities. We can stop the
World Bank and the IMF from abusing conditions. We can stop the
IMF from imposing itself as the sole arbiter of aid and economic policies.
Norway and Sweden, alongside the major countries of the West,
do use the IMF regularly as instruments to force policies on developing
countries that they themselves wouldn’t implement in their own
countries. We can ask them to stop this behaviour, immediately. But
more importantly, we can support the African Union’s eff ort to build
alternative institutions. In fact, the economic advisor to the chairman
of the African Union Commission said to me recently at a meeting
in South Africa on the role of the IMF in Africa, ‘Do you know,
Charles? We had decided that we will not allow the IMF and the
World Bank to come and visit the African Union, let alone fi nance it,
because of the damage they caused the continent throughout the ’80s
and ’90s. We had decided that it was best to shape Africa’s destination,
keeping these institutions at arm’s length.’ He said, ‘Unfortunately,
we had to agree to talk to the World Bank recently as a courtesy to
the new vice-president of the World Bank who is a Nigerian woman,
and it is very impolite to turn down a visit of one of the few African
women leaders in the world.’ This reveals that there is quite wide-