Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

1. The history of the CADTM and its struggle against illegitimate debt: Origins

Benjamin Lemoine: How did you become involved in the struggle against illegitimate debt?

Eric Toussaint: I taught secondary-level history and social science (in public technical and vocational education institutions) between 1975 and 1994. While teaching at Liège in the 1980s, I witnessed the debt crisis of this municipality of 200,000 inhabitants. It was catastrophic and an austerity plan (extremely hard for its time) was implemented. That led me and a host of colleagues and different categories of workers to analyze the origins of the debt claimed from the city of Liège. At the same time, the Third World debt crisis broke out: Mexico defaulted in 1982. Many initiatives to oppose the payment of unpayable debt were taken in the 1980s, particularly in Latin America. Similarly, in Africa, the young Burkinabe President Thomas Sankara took up the Debt issue in 1985. This led me to believe, with the others who co-founded the Committee for the Abolition of Third World debt (CADTM) in 1990 in Belgium [2], that this was a new and transverse issue which justified the creation of a specific organization, like other well-known organizations such as Greenpeace or Amnesty International. The idea took off from a specific issue and went further into the problems of society and the global capitalist system. The committee began mainly as a Belgian organization. However, through its publications in French it became so well-known in France, western Switzerland, French-speaking Africa and Haiti, that we are now present in over 30 countries.

As for education, while giving full-time courses in high school, I continued studying and completed my Ph.D. in Political Science at the Universities of Liège and Paris VIII in 2004. My thesis was on the political aspects of the intervention of the World Bank World Bank
WB The World Bank was founded as part of the new international monetary system set up at Bretton Woods in 1944. Its capital is provided by member states’ contributions and loans on the international money markets. It financed public and private projects in Third World and East European countries.

It consists of several closely associated institutions, among which :

1. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, 189 members in 2017), which provides loans in productive sectors such as farming or energy ;

2. The International Development Association (IDA, 159 members in 1997), which provides less advanced countries with long-term loans (35-40 years) at very low interest (1%) ;

3. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), which provides both loan and equity finance for business ventures in developing countries.

As Third World Debt gets worse, the World Bank (along with the IMF) tends to adopt a macro-economic perspective. For instance, it enforces adjustment policies that are intended to balance heavily indebted countries’ payments. The World Bank advises those countries that have to undergo the IMF’s therapy on such matters as how to reduce budget deficits, round up savings, enduce foreign investors to settle within their borders, or free prices and exchange rates.

and the IMF IMF
International Monetary Fund Along with the World Bank, the IMF was founded on the day the Bretton Woods Agreements were signed. Its first mission was to support the new system of standard exchange rates.

When the Bretton Wood fixed rates system came to an end in 1971, the main function of the IMF became that of being both policeman and fireman for global capital: it acts as policeman when it enforces its Structural Adjustment Policies and as fireman when it steps in to help out governments in risk of defaulting on debt repayments.

As for the World Bank, a weighted voting system operates: depending on the amount paid as contribution by each member state. 85% of the votes is required to modify the IMF Charter (which means that the USA with 17,68% % of the votes has a de facto veto on any change).

The institution is dominated by five countries: the United States (16,74%), Japan (6,23%), Germany (5,81%), France (4,29%) and the UK (4,29%).
The other 183 member countries are divided into groups led by one country. The most important one (6,57% of the votes) is led by Belgium. The least important group of countries (1,55% of the votes) is led by Gabon and brings together African countries.

http://imf.org in the Third World. [3]

L. B. Were you politically active before the Liège experience?

E. T: I entered politics very early. I was not yet 14 in May 1968 and had already been active in my school since 1967. I lived in a village of coal miners mainly of immigrant origin (Polish, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks and so on). I must point out that my parents, village teachers, were not at all Marxists. There was not a single Marxist book in the family library. My father was a very active member of the Socialist Party. My parents were anti-racist, pacifist and internationalist. I was mobilized by anti-racism and the struggles of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in the US moved me immensely (Malcolm X’s radical position attracted me more). I felt absolute solidarity with the workers fighting for their rights through strikes and street demonstrations. I participated in demonstrations against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. In May 1968, I followed the developments in Paris very closely. I read voraciously: Mao, Guevara, the Communist Manifesto and many Marxist political works from different currents. This led me, in 1970, to join the Trotskyist current called the Fourth International. The Communist League (later the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire – Revolutionary Communist League) was the member organization of the Fourth International in France, led by Alain Krivine and Daniel Bensaïd. In June 1970, I hitchhiked to Paris to see the organization with a friend of my age. I was not quite 16 years old. I started reading Leon Trotsky’s major analytical works, which helped me to understand the degeneration of the Soviet Union and why it was important to have a permanent revolution and a policy on the global scale.

B.L: Was there an understanding of the debt issue within the Fourth International or, on the contrary, was it an isolated position?

E.T: CADTM was established in 1990. Ernest Mandel, a senior leader of the Fourth International, with whom I actively cooperated, argued for the cancellation of Third World debt in 1986. [4] Moreover, in 1989 a coalition was established in France with personalities like the singer Renaud and the writer Gilles Perrault at the initiative of the Revolutionary Communist League. The coalition was called “Ça suffat comme ci“ (in colloquial French it means ‘It’s enough!’) and it was a broad united campaign initiated in response to François Mitterrand’s call for hosting a G7 meeting on the occasion of the French Revolution’s bicentenary. Most of the left found this call to be provocation. Renaud, who was drawn to Mitterrand and was quite an admirer, was in a dilemma. For him it was a crisis of confidence on the occasion of the bicentenary. Renaud performed in a massive free concert at Vincennes with his South African friend Johnny Clegg and the Mano Negra band. Tens of thousands of people attended the concert and at least 10,000 were present at the street demonstration. The appeal for the abolition of the Third World’s debt constituted the main issue for this coalition. The founding text of the CADTM-Belgium is the “Bastille appeal” for the cancellation of the Third World debt, [5] written in 1989 by militants of the Revolutionary Communist League and Gilles Perrault. So this political current quite clearly stemmed from the problem of debt, especially that of the Third World countries. Nevertheless, SOS Racisme’s success in France marginalized this huge campaign of 1989. A few years later SOS Racisme and Harlem Désir took the Ça suffat comme ci movement’s space. At that time, i.e. during the 1990s, Désir kept regular contact with the CADTM. So did Arnaud Montebourg who, as the Socialist Party deputy to the National Assembly, focused on tax evasion and also development aid. When SOS Racisme was launched, they tried to reproduce our formula of giant free concerts and assemblies. The Debt issue resurfaced in France during the G7 meet in Lyon in 1996. Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and others were present there. The collective launched in Lyon was called Les Autres Voix de la planète (”The Other Voices of the Planet"), which inspired the title of the CADTM’s bulletin. The CADTM played a key role in the analyses and the content of the final declaration of this counter-G7. It is also the CADTM which funded the permanent site of Les Autres Voix de la planète in Lyon to prepare for the joint counter-summit.

Southern debts, Northern debts

B.L: During those years, was any clear-cut difference drawn in the struggle between the debts of the North and the South?

E.T: Yes, the Northern debt was not treated as a key issue in 1990, but I considered it to be so. As for the current situation, when the banking crisis which erupted in the US in 2006-2007 engulfed Europe towards 2007-2008, and when a number of countries socialized their banking losses to save the banks, the public debt rocketed. I was immediately convinced, with other members of the CADTM, that it was time to take into account the new dimension of the Northern public debt. We did so before it dawned upon others. We must remember that in 2008-2009, the first reaction of José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, was to propose a policy which looked like a neo-Keynesian turning-point. In fact, it simply provided temporary social shock absorbers because the Northern governments dreaded that the challenge to the system might turn into something colossal and dynamic. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy announced subsidies to support the automobile industry. Part of the alter-globalization movement and the various leftwing currents did not realize that soon, under the pretext of the huge increase in public debt, an extremely brutal austerity offensive would be unleashed. What the mainstream media called the “sovereign debt Sovereign debt Government debts or debts guaranteed by the government. crisis” only became evident in 2010 with the famous Greek crisis. In fact, a widespread media operation was launched to hide the basics, namely the continuing banking crisis and a series of initiatives of the European Central Bank Central Bank The establishment which in a given State is in charge of issuing bank notes and controlling the volume of currency and credit. In France, it is the Banque de France which assumes this role under the auspices of the European Central Bank (see ECB) while in the UK it is the Bank of England.

ECB : http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/Pages/home.aspx , the governments of the European Union and also of the US to bail out banks with public finance.

In October 2008, I wrote very clearly in an article [6] about what was to happen in 2010, how the events would unfold. In short, we, as the CADTM, were prepared for what actually occurred. We have also published two books that perfectly illustrate this: La crise, quelles crises ? (Crisis, what crisis?), published in December 2009 and La Dette ou la Vie (Debt or Life) published in 2011. The latter was awarded the Political Book Award in the Liège Political Book Fair of the same year. We have also conducted seminars and since 2010 we have been trying to convince a host of movements to introduce a European front for questioning debt repayment.

B.L: Between the 1980s of “Ça suffat comme ci” (It’s enough!’) and 2007-2008, twenty years have passed. But the Northern and Southern debts still continue to be perceived differently. How do you explain that?

E.T: There is a strong connection between the CADTM and what was called Third Worldism in the 1960s and 1970s. [7] The CADTM is associated with the proponents of Third Worldism and I personally had close ties with Ahmed Ben Bella (the first president of independent Algeria, overthrown in 1967 by Boumedienne), [8] François Houtart, Gus Massiah, André Gunder Frank, Theotonio dos Santos and so on. The CADTM has also collaborated with Susan George, [9] who wrote extensively on Debt during the 1980s and the 1990s, and with the writer Gilles Perrault since his involvement with the Bastille Appeal in 1989. Gilles Perrault was extremely committed to the publication of his book Notre ami, le roi (Our Friend the King) [10] and the defense of Abraham Serfaty, [11] who was a political prisoner in the jails of Hassan II. I must also mention René Dumont [12] who was a representative figure of Third Worldism. He introduced the ecological dimension. Thus the CADTM’s affiliations include people who in the early 1990s became 60 or 70 years old, and who were mobilized in solidarity with the Third World or were leaders. CADTM is also linked to international networks of the 1990s’ movements, such as Via Campesina (established in 1993), the World March of Women (established in the late 1990s), Jubilee South (established in 1999), and ATTAC (established in 1998-1999) and so on. In 2001, these movements came together to create the World Social Forum, of which the CADTM is a founder-member.

The CADTM has transformed in the course of its evolution: it went from a Northern organization expressing solidarity with the South to a network for North-South action exploring alternatives to the debt-system.

At its global assembly held at the end of April, 2016 in Tunis, CADTM unanimously decided to retain its acronym but change its name to the “Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debts.” The motion in favour of changing the title presented the following arguments: “The proposed change is justified by the evolution of the CADTM’s national and international work. CADTM was born in 1990 during a full-fledged crisis of Third World debt with a demand for cancelling the debt of the so-called Third World countries. Since the 1990s, the use of the term ‘Third World’ has been waning, especially because the Second World (i.e. the block of actual socialism) has disappeared and because of the various developments within the Third World category – now known as ‘developing countries’ (emerging countries, BRIC, LDC Least Developed Countries
LDC A notion defined by the UN on the following criteria: low per capita income, poor human resources and little diversification in the economy. The list includes 49 countries at present, the most recent addition being Senegal in July 2000. 30 years ago there were only 25 LDC. , HIPC Heavily Indebted Poor Countries
HIPC In 1996 the IMF and the World Bank launched an initiative aimed at reducing the debt burden for some 41 heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC), whose total debts amount to about 10% of the Third World Debt. The list includes 33 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The idea at the back of the initiative is as follows: a country on the HIPC list can start an SAP programme of twice three years. At the end of the first stage (first three years) IMF experts assess the ’sustainability’ of the country’s debt (from medium term projections of the country’s balance of payments and of the net present value (NPV) of debt to exports ratio.
If the country’s debt is considered “unsustainable”, it is eligible for a second stage of reforms at the end of which its debt is made ’sustainable’ (that it it is given the financial means necessary to pay back the amounts due). Three years after the beginning of the initiative, only four countries had been deemed eligible for a very slight debt relief (Uganda, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, and Mozambique). Confronted with such poor results and with the Jubilee 2000 campaign (which brought in a petition with over 17 million signatures to the G7 meeting in Cologne in June 1999), the G7 (group of 7 most industrialised countries) and international financial institutions launched an enhanced initiative: “sustainability” criteria have been revised (for instance the value of the debt must only amount to 150% of export revenues instead of 200-250% as was the case before), the second stage in the reforms is not fixed any more: an assiduous pupil can anticipate and be granted debt relief earlier, and thirdly some interim relief can be granted after the first three years of reform.

Simultaneously the IMF and the World Bank change their vocabulary : their loans, which so far had been called, “enhanced structural adjustment facilities” (ESAF), are now called “Growth and Poverty Reduction Facilities” (GPRF) while “Structural Adjustment Policies” are now called “Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper”. This paper is drafted by the country requesting assistance with the help of the IMF and the World Bank and the participation of representatives from the civil society.
This enhanced initiative has been largely publicised: the international media announced a 90%, even a 100% cancellation after the Euro-African summit in Cairo (April 2000). Yet on closer examination the HIPC initiative turns out to be yet another delusive manoeuvre which suggests but in no way implements a cancellation of the debt.

List of the 42 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries: Angola, Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoro Islands, Congo, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Honduras, Kenya, Laos, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Vietnam, Zambia. , etc.). With the 2008 financial crisis and its repercussions, the CADTM’s work gradually began to encompass the public debt of Northern countries, never overlooking the need for debt cancellation in the”Third World“countries. We have demonstrated how the “debt system” as a whole subjugates people of both the North and the South. To address this “debt system”, the CADTM has been systematically developing a new course of action for the past 5 years and exploring the issue of illegitimate private debts such as micro-credit in the South where women are the first victims, debts of farmers, students, families evicted by banks, etc. The concept of ‘illegitimate debt’ encompasses the debts in the South and the North, public and private.”

Let me recall that the CADTM is mostly present in the so-called “developing” countries: 15 African countries (see http://www.cadtm.org/Africa,4686) 6 Latin American and Caribbean countries (see http://www.cadtm.org/CADTM-XX-ans-de-lutte) and 2 countries in South Asia (India and Pakistan). Regarding the most industrialized countries, the CADTM is present in 6 European countries (see http://www.cadtm.org/Europe,338) and Japan.

END OF PART I

Translated from French by Suchandra De Sarkar and Snake Arbusto