H17497
Headlines : InternationalMoney raised for Africa 'goes to civil wars'
“The money has ended up making Africa poorer and more violent because the money has been diverted towards warlords, weapons and armed invasions,“ she [Napoleoni] says. “The problem of Africa is corruption.“
The cult of celebrity means that people who are famous for nothing more than being pop or movie stars speak out on issues they don’t fully understand. “People like Bono and Bob Geldof are not ill-intentioned,” she says. “But the simple fact that being a celebrity puts you in a position above everybody else is unacceptable.”
[Posted By variable]Republished from New Zealand Herald
Billions of dollars raised for African famine relief by celebrities Bono and Bob Geldof have instead funded civil war across the continent, says terrorism expert Dr Loretta Napoleoni.
London-based Napoleoni, in Auckland to appear at the Writers & Readers Festival, has written two books, Terror Inc: Tracing the Money Behind Global Terrorism and Insurgent Iraq: Al-Zarqawi and the New Generation, on the economics of terrorism.
Her latest book, Rogue Economics, studies the destabilising effect of economic globalisation, focusing in part on why more than half a trillion dollars worth of aid sent to Africa since the 1960s failed to reach the intended destination – developing the nations’ economies.
That huge amount of aid, which includes money from the United Nations and donations generated by Live Aid for Ethiopia, organised by Geldof, and the Live 8 concert in 2005, organised by Bono, has instead “served as a rogue force, notably as an important form of terrorist financing” in countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Kenya. Ethiopia, for example, received $1.8 billion in foreign aid between 1982-85, including a large contribution from Live Aid; $1.6 billion of that, she points out, was spent on buying military equipment.
Posted by variable
...note how the 4 and the dollar sign on the keyboard are "intertwined....":http://www.i18nguy.com/l10n/rokuyo-japanese-calendar.html .@** ..--static transmision...._--_8**over][out** half the lies they tell about me aren't even true Hua Hu Ching ...
if you can find it in your heart, for only pennies a day, u2, can sponsor a warlord
“People like Bono and Bob Geldof are not ill-intentioned,”
Towards themselves at any rate…
Napoleoni’s thesis is riddled with holes. For a start, the $1.6bn in aid dispensed to Ethiopia in the 1980s didn’t fund terrorists or warlords, but funded a repressive government. “Aid” monies have always been directed towards geostrategic ends. With the Horn of Africa being the site of competition between the Soviet Union and the U.S. during the 1970s and 80s, both Somalia and Ethiopia received support from the two superpowers. In both cases, repressive governments and internal conflict resulted.
The 1990s saw the fragmentation of Somalia and a similar, but attenuated, process in Ethiopia (where Eritrea seceded, Ogaden revolted and a coup was mounted successfully to put the current despot in power). In this, indirect way, the arms and training funded by foreign aid in the 1980s still supports warlords and what you might label ‘terrorists.’
What Napoleoni overlooks is that the aid dispensed to Africa in the 1980s was always massively outweighed by debt repayments and repatriation of profits from Africa to various investment centres like Wall Street, London, South Africa etc.. Aid was essentially (and still is) a means of ensuring that these flows continued, and continued to solidify the dominant position of investor nations in the world system/economy.
In Bono’s defense, he is well aware of the problem of debt, having devoted a great deal of time to pushing for debt forgiveness, as has Geldof.
I’ve read “Rogue Economics” and I think that it suffers from some serious gaps, despite being a good read. Might post on it sometime, but I recommend people look it over as it’s worthwhile.