Eritrea, one of the few African countries that have been able to significantly reduce the number of reported malaria cases, is to further boost its campaign against the killer disease using a donation of 30,000 long-lasting mosquito nets. According to officials, the number of reported malaria cases in Eritrea fell from 200,000 in 1999 to 45,000 in 2003. "The success of Eritrea can be explained by various strategies. One of those is using impregnated bed nets," Berhane Ghebretinsae, the Eritrean director general of Health Services, told IRIN in the capital, Asmara.

The term "blood money" has come to have new meaning in Cameroon, where certain patients and their families complain that a brisk trade in trafficked blood has led to shortages in hospitals. "Getting hold of a pouch of blood for a patient who has urgent need of it can be an experience akin to Calvary," Martin Djomo, the husband of someone who is dependent on blood transfusions, told IPS.

With the dust not yet settled on the health department's bid to regulate medicine prices, another messy conflict over state regulation of private health care looms large. A decade-long attempt to provide a unified health system that includes both public and private sector providers took concrete form on Friday, when President Thabo Mbeki signed the long awaited National Health Bill into law. The move is set to spark loud protest from doctors and private hospital groups, anxious about clauses in the legislation designed to regulate their services.

Ten years ago, Inviolata Mmbwavi’s relatives thought she would die. Today, thanks to her determination, she is the star of the family. "My entire family is now proud of what I am despite the handicaps I face," Inviolata says. She adds: "Even relatives who used to gossip about my HIV status have stopped." Today, she has only one wish. "I would want to have another child but I do not want to infect somebody or have an HIV-positive child," she says.

Officials from the 13 member nations of the Southern African Development Community this week at a nine-day summit in Mauritius are expected to discuss a new strategy for fighting HIV/AIDS in the region, Xinhua News Agency reports. Government leaders from Angola, Botswana, Congo, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe are expected to attend the meeting.

The process of formulating Kenya's national land policy got underway last week, with the government assuring Kenyans that although donors are financing the process, they would not influence its outcome. The move follows concerns raised by the DFID's appointment of an expatriate, Martins Adams, as a technical advisor for the process. $1.8m has been provided by DfID, USAID and SIDA to fund the land reform process.

Insufficient funds, poor infrastructure and widespread landmines continue to blight efforts to resettle tens of thousands of Angolans who fled their homes during the civil conflict. Last week the World Food Programme (WFP) warned that unless new donations were received in September no cereals would be distributed to resettled returnees or those scheduled to be repatriated from neighbouring countries. The UN agency has already slashed cereal rations by 50 percent due to the lack of funds.

Strike action is imminent at the University of Zambia after lecturers vowed not to teach next week until Vice-Chancellor Professor Robert Serpell and his deputy are removed. But UNZA Vice-Chancellor, Professor Robert Serpell has maintained that the University would run as scheduled and expects all members of staff to begin normal duties next week when classes were expected to resume.

January 2005 will be a nerve-wracking month for hundreds of newly-qualified professional nurses who will be waiting to be told where they will serve a year’s community service. But it will be an even bigger logistical nightmare for the Department of Health with just five months to ensure the latest programme of compulsory community service kicks off smoothly at the beginning of next year. In July, Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang announced ahead of her budget speech in Parliament the introduction of community service for nurses.

The ICC Update keeps its readers informed with up-to-date articles and concise summaries on issues concerning the ICC. In a few pages, the Update regularly covers the regional updates, media coverage, upcoming events, and resources in the weeks since the last Update. The 40th issue is now available.

The United Nations has suspended peace talks with the Burundi rebel group which claimed responsibility for massacring more than 160 Congolese Tutsi refugees, a spokeswoman for U.N. operation in Burundi said on Tuesday. A regional summit on the country's shaky transition to peace was due to be held in Tanzania on Wednesday and political analysts said they expect the regional leaders to recommend severe action against the FNL.

Recent reports of political skirmishes between the ruling FRELIMO party and the main opposition, RENAMO, ahead of Mozambique's general elections in December, are a cause for concern, say analysts with the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA). RENAMO this week accused the government of moving police units to Maringue in the central province of Sofala, a RENAMO stronghold where its leader Afonso Dhlakama is based, after clashes between the political rivals in the neighbouring town of Inhaminga.

Despite bouts of insecurity, including inter-militia fighting over the month of July in parts of Ituri District, northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), there are signs that the situation in the region is improving, a new report indicates. One of the peace indicators is the "steady and noticeable" return of internally displaced persons (IDPs), according to the July edition of "Ituri Watch". Ituri Watch is a monthly report compiled by the Africa Initiative Programme (AIP) in association with the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response-Africa.

More than 20 people have died in two days of heavy factional fighting in the Bay region of south-central Somalia, local sources in the regional capital, Baidoa, 240 km southwest of Mogadishu, told IRIN on Monday. About thirty others were wounded. The fighting broke out on Friday between the Dabare and Luway subclans of the larger Digil-Mirifle group. The clashes were concentrated in and around the town of Dinsoor, 90 km west of Baidoa, and in the surrounding villages, according to one source.

Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders wrapped up their summit on Tuesday by adopting key guidelines on holding free and fair elections, bidding farewell to two long-serving heads of state, and admitting Madagascar as a "candidate member". The guidelines stipulate that SADC members will uphold full participation of citizens in the political process, freedom of association, political tolerance, equal access to state media for all political parties, equal opportunity to vote and be voted for, and voter education.

In his last meeting as chairperson, Benjamin Mkapa has called for the fast-tracking of the establishment of a financial and technical support system to implement land reforms in the region. Announcing the launch of SADC's regional Land Reform Committee, Mkapa said that SADC "cannot run away from our historical duty to set right these historical wrongs and injustices."

The opposition to Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki has been meeting, leading to the most significant shake-up in Eritrean politics for many years. Opposition groups, which have been notoriously disunited, have come up with a common set of objectives, which could - for the first time in years - begin to pose a greater challenge to the president's hold on power. Since achieving independence from Ethiopia in 1993, Eritrea has been a one party state.

Togo's government has freed some 500 prisoners, after President Gnassingbe Eyadema granted them a pardon. Among those released are seven militants of the opposition Union of Forces for Change (UFC) party. The European Union (EU) has made improvement to human rights and political freedoms conditions to the resumption of aid frozen in 1993.

Economic obligations on industrialized countries to ensure fair trade and reduction of Least Developed Countries’ (LDC) debt burden as well as environmental measures to control pollutants and ensure more equitable and appropriate use of natural resources were the subject of the workshop organized by Climate Network Africa entitled “Dialogue with East African Legislators on Climate Change and Sustainable Development”. To date, the growth of economies and emissions has occurred mostly in the industrialized countries. “Emissions is wealth”, has been the thinking of many. The workshop discussed the impacts of these emissions and what actions the legislators in East African region should take.

Why are most Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa poor and why are they getting poorer while most people in the rest of the world are becoming better off? The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who have become Sub-Saharan Africa's fairy godmother and godfather respectively, every year churn out statistics that tell the same tale - Africans are poor and in many instances have fallen so far down it is difficult to imagine them getting poorer. With poverty and growing impoverishment go conflicts over scarce and shrinking resources.

Diplomatic postings for more than 90 officers of Kenya's Ministry of Foreign Affairs have been cancelled after allegations of serious irregularities in their selection. The Permanent Secretary, Esther Tolle, took the action after concerns that nepotism, tribalism and cronyism were the main considerations during the appointments. This follows recent concerns that the Ministry is wasteful by sending junior officers, including drivers, on foreign postings at considerable cost, rather than using locally employed staff as is the custom with most other countries.

Combination therapy with three generic antiretroviral drugs in a single tablet has been validated for the first time in an open clinical study in a developing country. Follow-up of 60 patients treated in Yaoundé, Cameroon, has demonstrated the excellent efficacy and safety of a generic fixed-dose combination, says MSF.

The Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI) has condemned the highhanded manner in which Bugiri resident district commissioner, Isaac Lulaaba, allegedly broke up a National Freedom Party rally by using firearms at the weekend. The FHRI spokesperson, Wendy Kasujja, said in a statement that the use of force on a peaceful crowd was uncalled for and urged the government to refrain from such practices.

The former general manager of Malawi's state Petroleum Control Commission (PCC) was found guilt of graft this week. The case against Dennis Kambalame, the ex-PCC head, has taken a record two years and the guilty verdict marks the first victory for Malawi's official Anti-Corruption Bureau, formed in 1998.

Katele Kalumba, Zambia's former foreign minister, and three ex-senior Treasury officials, have been arrested and charged with corruption. The charges relate to contracts awarded to two US firms, through which the government lost in excess of $20 million. Their trial is scheduled to begin on 10th September.

Both the civil society and private sectors in Kenya have expressed their concern at being excluded from consultations on the drafting of the country's ICT policy. The new policy is intended to cover issues such as access to ICTs and the legal framework for the industry's operations. At present it is estimated that over 90% of the 30 million population are unable to access ICTs.

The massacre of 160 Tutsi refugees at the Gutambe camp in western Burundi was the latest in a catalogue of atrocities conducted “in a cycle of impunity”, human rights observers say. Agencies have accused the international community of ignoring evidence of previous human rights violations to secure diplomatic success in Burundi's troubled peace process, and are demanding a thorough investigation and public enquiry into the massacre.

The Rwandan government’s pledge that its troops in Darfur will protect civilians should encourage the international community to press Sudan to accept an enlarged African Union mission with a mandate for civilian protection, Human Rights Watch says. The current African Union mandate does not specifically authorize the 154 troops to protect civilians, but Rwandan President Paul Kagame insisted that Rwandan troops would intervene if civilians are threatened. On July 27, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council proposed increasing the current ceasefire monitoring force to more than 2,000 soldiers and expanding its mandate to provide civilian protection. Seven African countries have indicated their willingness to contribute troops to such a mission, but the Sudanese government has so far refused to accept the proposal.

The situation in the troubled Darfur region of western Sudan remained tense as the first batch of an African Union (AU) force, consisting of 154 Rwandan troops, arrived to protect an AU observer mission, relief workers said. "The overall situation on the ground throughout the Darfur region remains very tense," Jennifer Abrahamson, public information officer for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Sudan, told IRIN on Monday. The UN has described the conflict in Darfur as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, at the moment. An estimated 2.2 million people are in urgent need of food, medicine and other basic items of survival, of whom 1.2 million are IDPs who have been forced from their homes by attacks launched by government-backed Janjawid militias.

Hopes were raised on 18 August last year that Liberia’s protracted human rights crisis would finally end but major challenges remain, Amnesty International says in a new report. "The Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in Accra augured well for the Liberian people who had suffered more than a decade of appalling human rights abuses. But one year later, despite some major advances, progress towards ensuring protection of human rights is disappointingly slow," the organization said. Harassment, intimidation, extortion, forced labour and looting are reported to continue in Lofa County, still controlled by forces of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), and in the south-eastern counties of Sinoe, Grand Kru, River Gee and Maryland, where forces of the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) still hold sway.

Despite considerable rhetoric about gender mainstreaming in development, little has been done in practice. Reasons for this lack of action include lack of understanding of the links between gender and other issues, resistance to the concepts of gender equality and equity as these threaten prevailing structures of power and lack of involvement of civil society and alienation between the political (ruling) class and the people. This is according to a report produced by the United Nations (UN) Environment Programme that outlines some of the major issues related to women and the environment.

UNIFEM and The Association for Women's Rights in Development created this resource based on a Feb-March 2002 online discussion for young women. The booklet offers an overview of the e-discussions, profiles young women's HIV/AIDS leadership, and describes activities for young women who want to start campaigns to raise awareness and decrease stigma in their communities.

The recently concluded WTO's General Council's meeting in July is a serious setback for Africa. In putting “ back on track” the Doha Round (a Round that most developing countries were forced to accept under duress soon after the events surrounding September 11), the July outcome now cements and defines the next phase of the negotiations in which developed countries will now enjoy a huge margin of advantage. If Cancun provided some breathing space for the South, the relief has been short-lived as issues of priority for the North, namely safeguarding the iniquitous regime of agriculture subsidies, prying open markets of the South for agricultural exports and for manufactured goods, have been defined in the July framework in a way that assures an outcome at the end of the Doha Round that may be as unjust and unbalanced as the Uruguay Round. What exactly went wrong?

The elimination of tariffs in the 20-nation Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) will not occur in December 2004 as planned, according to a top official. "It has been deferred to next year," said Chungu Mwila, director of investment at the regional organisation. He told a three-day workshop in South Africa this week on 'Trade and Poverty in Southern Africa' that some members had requested more time to prepare.

Since the mid-1990s, several countries in sub-Saharan Africa – others are Nigeria, Angola and Gabon – have experienced strong revenue growth from the petroleum industry. In most cases, however, this new wealth is not contributing to economic development or improving living standards. Rather, it has been used almost exclusively for the enrichment of the countries' leaders, and as a consequence most of the population remains poor and unprotected.

The Internet can be a tremendous communication tool for all nonprofits, but are you using its full potential? Do you know how to integrate the Internet into your fundraising plan?

Topics covered include: Introduction to fundraising; fundraising techniques; Public Relations and special events; budgets and financial control, fundraising strategies and ethics and professional behaviour.

Call it institutional change-management fatigue. Or an unlimited spin-doctoring capacity by clever public relations officials. Or naivety on the part of those NGOs, environmentalists, trade unionists and Third World activists who cheered the appointment of Renaissance Man James Wolfensohn as World Bank president in 1995.

Whatever the excuse, the bottom-line is obvious: no substantive changes at the Bank and International Monetary Fund. And yet the need for a radical transformation could not be more obvious, in the wake of the late 1990s legitimacy crisis, itself a function of at least four managerial and economic factors that still have not been tackled properly:

- the institutions' 'democratic deficit', which made them unsuitable for genuine global governance;
- the continued reliance upon the neoliberal 'Washington Consensus' approach to public policy;
- the Bank's ongoing orientation to controversial mega-projects; and
- both agencies' failure to cancel Third World debt and cool international financial speculation born of liberalised capital markets.

But we have to be frank about what drives these institutions, even when their credibility is at an all-time low: lubrication of private capital accumulation and stabilisation of geopolitical tensions through subsidised credits (often 'bail-outs' for earlier commercial lenders). So the four factors were not really failures - they were and are integral to the workings of the international economy.

Did reformers understand this problem, and did they adjust their plans accordingly? Confusingly, hopes were raised in part because of the 1997-99 tenure of Joseph Stiglitz as chief economist. Simultaneously, other catalysts for change included commissions on structural adjustment, dams and extractive industries.

However, the internal procedural changes, rhetorical shifts, research reports, individual initiatives, and multi-stakeholder forum exercises that emerged since the short-lived Stiglitzian glasnost did not fundamentally affect operations. The view from the inside is revealing, as staff in the Middle East and North Africa section complained in a leaked 1999 memo to Wolfensohn: 'The World Bank is increasingly being drawn into activities which are politically sensitive (participatory processes, involvement of civil society, corruption and so on). There is no doubt about the importance and relevance of these for development and success of World Bank assistance, but staff are not well prepared to handle these issues which creates more anxiety and stress.'

Yet because the legitimacy crisis has continued growing, it has been rhetorically important for the Bank and Fund to claim they are now 'post-Washington' in their ideology. In March 2002, midway through the United Nations Financing for Development (FFD) summit in Mexico, the Bank, Fund and German officials began promoting the idea of a new 'Monterrey Consensus', which would usher in an era of fair global finance. Even John Williamson has argued in the IMF's own magazine that his celebrated 1990 definition of the Washington Consensus was misunderstood and manipulated by leftist critics.

The institution's 60th birthday provides a chance to review the reform agenda, and to ask whether the late 1990s challenge from high-profile critics - Stiglitz and other enlightened economists, some Third World governments and protest movements -- was as effective as it could have been. Were issues posed by reformers -- debt relief, community and NGO participation in neoliberal programme design, democratic governance, global financial regulation, and commissions dealing with structural adjustment, dams and energy -- the correct ones to tackle?

And if all these reforms were foiled by institutional lethargy or worse, is it appropriate to consider an entirely different strategy, based on Third World states removing themselves from influence by the Bank and IMF? Is collective default feasible, and should Northern supporters assist the process by refusing to buy bonds issued by the World Bank?

Debt relief deferred

Within a year of Monterrey, the World Bank made an embarrassing concession, regarding its prize reform: the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief initiative. The Bank acknowledged longstanding criticisms that its staff 'had been too optimistic' about the ability of countries to repay under HIPC, and that projections of export earnings were extremely inaccurate, leading to failure by half the HIPC countries to reach their completion points. Paradoxically, the Bank blamed failure upon 'political pressure' to cut debt further, as the key reason repayments were still not 'sustainable.'

HIPC was a mirage from the outset, as even the moderate London lobby group Jubilee Plus admitted in its September 2003 progress report: 'According to the original HIPC schedule, 21 countries should have fully passed through the HIPC initiative and received total debt cancellation of approximately $34.7 billion in net present value terms. In fact, only eight countries have passed Completion Point, between them receiving debt cancellation of $11.8 billion.'

Add a few other countries' partial relief via the Paris Club ($14 billion) and it appears that the grand total of debt relief thanks to the 1996-2003 exercise was just $26.13 billion. There remained more than $2 trillion of Third World debt that should be cancelled, including not just HIPC countries but also Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and other major debtors not considered highly-indebted or poor in the mainstream discourse.

Inadequate financial provision for HIPC in western capitals probably reflects the merits of using debt as a means of maintaining control over Third World economies. An 'enhanced HIPC' was introduced to give the appearance of concern, and at the G8's Evian Summit in 2003, the world's leaders agreed with pleas by African representatives to relook at the programme. Yet no fundamental changes or substantial new funds were mooted. Proposals to write off further debt owed by Ethiopia and Niger in April were, at press time, likely to be vetoed by the US Treasury.

Poverty 'Reduction' Strategy Papers

In 1999, HIPC was accompanied by a renaming of the structural adjustment philosophy: Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). More than two years later, at Monterrey, South Africa's finance minister Trevor Manuel - who joined former IMF managing director Michel Camdessus as special envoys of UN secretary general Kofi Annan - argued that PRSPs were 'an important tool for developing countries to reduce their debt burdens… a thorough and useful PRSP requires time, resources and technical capacity.' He suggested the Bretton Woods Institutions increase their role, to 'provide more technical assistance to meet those particular challenges.'

In contrast to Manuel's desire for PRSP expansion, civil society resistance to structural adjustment increased across the Third World, including Manuel's home continent, sometimes in the form of 'IMF riots.' A May 2001 Jubilee South conference of the main African social movements in Kampala concluded: 'In addition to the constraints placed on governments and civil society organisations in formulating PRSPs, the World Bank and IMF retain the right to veto the final programs. This reflects the ultimate mockery of the threadbare claim that the PRSPs are based on “national ownership.” An additional serious concern is the way in which PRSPs are being used by the World Bank and IMF, directly and indirectly, to co-opt NGOs to “monitor” their own governments on behalf of these institutions.'

The latter gambit had begun to fail by the time the FFD convened in Monterrey. Even the World Bank's best African case, Uganda, heard its National NGO Forum report: 'Among CSOs there is growing concern that perhaps their participation in the endeavour has amounted to little more than a way for the World Bank and IMF to co-opt the activist community and civil society in Uganda into supporting the same traditional policies.'

Democratic governance?

Barely acknowledging the power imbalances in the global system, the Monterrey Consensus offered only timid suggestions for global governance reforms. The Bank and IMF took nearly a full year to come forward with a plan, which, as it turned out, was an insult to the concept of democratic global governance.

The Bretton Woods Institutions' nearly fifty Sub-Saharan African member countries are represented by just two directors, while eight rich countries enjoyed a director each and the US maintained veto power by holding more than 15% of the votes. (There is no transparency as to which board members take what positions on key votes.) The leaders of the Bank and IMF are chosen from, respectively, the US and EU, with the US treasury secretary holding the power of hiring or firing.

In this context, some reformist gestures were needed for the sake of appearance. Nevertheless, the Financial Times reported that the 2003 Bank/Fund strategy emanating from the IMF/Bank important Development Committee (chaired by Manuel) offered only 'narrow technocratic changes,' such as adding one additional representative from the South to the 24-member board. For the US, even those mildmannered reforms were too much, and the Bush regime's executive director to the Bank, Carol Brooking, opposed reforms and instead suggested merely a new fund for extra research capacity aimed at the two institutions' Third World directors. Asked about the democracy deficit at the September 2003 annual meeting in Dubai, Manuel merely remarked, 'I don't think that you can ripen this tomato by squeezing it.'

Fanning financial fires

A final example of Monterrey's amplification of the self-destructive tendencies of international finance, was the conference's call for 'liberalising capital flows in an orderly and well sequenced process'. The Asian financial crisis had earlier stalled the persistent armtwisting efforts of US treasury secretary Larry Summers to force through an amendment to the IMF articles of agreement which would end all exchange controls everywhere.

When Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi had resisted Summers' gambit in 1997, according to Stiglitz, the IMF cut off the cheaper loans it had earlier made available. Cross-conditionality also made Ethiopia ineligible for other low-interest loans and grants from the World Bank, the European Community, and aid from bilaterals.

Stiglitz waged war within the Bank and Clinton regime, finally winning concessions, but he learned a lesson: 'There was clear evidence the IMF was wrong about financial market liberalisation and Ethiopia's macroeconomic position, but the IMF had to have its way.' Zenawi poignantly implored, at a mid-2003 Economic Commission for Africa meeting, 'While we will not be at the high table of the IMF, we should at least be in the room where decisions are made.'

The only reform project to deal with financial speculation was a bailout mechanism which might save Wall Street from its own worst excesses, but also allow a 'workout' system for countries that had urgent repayment difficulties. In mid-2003, a debt arbitration mechanism was finally proposed by the IMF's current acting managing director, Anne Krueger, a Bush appointee. However, the plan came to naught, for as the The Guardian's Larry Elliott explained, 'Billions of dollars from the bail-outs ended up in the coffers of the big finance houses of New York and George Bush was told not to meddle with welfare for Wall Street. The message was understood: the US used its voting power at the IMF to strangle the bankruptcy code at birth.'

Reforming from the outside?

Under the prevailing balance of power, the top-down reform processes discussed above could not have worked. But what of other efforts at reform from the outside (ostensibly from below), particularly via international commissions in which the World Bank plays a crucial hosting and financing role?

The three major recent processes in which well-meaning civil society advocates went inside the Bank were the World Commission on Dams, the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (Sapri) and the Extractive Industries Review. In the first case, a Bank water expert, John Briscoe, actively lobbied southern governments to reject the findings of a vast, multi-stakeholder research team in 2001. According to Patrick McCully of International Rivers Network, 'The World Bank's singularly negative and non-committal response to the WCD Report means that the Bank will no longer be accepted as an honest broker in any further multi-stakeholder dialogues.'

As for Sapri, hundreds of organisations and scholars became involved in nine countries: Bangladesh, Ecuador, El Salvador, Ghana, Hungary, Mexico, the Philippines, Uganda and Zimbabwe. They engaged in detailed analysis from 1997-2002, often alongside local Bank and IMF officials. Bank staff withdrew from the process in August 2001. In April 2002, when the research, a 188-page report, The Policy Roots of Economic Crisis and Poverty, was tabled for action, civil society groups found that the Bank ignored it.

The third case, the Extractive Industries Review (EIR), also nearly went off the rails when an April 2003, incident in Bali, Indonesia delegitimised the exercise before a final report was drawn up. A meeting between the Bank, international mining industry and civil society ended in an uproar when 15 environmental and human rights groups left in protest. According to the New York Times, 'The group of reviewers set up by the Bank had already circulated its draft conclusions supporting the Bank's oil, gas and mining investments, even though conferences organised to gather information from concerned groups and individuals in Asia, the Middle East and Africa had not yet taken place.'

In the meantime, the Bank approved loans for two infamous pipelines, Chad-Cameroon and Caspian, despite objections from the environmental, human rights and social justice communities. By late 2003, civil societies indignation meant that the EIR leader, former Indonesian environment minister Emil Salim, encountered another legitimacy crisis for World Bank participation politics.

In response, Salim ensured the critique by social movements and environmentalists made it into the December 2003 draft report, including the recommendation that public funds should not be used to facilitate private fossil-fuel profits. The recommendations would have meant an end to World Bank coal lending by 2008; mandatory revenue sharing with local communities; extensive environmental and social impact assessments; 'no go' zones for mining or drilling in environmentally sensitive areas; no new mining projects that dump tailings in rivers; obligatory environmental restructuring; and increased renewable energy investments.

No one was surprised when lead Bank energy staffer Rashad Kaldany disagreed with the recommendations. Several major environmental NGOs blasted the institution: 'One of the Bank's most important environmental reforms of the 1990s was its more cautious approach to high-risk infrastructure and forestry projects. This policy is now being reversed. The World Bank recently announced that it would re-engage in contentious water projects such as large dams in what it refers to as a 'high risk/high reward' strategy. In 2002, the Bank dismissed its 'risk-averse' approach to the forest sector when it approved a new forest policy. The World Bank is also considering support for new oil, mining, and gas projects in unstable and poorly governed countries, against the recommendations of its own evaluation unit.'

Starting from scratch?

Civil society enthusiasts of such commissions should have been warned by well-meaning insiders who also failed to move the reform agenda forward. From a vantagepoint in the chief economist's office during the late 1990s and early 2000s, David Ellerman saw more than his share of reform gambits. Finally, Ellerman threw up his hands: 'Agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF are now almost entirely motivated by big power politics and their own internal organisational imperatives. All their energies are consumed in doing whatever is necessary to perpetuate their global status. Intellectual and political energies spent trying to “reform” these agencies are largely a waste of time and a misdirection of energies.'

Persuasion by reformists within the chief economist's office did not affect the institution, agreed William Easterly, a former senior staffer: 'There's a big disconnect between World Bank operations and World Bank research. There's almost an organisational feud between the research wing and the rest of the Bank. The rest of the Bank thinks research people are just talking about irrelevant things and don't know the reality of what's going on.'

Abuse of power and dogmatic ideology were Stiglitz's long-standing justifications for his August 2002 call to consider replacing the IMF: 'I'm beginning to ask, has the credibility of the IMF been so eroded that maybe it's better to start from scratch? Is the institution so resistant to learning to change, to becoming a more democratic institution, that maybe it is time to think about creating some new institutions that really reflect today's reality, today's greater sense of democracy. It is really time to re-ask the question: should we reform or should we build from start?

At the same time, a Columbia University colleague of Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, began arguing that low-income countries should not repay World Bank and IMF loans, and should redirect debt servicing directly towards health and education. Decapitalisation of the Bretton Woods Institutions through a new wave of sovereign defaults would be a sensible and direct closure tactic.

After all, Sachs insisted, no one 'in the creditor world, including the White House, believes that those countries can service these debts without extreme human cost. The money should instead be rerouted as grants to be spent on more demanding social needs at home. Poor countries should take the first step by demanding that all outstanding debt service payments to official creditors be reprocessed as grants for the fight against HIV/AIDS.' The idea was not as outlandish as it appeared at first blush, according to the Boston Globe, for during the 1980s Bolivia and Poland both got away with this strategy: 'Because the two countries used that money for social causes both were later able to win debt forgiveness.'

Default may be the logical option, since so few HIPC resources are being allocated for debt relief. Argentina, Nigeria and Zimbabwe may have been the highest-profile defaulters since 2000, but there are many more that will eventually feel pressure from the grassroots, conduct a cost-benefit analysis, and decide that default -- combined with internal financing of development using local currency to meet basic needs--is the common sense approach.

Solidarity and strength

In parallel to Third World governments becoming more militant, pressure on the institutions from their main shareholders - Northern citizens via their governments - will be vital. An extraordinary new tactic will assist: the World Bank Bonds Boycott. US groups like Center for Economic Justice and Global Exchange have been working with Jubilee South Africa and Brazil's Movement of the Landless, among others, to ask: is it ethical for socially-conscious people to invest in the World Bank by buying its bonds (responsible for 80% of the Bank's resources), hence drawing out dividends which represent the fruits of enormous suffering?

In even the conservative belly of the global economic beast, the USA, organisations endorsing the Boycott included important US cities such as San Francisco, Milwaukee, Boulder and Cambridge; major religious orders; the most important social responsibility funds; and major trade union pension/investment funds. During late 2003, the world's largest pension fund, TIAA-CREF, sold its World Bank bonds as campaigners made it a special target.

Bank Boycott activists understand that the institutions' waning legitimacy - and hence threatens to funding by socially-responsible investors and eventually angry taxpayers -- is the only target that most Third World social movements can aim at. They have done so in recent years with an increasingly militant perspective that worries not about the Fund and Bank's 'failure to consult' or 'lack of transparency' or 'undemocratic governance' -- all easy populist critiques, whose reformist ambitions are terribly weak. (What difference, after all, would it make if Trevor Manuel were the first non-European IMF MD?)

Most of the attention that the leading activists pay to the Washington Consensus ideology is to the core content: commodification, whether in relation to water, electricity, housing, land, anti-retroviral medicines and health services, education, basic income grant support or other social services, ideally all at once and in cross-sectoral combinations. It is there, in grassroots movements to decommodify the goods and services which the World Bank and IMF increasingly put out of reach, that the only feasible alternative strategy can be found.

* Patrick Bond is professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. A longer version of this article is in the June 2004 issue of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. Further details of the South Africa case are in Bond, P. (2004), Talk Left, Walk Right: South Afica's Frustrated Global Reforms, Pietermaritzburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press; and Bond, P. (2003), Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance, London, Zed Books.

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The Zambian government's crusade against corruption has suffered a major setback with the collapse of a court case against two key suspects, former intelligence chief Xavier Chungu and his co-accused Attan Shansonga, the former Zambian ambassador to the United States. Charges against Chungu and Shansonga were dismissed last week when it was ruled that they were beyond the jurisdiction of Zambian courts after they jumped bail and fled abroad.

The one rebel movement still fighting in Burundi’s civil war was declared a terrorist group on Wednesday at a one-day summit of regional heads of state. The leaders also ratified a timetable for Burundi’s elections to be held before 1 November.

Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, has created a body to coordinate the national response to HIV/Aids. Professor Babatunde Osotimehin, who serves as chairman of the National Action Committee on Aids, works with Nigeria's Ministry of Health, other government agencies, NGOs and international organizations to develop a comprehensive strategy. He spoke to AllAfrica's Tamela Hultman.

The Islamic Teachers Training College in Mombasa has opened its doors to women. Since it was established, the institution has only been offering training to men. Board of Governors chairman Sheikh Khalfan Abdallah Mazrui said intake for female students will start in September. He said the institution has a capacity for between 30 and 40 women.

More than a year after the coup of March 2003, which followed six months of intense fighting, insecurity and small-scale displacement persist. The UN estimates that there are 200,000 internally displaced people as of June 2004, but the absence of IDP camps and the intermittent nature of the current displacements make it hard to establish figures accurately.

While other parts of Europe have seen a rise in tension between races, Italy, with its close proximity to North Africa, is a prime gateway for the wave of immigrants entering the Continent. Now a fresh debate over the place of these newcomers is igniting in a country that has long been more accustomed to emigrating than hosting foreigners.

In the course of the discussion, which was held over two meetings, the issues of slavery and slavery-like practices, political parties, human trafficking, refugees and displaced persons, the status of women, education and the State party's national human rights plan were raised among other subjects.

Amnesty International has written to the Chairman of the African Union (AU), President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, expressing grave concern about the future of the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (African Court). During its Third Ordinary Session in July, in Addis Ababa, the African Union's (AU) Assembly took a decision to integrate the African Court and the Court of Justice of the AU into one Court. "This decision is inconsistent with an earlier decision taken by the AU Assembly in Maputo in July 2003, to the effect that the African Court 'shall remain separate and distinct from the Court of Justice of the African Union'," the organization said.

The fight for human rights in Nigeria has received ample coverage, as has that for fairer distribution of oil revenues - and the battle to curb endemic corruption. But, Nigerian women have another, and often more pressing fight on their hands - for abortion rights. In Nigeria, abortion is only permitted if the procedure is needed to save the life of a woman. Abortion under other circumstances is punishable with up to seven years imprisonment for the woman concerned, while the doctor who performs the procedure can spend 14 years in jail.

Condom promotion to the general population - not only high-risk groups - is necessary and effective in curbing the spread of HIV/AIDS, especially in countries with high HIV prevalence, according to an Issue Brief released by Population Services International (PSI), a nonprofit organization implementing HIV/AIDS prevention programs in more than 60 countries.

Though starting from a modest base, China's trade with the African continent reached $18.5 billion in 2003, an increase of 50 percent since 2000, and it is on track for another big increase this year. China's push into Africa is all the more remarkable because it comes when that continent has become the virtual stepchild of the international trade system, a mere footnote - or worse, simply unmentioned in discussions of global commerce.