GOAL's Jonathan Edgar talks about the impact of the Live8 concerts and G8 summit on ending world poverty...

The recent G8 summit, and accompanying Live8 concerts, got everybody's attention. Lots of decent music and democracy in action marches leading to historic declarations on increased Third World aid and debt relief. Bono declared that if this wasn't the end of global poverty, it was the beginning of the end of global poverty. Which seemed like a result. It was heady stuff.

But not everybody got so excited. Some aid groups complained that the money promised was nowhere near enough, and that an opportunity to make real progress for the world's poor had been missed. Some even said that far from being a good thing, the Gleneagles summit was a sham designed to make it look like the G8 cared about the world's poor when they had no intention of doing anything that could actually help end world poverty.

So it was hard to know what to think. Harker decided to ask GOAL's Jonathan Edgar for his reaction to the announcements.

"I was a bit disappointed by the G8 summit," says Edgar, a senior aid worker with experience overseeing GOAL projects in Africa. "The international community are missing the key issue which is that without protection and good governance, debt relief and increased aid are meaningless. Geldof and Bono were stating that if you have debt relief and you have aid then that's it, we've solved the problem. If people think that then they've missed the point. As much aid as possible is not a bad thing, but it is not going to make poverty history. Debt relief and increasing aid are just two issues amongst many."

For example, Edgar reckons that debt relief is not much good to the nomads of Darfur currently being ethnically cleansed out of existence by Sudanese government sponsored militias.

"The Irish people would be disgusted if they knew what the Sudanese government are doing [in Darfur]. The Rwandan genocide is happening again in Jebel Mara [an area in Southern Sudan where GOAL provide emergency assistance to those most under threat]. They'd also be disgusted to know that Sudan is on the list for debt relief. Aid going to the Sudanese government should be halted by the international community until they sort out their internal political problems. Until they stop killing their own people."

An estimated 200,000 people have been killed in the last two years. More than 2 million people having to leave their homes. Edgar says the only way to stop the killing is for a Western military force to go in and physically put themselves in the way. The UN have been humming and hawing over Darfur for more than a year now, and the situation just gets worse and worse, with more and more people being massacred.

"GOAL has been calling for years for a standing army deployed through NATO or through the UN, it doesn't matter who does it. The UN isn't working, that is our perspective, it doesn't work. The situation in Darfur is an example of that, where people are getting raped and killed on a daily basis and the African Union are sent in, but there aren't enough people in the African Union to provide that protection. What would solve the problem is what happened in Kosovo. 40,000 armed troops going in and stopping the conflict and protecting the people. That is what is actually needed in Sudan."

Is there any chance of this happening?

"I don't think so. It's logical, but we've been told it's not that simple. It can't be stopped because of geopolitical issues."

The UN Security Council say they can only send troops to Darfur if there is genocide taking place. And they have been arguing for a year or more over what actually constitutes a genocide. If it's just hundreds of thousands of people being raped and killed, that doesn’t fit the dictionary definition of genocide, so they say they can't do anything to stop it. This is obviously just bullshit. The real reason the great powers [the same guys giving the debt relief and aid] don't want to go in and stop the killing is politics. And politics comes down to money.

Edgar explains: "Sudan is a hotbed of international political and financial interests. There are contracts between the Chinese government and Sudan. It's very difficult for the international community to act if China is not in support of action against the Sudanese government. It's unbelievable what it's [China] doing, and the international community basically have their hands tied. Myself and John O'Shea met senior representatives of the American Government who told us they should do something, but there is nothing they can do. Basically they had been told directly by George Bush that this was a humanitarian aid situation, it was not political. But it is political, only a political solution will solve it. And the reason the Americans won't get involved is because of China."

Nobody wants to piss off the Chinese, or those Far Eastern markets that are more important than ever these days, so they pretend not to notice that hundreds of thousands of people are dying. Those markets, obviously, are worth a lot more to the G8 than the money promised in aid and debt relief.

Sudan is not the only place where hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being killed. The situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo is, if it is possible to compare, even worse. There is nobody really in charge in the DRC and huge armies from the surrounding countries have invaded to get their hands on Congo's valuable natural resources. Vicious battles between the contending armies are common. Millions of locals are caught in the middle. According to Human Rights Watch, an estimated 5 million people have died due to the conflict in the last six years, making the civil war there more deadly to civilians than any war since World War II.

Again it's the kind of humanitarian disaster that Goal would like to see the world's leaders take an active interest in. But they don't want to. The reason is politics again.

"What's going on in the Congo is unreal, unbelievable," according to Edgar. "Eastern Congo is one of the most dangerous places you can possibly go. There are millions and millions of people displaced, people are being killed everyday, basically it is unbelievable. Congo is extremely rich in minerals and diamonds and there is oil there. It's a gold mine. The Ugandan government, the Sudanese government [them again], the Rwandan government, all of them are involved in conflict in the Congo. A lot of it is to do with money you know, people getting rich in the west off these minerals."

You might be interested to know that the Ugandan government, which is up to it's elbows in the bloody pillage, is also getting direct aid from the Irish taxpayer. GOAL have been lobbying the Irish government to stop giving this uber corrupt regime our money, and there have been cuts in the aid to Uganda recently, but we still give €30 million in direct aid per annum. Obviously there are plenty of incredibly poor people in Uganda who could do with our help, but their government seem more interested in enriching themselves by getting involved in the Congo free-for all.

"What I'm concerned about, you look at debt relief, you look at the debt, and then you look at how much they are spending on arms for example, the Ugandan budget on buying arms off the west, and how much it owes in debt is ridiculous," says Edgar.

What makes the situation even more disgraceful is that Western arms companies [and therefore Western economies, i.e. you and me] are benefiting from the situation. No guns are made in Africa, they all have to be bought from more developed nations. 89% of all arms sold to developing countries in 2003 came from just 5 members of the G8: the US, Russia, France, the UK and Germany. This is where the guns used to shoot innocent people in Darfur or the Congo come from. Ireland is also involved in the global arms trade. The Irish government invests money in British and US arms companies through the National Pensions Reserve Fund. We're all part of the problem.

Edgar says one simple decision by G8 leaders could ease a huge amount of Third World suffering. "Say the Western governments decided that they would never sell arms again to Africa that would be simple. That would solve a lot of problems. The counter argument to debt relief is that if you wipe out debt there will then be more money to spend on arms."

If you think about this long enough you can come to your own conclusions about why the G8 decided that debt relief and aid wasn't such a bad idea. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be sceptical when Blair, Bush, Chirac et al say they are serious about ending global poverty.What the poorest of the poor in Africa need more than money is security and an end to corrupt regimes. Debt relief and aid increases alone aren't going to sort the situation out.

This is not to say that Live 8 was a bad thing, but people should be aware that when Bono or Bob start spouting on about saving the world's poor they don't know what they are talking about. As Edgar puts it...

"Live 8 was a good thing. It raised awareness, but it's not that simple. The job's not done. It was a concert and Geldof and Bono are musicians, at the end of the day that's what they do, they head up bands. Geldof is not a great spokesman for the aid world, he is not a great spokesman for Africa as far as I'm concerned. The likes of [GOAL CEO] John O'Shea and the rest of the heads of agencies they're the spokespeople for what we're doing."

So when John O'Shea says that wiping out debt is a "waste of effort" and that the only way to end world poverty is to "deploy UN soldiers wherever they are needed; refuse to give any additional monies to corrupt Third World leaders; ban all arms sales to Third World Governments; and trade fairly with the poor," maybe we should listen. Decent concert though.

Previously published on www.oxygen.ie