Ted Aldwin Ong, Sun Star
September 7, 2006

The Jubilee South-Asia Pacific Movement on Debt and Development will call for immediate 100 percent cancellation of multilateral debt owed by countries of the South at the upcoming International People’s Forum versus the International Finance Institutions.

Siding with debt campaigners, commentator Ted Aldwin Ong writing for the Philippines’ Sun Star newspaper network, said the international financial institutions’ emphasis on a “debt sustainability” framework for indebted countries represented a “refusal to address the more fundamental question of the illegitimacy of the debt claimed from the South.”

Peoples of the South, he said, “should not be made to pay for illegitimate debts,” which included: debts they had not benefited from, debts that financed projects that had caused the displacement of communities and damage to the environment, debts wasted on corruption or failed projects, debts contracted through undemocratic and fraudulent means, debts with grossly unfair terms and harmful conditions, odious debts incurred by dictatorships, debt contracted in the context of exploitative international economic relations, and debts for which peoples of the South had already paid many times over.