Jubilee 2000: The Movement America Missed

Three days before Christmas, the United States and its fellow G7 members announced they had agreed to forgive loans to 22 of the world's poorest countries, amounting to $20 billion with another $90 billion to come.

The New York Times printed an 800-word story about this on its sixth page. Otherwise, there was no major coverage -- not on television or in national newspapers -- of a pinnacle moment in a debt relief effort that had mobilized millions of people and claimed center stage in a debate about the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's culpability in third world economies.

What's surprising about this journalistic omission was that there was even some panache to the story. The debt forgiveness initiative was not just a tale of bureaucrats at little known, poorly understood lending agencies. It involved celebrity superstars like Muhammad Ali and U2's Bono. It had a nice Biblical tie-in to the Jubilee concept of forgiving debt and freeing slaves. It had resulted in a Guinness Book of World Records record: over 24 million people in 166 countries had signed a "Jubilee 2000" petition demanding debt relief for impoverished nations. Essentially, according to the British press, the millennial debt relief movement was a grassroots effort with the size and scope of the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. But that was not true in the United States.

Sure, the American press produced the occasional story on the debt issue. "Can Bono Save the Third World?" was the title of a January 2000 Newsweek article; "The Rock Star, the Pope and the World's Poor" was the Los Angeles Times' January 2001 contribution. And PBS' NewsHour with Jim Lehrer ran a short program in April 2000 with the usual talking heads.

But American news organizations generally remained mum on the subject. Not sexy, you could hear the TV producers mumbling. Too complicated, grunted the newspaper editors.

Isolationism -- geographic and historic -- has long been the rationale for American's lack of interest in foreign affairs. Yet there is something more profound in Americans' ignorance about countries whose prosperity they directly affect and could ostensibly improve. The story of Jubilee 2000 illustrates this well, and gives an object lesson in how activist movements succeed or fail in the most economically powerful, inward-looking country in the world.

Victories Abroad

The concept of debt relief had been circulating for many years among a small world of academics, economists and aid workers. The general public, however, "was completely unaware of the problem," said Ann Pettifor, the plucky director of Jubilee 2000 UK. Pettifor was recruited in 1996 by a group of aid agencies in England to, in her words, "help write off the debt for the poorest countries." But the aid agencies thought that her chief proposal -- a public media campaign to educate and engage the public about debt relief -- was ridiculous. The reasons for third world debt were too arcane, they reasoned, beyond the understanding of ordinary people.

Nevertheless, Pettifor forged ahead with the help of two 70-something Christian politicos, Martin Dent and Bill Peters. Six years before, over drinks in an Oxford pub, Dent and Peters had come up with an idea to connect third world debt cancellation to the Old Testament idea of Jubilee -- a tradition of erasing all debts and freeing slaves once every 50 years.

Peters was a retired British ambassador. Dent, a retired professor. Both had worked on relief projects in Africa, with varying degrees of dismay. They also had ridden the failed wave of the 1980s debt reform movement.

Yet they believed that a Jubilee 2000 campaign, as they dubbed it, could become a 21st century equivalent of the 19th century's abolitionist movement. The reason was simple: third world indebtedness was the new form of slavery. When people understood that 52 countries like Zambia, Uganda and Honduras owe $365 billion dollars to Western institutions, and that the loans were often incurred by military dictatorships, they would realize the logic of Jubilee remission.