Tamil Justice

Reuters – IMF delays third tranche of $2.6 bln Sri Lanka loan

By Shihar Aneez

The International Monetary Fund said on Thursday it is delaying the third tranche of a $2.6 billion loan to Sri Lanka after the government missed its 2009 deficit reduction targets.

IMF officials told a news conference that Sri Lanka’s domestic budget borrowing — consistent with a budget deficit target of 7 percent of gross domestic production — was exceeded by a substantial amount.

“It would be more than 1.5-1.75 percent than the target, but we haven’t seen the final number yet,” said Brian Aitken, the IMF mission head to Sri Lanka. “The third tranche will be delayed and completed when the budget is formulated after the election.”

The central bank had earlier said that the $40 billion economy likely missed 2009 budget deficit goal of 7 percent set by the IMF as a condition for the loan.

The third tranche is worth around $318 million of the remaining loan of around $2 billion and was planned to be approved this month after considering the island nation’s commitment to the IMF targets.

Sri Lanka has not presented its full year budget for this year due to two national elections in the first four months. The parliamentary polls are scheduled on April 8 after President Mahinda Rajapaksa won his re-election on Jan. 26.

“We agreed with the government under these circumstances, it makes sense for us to re-engage in a more comprehensive way following the elections and formation of new cabinet, in the context of a new budget,” Aitken said.

The third tranche review will be completed in May, he said.   More

Avaaz.Org – Drop Haiti’s Debt

As Haitian families search for survivors and relief rolls in, Haiti is still staggering under $1 billion in old debts racked up by unscrupulous lenders and unelected governments of the past.

But in recent days, a worldwide outcry has grown to cancel Haiti’s debt — and while some key lenders are rumoured to be holding out, the IMF and some key governments have indicated that debt relief could be within reach.

More pressure is needed. The petition below will be delivered to the IMF and G7 finance ministers at their crucial meetings in coming days — sign and spread the word:

Petition to Finance Ministers, IMF, World Bank, IADB, and bilateral creditors:

As Haiti rebuilds from this disaster, please work to secure the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans.

SIGN THE PETITION HERE!

Emergency Rally For Haiti - 5pm Thursday January 28 Sydney Town Hall

Cancel The Debt, Aid Not Occupation, Reinstate Democratically Elected President Aristide

Cancel the Debt

Haiti, perhaps the poorest country in the western hemisphere is where about 75% of the population “lives on less than US $2 per day, and 56% — 4.5 million people — live on less than $1 per day”.

Decades of neoliberal “adjustment” and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government from investing in its people or to regulate its economy. These policies worsened the impact of the recent earthquakes because Haiti lacked even basic infrastructure, instead paying IMF loans.

Haiti owes approximately $1 billion to the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, and a handful of others. These organizations are using Haiti’s tragedy as a money making opportunity. The “aid” they are giving is only a loan, which must be repaid, at interest. This loan will be on top of the $890 million in loans that Haiti owes the IMF, a coalition of the rich. This debt, which has already been paid through decades of exploitation by multinational corporations, must be cancelled to end Haiti’s vicious cycle of poverty and build badly needed services.

Reinstate Democratically Elected President Aristide

Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and his government (elected by some 75% of the Haitian electorate) was overthrown by an internationally sponsored paramilitary coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. It was replaced by a U.S backed feeble and corrupt government.

President Aristide, a progressive priest turned president, threatened to help Haiti’s poor enough to earn the scorn of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and both Republicans and Democrats. His government was denied much-needed international funds for development, and his poor followers demonised as chimeres, or “devils.” In 2004, Haiti’s ultra-rich minority worked hand in glove with right-wingers in Washington and Paris to create a case for “regime change”. Aristide has broad support amongst the Haitian people who have called for his return.

Aid Not Occupation

The U.S emergency response has been largely focussed on sending the hugely costly and inefficient US military — a fleet of aircraft and an aircraft carrier. The Obama administration claims it will allocate $100 million in emergency aid to Haiti. The cost of operating an aircraft carrier, including crew, is roughly $2 million a day. Just sending a carrier to Port-au-Prince for two weeks accounts for a quarter of the announced U.S aid effort. While many of the military personnel sent there will certainly be doing actual aid work, given the U.S long history of brutal military/colonial control of Haiti, will inevitably be spending their time ensuring continued survival and control of the parasitic pro-US political elite in Haiti. Haiti needs aid, not a military occupation.

Donations should be made to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund. http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/HERF.html

Organised by The Latin American Social Forum. Victor Hugo 0425 324 621, John 0413 310 452, 02 9690 1977

Some of these articles are a few days old

WSWS – A grim journey through Sri Lanka’s war zone

Counterpunch – Post-War Internment Hell for Tamils

Guardian – Former army chief to run for Sri Lankan presidency

AFP – IMF sells 10 tonnes of gold to Sri Lanka

The National – Political terrain shifts in Sri Lanka

Financial Times – A peace dividend Sri Lanka cannot squander

AFP – Sri Lanka reserves ‘comfortable’ after bailout: IMF

Reuters India – UPDATE 1-S.Lanka deficit target challenging,but reachable-IMF

NASDAQ - IMF Approves More Funds For Sri Lanka

The International Monetary Fund’s executive board approved another release of funds to Sri Lanka under an arrangement to help the South Asian country avoid a balance-of-payments crisis.

The IMF will release immediately about $329 million to Sri Lanka, bringing the total funds disbursed under the agreement since July to about $659 million.

The agreement was approved on July 24 for about $2.6 billion.

Sri Lanka’s performance under the arrangement is “encouraging,” Takatoshi Kato, IMF Deputy Managing Director and Acting Chair, said in a statement. ” Recent economic developments have been stronger than expected, and the near-term outlook has improved.”

However, he added that the country still needs to address “fundamental vulnerabilities.”

AFP – IMF clears Sri Lanka second tranche loan of 329 mln dlrs

The International Monetary Fund said Friday its executive board approved the release of 329.4 million dollars to Sri Lanka, the second portion of a loan to help the country weather the economic crisis.

The IMF said the board completed the first review of Sri Lanka’s economic performance under a 20-month standby loan.

This allows the immediate disbursement of the second tranche, bringing total disbursements under the arrangement to 658.8 million dollars.

“Sri Lanka’s performance under the standby arrangement is encouraging,” said IMF deputy managing director Takatoshi Kato.

“Recent economic developments have been stronger than expected, and the near-term outlook has improved. While the Fund-supported program had helped Sri Lanka avoid a balance of payments crisis, fundamental vulnerabilities remain to be addressed. Strict adherence to the program targets and steadfast implementation of the reform agenda will be essential.”

The IMF approved the program in July to help the South Asian country rebuild international reserves and strengthen Sri Lanka’s domestic financial system.

Britain abstained from voting on the loan after politicians indicated they could not support it because of an ongoing tense political situation.

Britain wanted to “secure long-term peace and prosperity” for Sri Lanka through reconciliation between its communities, officials said in a letter to the multiparty parliamentary groups on Sri Lanka and Tamils.

Human Rights Watch said the IMF should have set conditions on the loan, including demands that the Sri Lankan government help resettle nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians being held in tightly guarded camps.

The IMF loan, under negotiation with Sri Lankan authorities since March, came two months after the end of the civil war with the rebel Tamil Tigers that claimed up to 100,000 lives and left some 300,000 war-displaced civilians in the north.

IMF satisfied with Sri Lanka’s economic performance

The IMF, in a statement at the conclusion of a two-week staff mission to Colombo, said that “recent economic developments have been stronger than expected.”

“The government’s policy approach has been in line with the program, and performance based on the program’s July targets has been broadly satisfactory,” the Washington-based institution said.

“Net international reserves continue to show impressive growth driven by an increase in investor confidence and stronger than expected remittances.”

…A second disbursement of the loan depends on further reviews and approval of the executive board.

Despite an array of criticism against the loan, the IMF succeeded in obtaining the approval of the executive board, its top decision-making body composed of 24 countries or groups of countries, by obtaining the abstention of its biggest members, which had reservations about the proposal.

Inner City Press : Tale of Two Chinas, Protest by Tamils, Artist Feted at UN for Big Paintings and Parents

Online Opinion – IMF approves Sri Lanka loan despite unchanged human rights situation

The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on July 24, approved a US$2.6 billion loan to Sri Lanka despite the fact that the Sri Lankan government has done little to ease continuing human rights concerns in the two months since the end of the conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam Elam (LTTE).

Human Rights Watch had urged that the IMF insist that the government of President Rajapaksa address significant post-conflict human rights abuses as part of the loan approval process. Human Rights Watch said that more than 280,000 people, almost all of them Tamils, continue to be held in detention camps; the government restricts access by humanitarian organisations, the media and independent monitors to those camps; and suspected LTTE fighters are being held incommunicado in breach of international law.

“To approve a loan … while they have hundreds of thousands penned up in these camps is a reward for bad behaviour”, said Brad Adams, Asia Director of Human Rights Watch.

Click here to read opinion piece

Crikey – I.M.F. Approves $2.6 Billion Sri Lanka Loan

NEW DELHI — The International Monetary Fund has approved a $2.6 billion loan to help Sri Lanka shore up its economy in the midst of the global economic crisis and the aftermath of a bloody civil war.

But several countries, including the United States and Britain, abstained when the fund’s board voted Friday to approve the loan, reflecting growing unease among many Western nations about alleged human rights abuses during and after Sri Lanka’s prosecution of the war against the Tamil Tiger insurgency.

That war ended in May, with the government’s stunning defeat of the Tigers on a narrow strip of beach in northern Sri Lanka. The entire senior command of the separatist group was killed, along with an untold number of Tamil civilians who had been used as human shields by the Tigers.

Since the end of the fighting, about 280,000 ethnic Tamils have been held in sprawling military-run camps in northern Sri Lanka.

Residents are not free to leave the camps, a measure government officials say is necessary to root out insurgents hiding among the population.

As the months wear on, the camps have posed an increasing problem for the Western countries that are paying for most of the food, shelter and medicine for the displaced.

Human rights organizations and diplomats say that serious questions linger about the manner in which the government prosecuted the war.

The United Nations has estimated that 7,000 civilians died near the end of the war, when hundreds of thousands of people were herded into a small area by the Tigers, who made their last stand among civilians. No reliable count has been made of the dead in the bloody last weeks of the fighting.

Sri Lanka has managed to avoid any international accounting of the civilian casualties, maneuvering votes in the Human Rights Council in Geneva, an intergovernmental body established by the United Nations, to stop calls for an independent investigation. Sri Lankan government officials have said that they are conducting their own inquiry, and that the war ultimately saved lives by halting a seemingly endless conflict.

The government has also pledged to get 80 percent of those displaced by the war back in their homes by the end of the year.

Human rights organizations had pressed the International Monetary Fund to hold back the loan, which Sri Lanka needs to stabilize its economy, until the government demonstrated a sincere commitment to respecting human rights.

“It is a simple matter of the government thumbing its nose at the international community and then coming to the international community for relief,” said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

Usually such loans are not controversial and are decided on the basis of the economic criteria set out by the monetary fund’s staff, with the board vote being mostly a formality.

But some Western countries were agitating to hold back the loan until Sri Lanka met certain benchmarks, like allowing Tamils displaced by the fighting to return to their homes.

The Press Association – UK abstains in Sri Lanka loan vote

Guardian – Britain signals unease with Sri Lanka by abstaining on IMF loan vote

Times Online – Britain to oppose IMF loan to Sri Lanka over plight of Tamil refugees

Press Trust of India – IMF Board approves USD 2.6 bn loan for Sri Lanka

BBC – IMF grants Sri Lanka $2.6bn loan

AFP – IMF approves 2.6 bln dlr loan for Sri Lanka

Wall Street Journal – Sri Lankan Loan Is Cleared by the IMF

Bloomberg – Sri Lanka Gets $2.6 Billion Loan From IMF to Aid its Economy

Guardian – IMF to agree £1.5bn loan to Sri Lanka despite alleged mistreatment of Tamils

AFP – Rights body slams IMF loan to Sri Lanka