FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Njoki Njoroge Njehu / Soren Ambrose 202/463-2265 mobile: 202/210-0782

WASHINGTON - April 26 - A coalition of Washington activists today announced they plan to rally near the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) headquarters at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 29. The demonstration will target the meeting of the IMF‰s International Monetary and Financial Committee, the policy-making body of the IMF, which includes finance ministers from around the world as well as the heads of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and several other agencies with power over the global economy. It is the same meeting targeted in last year‰s "A16" (April 16, 2000) mass rally and protests.

"The people meeting as the International Monetary & Financial Committee on Sunday have the power to end the debt crisis for the world‰s impoverished countries with a single vote this weekend," said Njoki Njoroge Njehu, a Kenyan national and Director of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, a coalition of over 200 U.S. organizations fighting for the fundamental transformation of the IMF and World Bank. "African countries and other parts of the Global South continue to struggle with a debt burden that is illegitimate and immoral Ö loans were made to dictators and undemocratic governments, resulting in debts that cause widespread poverty and crush peoples‰ prospects for recovery," said Njehu. "Nothing less than the immediate, 100% cancellation of the foreign debt of the impoverished countries, together with an end to structural adjustment-style ëreforms,‰ will suffice," added Njehu.

"If the institutions are serious about ëpoverty-reduction,‰" added Aminata Traore, Mali‰s former Minister of Culture, "and Africa, the most impoverished part of the world, is the priority, they must choose immediate debt cancellation and an end to structural adjustment programs over lending to multinational corporations for environmentally harmful projects that don‰t benefit African peoples."

In 2000, over 20,000 people protested in Washington, D.C. under the banner of the Mobilization for Global Justice demanding debt cancellation, and an end to environmental destruction and structural adjustment policies at the World Bank and the IMF. It was the first time that the U.S. public demonstrated mass solidarity with the people of the Global South who for decades have been opposing these institutions and their policies. Under strong U.S. government influence, the IMF and World Bank oversee many economies in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

"These institutions promote failed economic development models, which over the last 20 years have demanded that indebted governments open up to "free trade," beginning a race to the bottom for investment, jobs and environmental protection. Their demands for cuts in subsidies and social programs, hikes in interest rates, privatization of state-owned companies, and export production have laid the foundation for corporate-led globalization, including the WTO and trade treaties like the Free Trade Area of the Americas," said Fred Azcarate, Executive Director of Jobs with Justice, a national coalition of community, labor, student, and faith-based organizations.

The coalition sponsoring Sunday‰s demonstration, again called the Mobilization for Global Justice, also announced a call for a mass mobilization at the fall meetings of the IMF and World Bank, which take place in Washington between September 28 and October 4. Many activists from the broad anti-corporate-globalization movement are already making plans for a creative, vigorous, and massive turn-out at those meetings, which involve far more delegates and sessions than the spring meetings. Recent publicity given to Sunday‰s demonstration by the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington suggests that in addition to the many issues of globalization itself, there may be serious questions about the preservation of the constitutional right of the public to denounce unfair economic structures without disproportionate and exorbitant responses, including demonization of dissent,by the authorities.