c. 1998 Religion News Service

SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. _ In the 1970s, when Zambia’s copper mines were pumping out money and the country was one of Africa’s richest, Archbishop Medaro Mazombwe saw nothing but promise. A new road system was built, hospitals were well-stocked and new schools were being completed.

These days, having gone through a decade of low copper prices and soaring oil import costs, Zambia is heavily in debt and one of Africa’s poorest nations. Mazombwe blames institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for the chaos.

“We are slaves of debt,” said Mazombwe, a soft-spoken Roman Catholic cleric. “My country spends more money on debt than schools, health, water and sewer combined.”

Thursday (Oct. 22), Mazombwe and other Catholic leaders huddled privately with heads of the world’s leading financial institutions at Seton Hall University in South Orange in an effort to seek answers to a crisis many say is crippling the developing world.

Experts said the meetings were an important step in an unprecedented, worldwide campaign to win relief for the world’s poor. Protestants and Catholics have joined forces with other activists in a lobbying push aimed at canceling or substantially reducing the debt of some of the world’s poorest nations by the millennium.

The meetings, which came during the Conference on the Ethical Dimensions of International Debt, were a direct response to Pope John Paul II’s recent request that U.S. bishops get more involved in the issue of world debt and its impact on the poor.

After one closed-door meeting Thursday, World Bank President James Wolfensohn said discussions focused on “realistic” efforts to relieve debt, but added that his organization cannot resolve the crisis alone.

“I am the president of the World Bank,” he said. “I’m not president of the world.”

Wolfensohn and Michel Camdessus, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, painted a rosy picture of the ongoing discussions with religious leaders.

“If anything, this dialogue demonstrated for us that we are all in the same boat,” Camdessus said.

But it was clear that differences remain over how much debt needs to be forgiven and how quickly that can be achieved.

Monsignor Diarmuid Martin, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, a top Vatican office, spoke of a “difference of vision” on certain issues. But he also praised a recent joint World Bank/IMF agreement to ease the debt of six African nations and another in South American.

“We would hope for … the widest possible expansion of debt reduction by the year 2000,” Martin said. “But it is not in the hands of myself or President Wolfensohn or Managing Director Camdessus. It is in the hands of the wealthier countries.”

Financial officials stressed in the meetings that they are only partial players in the $2 trillion debt crisis. The 40 most heavily indebted nations, 33 of them in Africa, owe $220 billion, roughly 12 percent of it to the World Bank.

At least some of that debt was taken on by corrupt dictators who mismanaged or squandered it. Activists claim the world financial community failed to hold these leaders accountable.

“We’re bailing out the hedge funds and bankers, but those aren’t the people starving to death,” said Carole Collins, U.S. coordinator for Jubilee 2000, a lobbying consortium seeking debt relief that includes some of the major Protestant denominations.

Collins said the meeting of high-level leaders of both finance and the Catholic Church was a “big deal.

“This is all part of an unprecedented public outpouring that has immense momentum,” she said. “The imminence of the new millennium has people reassessing the past and thinking about new beginnings.”

Religious leaders point to biblical precedent for their proposal; the passage in Leviticus that talks about freeing slaves and forgiving all debts every 50 years. More modern precedents, such as debt forgiveness by the United States after World War II, also are raised.

Leaders from the pope to those in the Anglican Communion, the worldwide Protestant movement that includes the American Episcopal Church, and the Lutheran World Federation have called for substantial reduction, if not forgiveness, of “unpayable” debt by the year 2000.

Key financial experts argue such an action could throw global markets into chaos and doom future lending efforts to developing nations. Wolfensohn said the real focus of lobbying should be on the leaders of wealthy countries, who have cut foreign aid dramatically in recent years.

IR END CHAMBERS