Third world debt, disaster and despots

But it does leave me thinking that the problem of debt is not as simple as some people like to make it out to be. I think it has a lot to do with the corrupt leaders who are in charge of their countries' national finance, infrastructure and welfare. They are governed not by philanthrope but greed, vanity and cold misanthrope.

The German poet, playwright and Marxist, Bertolt Brecht once said that he couldn't understand why it was that under-developed countries - whose people were desperately poor - had regimes and uniformed-despots who lived in unbridled luxury.

They were creaming off the wealth of their countries in front of their people and the rest of the world. It was simply criminal.

To him it was morally repulsive and repugnant to see leaders living in palaces and travelling around in chaufeur driven limousines whilst their people lay starving and dying.

Even during the early twentieth century - without mass media - Brecht could see that these 'politicians' - whether they were in Asia or Africa - had little regard for their fellow countrymen and women. Their indifference to the plight of their own poor and needy was shocking and startlingly to him and his contemporaries.

But even today - over fifty years after Brecht's death -nothing much has changed.

You only have to look at the ruling military junta in Burma and its total lack of compassion or concern for its own people. Its cold hearted attitude and blatent disregard for its own nationals, border on a potential crime against humanity.

For instance, it's now been two weeks since the cyclone hit the country and already the estimated death toll is 78,000 with over 56,000 missing. And instead of asking for international aid or allowing foreign aid workers to assist, the generals are sitting stubornly in their secuded yet spacious luxury apartments, hidden away from the plight of the poor, disasters and suffering.

It really defies reason and logic.

This has got not so much to do with third world debt, but an attitude. It's a state of mind, a state of moral consciousness. Unless we change the way we think, then powerful western corporations and companies will continue to do business with dubious regimes in the third world. As the late Robin Cook said we need to have an ethical foreign policy and insist that the people we're doing business with have the same ethical standards and responsibilities we apply to our own country and our people.