When a earthquake of magnitude 7.8 on the Richter scale, it ripped through entire cities in Turkey, Kurdistan and Syria, with a balance – unfortunately still provisional – of almost 20 thousand dead and more than 60 thousand wounded I was in Nepala country where the wounds of the 2015 earthquake are still visible.
In the Himalayan country the toll spoke of about 10,000 dead, 600,000 houses destroyed, 3 million people affected by the earthquake. It activated aid machine: associations of various kinds and, above all, many “Mr. Nobody” and “Mrs. Nobody” began to weave the ranks of the solidarity to help a population devastated by the earthquake. There generosity of ordinary people during such cataclysms is impressive.
Who, on the other hand, has more resources often does not respond to the call. This is what happened in 2015 in Nepal. The international campaignJubilee Network” which brought together 75 associations and as many as four hundred religious communities in every corner of the planet, asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to condone at least in part the external debt of Nepal, so as to allow Kathmandu to use the new budget spaces to face the post-earthquake.
The IMF’s response? Justifying itself on the basis of internal regulations he denied This possibility. It was more important to keep track of accounting rules than to lend a hand to the government of a country that was experiencing a crisis tragedy. At the time the IMF, together with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank held $3 billion in debt Nepal estuary.
The external debt of the countries of the southern hemisphere has left the agendas of western countries. We are no longer in the times when Bono from U2 did campagna internationally and at the Sanremo Festival 2000 Jovanotti sang Cancel the debt. The debt of the countries of the South of the world seems to no longer be of interest, yet it continues to be a strangulation mechanism by international financial institutions.
The mechanism through which the notorious “adjustment plans” which condemn the peoples to the sufferings of austerity, cuts, layoffs and delivery into the hands of aoligarchy more and more restricted more money and more power. In short, the external debt continues to be an instrument through which the neo-colonialism of the countries of the center of the capitalist system and which subjugates the peoples of the South for the exclusive benefit of narrow cliques of hyper-corrupt leaders and decision-makers.
International institutions and Western governments can do a lot to give support to the populations of Turkey, Kurdistan and Syria devastated by the earthquake. To date, however, little or nothing is seen. Just a few drops of charity. And, moreover, selective and discriminatory. Which arrives, for example, in Turkey where Recep Tayyip Erdogan not even in the face of this catastrophe has he loosened his repressive measures and which have affected both those who protested on social networks against delays in relief efforts and building speculation, due to the scale of the tragedy – closure of Twitter and Tiktok and at least 18 arrests – and continues to prevent to many social and political organizations that minimal practicability which today would make it possible to strengthen aid. But which, on the other hand, almost does not arrive in Syria: there everything is more complicated due to the international sanctions imposed by the US and the EU. Sanctions which, as Iraq’s recent history shows, bring death and suffering to the peoples while leaving firmly in power those rulers they say they want to weaken and overthrow through instruments of economic warfare.
Sanctions that are an opprobrium in “normal” times, but which become even more inhumane in exceptional times like the ones we live in. If you really want to help the Syrian population victims of the earthquake, you must immediately eliminate the economic and financial sanctions affecting Damascus. Here the future of Assad and his regime is not at stake, but that of the men and women of Syria. And the ruthless hand of the West won’t wring a whisker from those who govern in Damascus, but it can do great harm to hosts of innocents who are only “faulty” of being born in the wrong part of the world.