by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Anyone who's ever approached a bank begging for a little financial mercy knows not to get their hopes up. But Montreal's Social Justice Committee (SJC), a human rights and global equity advocacy and awareness organization, thinks that if enough people bug the Prime Minister, he can step up onto the world stage and get the bigwigs to cancel the poorest countries' crippling debt payments to the World Bank.

Kicked off last week at a Sala Rossa soirée featuring guest speakers, music and amateur theatre, the Jubilee +5 campaign is essentially a call-out to the concerned to write letters to Paul Martin urging him to push global debt relief. It's a tall order: in 1999, organizers of Jubilee 2000, the original grass-roots debt-relief campaign, presented a 23-million name petition - the largest ever - to the G7 at their meeting in Cologne, Germany. People paid attention, but did little.

But debt relief may be getting sexy again, thanks at least in part to that devilish Irish imp Bono. Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Bono and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates urged the world to forgive much of the Third World's debt, for both humanitarian and security reasons (Bono told the assembled dignitaries that without relief, there could be "10 or 12 Afghanistans" in Africa). Of the 38 countries either receiving now or potentially receiving some form of debt relief from the World Bank, 31 are in Africa.

"In terms of concrete action, we want to educate people about the continued existence of the problem," says Deane Taylor, an SJC board member. "We thought five years ago that we'd realized our goal, but we have to stress that that didn't actually happen. We need the debt immediately and unconditionally cancelled." Pointing to World Bank figures, Taylor puts the total debt figure for sub-Saharan Africa at $200-billion (U.S.).

The problem of global debt is of course enormously complex, but the gist of it is this: poor countries, saddled by decades of bad loans that have either been frittered away on useless mega-projects or used to pad a dictator's bank account, have been paying so much interest on them that they've repaid the debt in some cases twice over without reducing the principal. This means no money for social services like health care - an especially fatal consequence in sub-Saharan Africa - and a reliance on raw materials for exports, the prices of which fluctuate wildly, according to the whims of global markets. To qualify for more loans, the International Monetary Fund is ordering them to re-structure and re-engineer their economies - meaning privatizing everything from garbage collection to water. In some cases, says Omar Aktouf, a management professor at the HEC business school, debt servicing alone can be worth 700 per cent of a country's GDP.

Eric Lamoureux, the SJC's Drop-the-debt campaign coordinator, thinks that there is cause for cautious optimism, even with market-friendly Paul Martin in office. In the meantime, however, he wants to concentrate on the year-long campaign and keep the pressure up. "We'll take a look at how things have progressed in December," he says.

For more information on the Jubilee +5 campaign, contact the SJC at 933-6797.