Miren Gutiérrez

Interview with Sylvia Borren, former executive director, Oxfam Novib

ROME, May 22 (IPS) - Sylvia Borren was executive director at Oxfam Novib from 1999 until Feb 2008. Before that she was programme director.

Oxfam Novib is the “elephant”, in her words, at Oxfam International, a confederation of 13 organisations working with over 3,000 partners in more than 100 countries, whose aim is to fight “for a just world without poverty”.

She talks with IPS Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutierrez about her legacy and other issues such as aid and how that intermixes with gender, and her work at the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP).

IPS: Oxfam International is a heterogeneous association… Was it difficult to keep a common goal and work together?

Sylvia Borren: Oxfam Novib is not large or influential enough on its own. The idea was to try to achieve greater impact through collective efforts. We had to jump over our shadow and link hands in order to have an impact. This became a strategic priority.

We are heterogeneous. At Oxfam we say we are an organisation of elephants (Oxfam Great Britain, Oxfam Novib), mice (Oxfam Australia, the U.S., Belgium, Hong Kong) and fleas (New Zealand, Ireland). And to my great delight Oxfam India and Oxfam Mexico are joining.

To handle this diversity we went from a representational to a competency business model, which made it possible to benefit from everyone’s strengths. For example, New Zealand is excellent in evaluation; Belgium, in mobilisation; Australia, in working with youths in parliament; Great Britain has more people on the ground… You have less paternalism this way… The win-win situation comes when you combine these qualities.

IPS: Surely it wasn’t always a harmonious relationship…

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Q&A: “We Are Haunted By a War Begun Under False Pretences”
Interview with Chuck Lewis, founder of the Centre for Public Integrity

WASHINGTON, Jan 23 (IPS) - Eight key players in the George W. Bush administration, including the president himself, made at least 935 false statements in the run-up to and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.These are some of the findings of a mammoth report just released by the Centre for Public Integrity, directed by founder Chuck Lewis.

Lewis asked his researchers to track every utterance by the top U.S. officials made from Sep. 11, 2001 through Sep. 11, 2003, regarding Iraq, “weapons of mass destruction”, and the alleged link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. These officials include President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and former White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

What this report proves is remarkable, even though it is now a matter of public record that there were no WMD in Iraq and that the attacks against the U.S. in 2001 had no connection to Saddam Hussein.

Lewis concludes in a statement: “Clearly, this Iraq chronology calls into question the repeated assertions of Bush administration officials that they were merely the unwitting victims of bad intelligence. More broadly, consider the timeless words of the late historian and Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, in his classic 1961 work, “The Image”: ‘We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.’ America went to war nearly five years ago after an orchestrated campaign of false statements by the nation’s top officials, a war begun under the illusion of an imminent national security threat. We are haunted by a war begun, in other words, under false pretences.”

Lewis spoke with IPS’s Editor in Chief Miren Gutierrez about what he says is “an unprecedented, 380,000-word, online searchable, public and private Iraq war chronology, the public statements interlaced with the internal knowledge, discussions, doubts, and dissent known at the time. What they said publicly juxtaposed against what they knew internally.”

IPS: You have tagged how many false statements were made by these top officials over the two years. How many exactly? Can you make any comparisons?

CL: We found 935 false statements… Bush made the most statements; McClellan the fewest. No one has ever done this for any other U.S. war, to my knowledge, a public and private chronology of what they said versus what they knew internally. There is no comparison to the past.

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En español

Q&A: ‘Everybody leaves the Forum happier, wiser and stronger’
Interview with Roberto Savio, member of the International Committee of the World Social Forum

ROME, Jan 9 (IPS) - Roberto Savio is probably among the best informed insiders at the World Social Forum (WSF). He has been on its international committee since it was created in 2001, and since 2003 he has been coordinator of the ‘media, culture and counter-hegemony’ thematic area.

He founded the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency in 1964, as well as other news and information organisations, always with an emphasis on the developing world. He is now IPS President Emeritus. He is co-founder of Media Watch International, based in Paris, and Chairman of the Board of the Alliance for a New Humanity, a foundation promoting the culture of peace.

Savio speaks with IPS Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutiérrez about the future of the WSF.

IPS: The World Social Forum (WSF) is an anti-globalisation movement, using the term ‘globalisation’ in a doctrinal sense, not a literal one. But the WSF is a global phenomenon…

Roberto Savio: The WSF is not a movement against globalisation; it is a movement against the kind of globalisation which is based only on the values of market and profit. That is a globalisation spawned by the Washington Consensus, the call for a New International Order made in the late eighties by the International Financial Institutions and the U.S. Treasury Department.

It also coincided with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and an unprecedented return to unilateralism in international relations, based on hegemony, military might, and the idea that the interests of the U.S. were automatically the interests of humankind, as President (George) Bush declared several times. The result of this kind of globalisation was to marginalise the United Nations, international law, and the call for social justice, sustainable development and other values which are enshrined in the constitutions of practically all countries.

Those who identify themselves with the WSF want another globalisation, where social justice, participation, democracy and people are also values. It is significant that when we started in 2001, we were considered a fringe movement; even by then President of Brazil. Now, seven years later, nobody defends any longer the Washington Consensus. The damages it did worldwide have prompted the IFIs to do some significant corrections, and even the Bush administration is having several changes of route.

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En español… 

Q&A: ‘We Do Not Want to Halve Poverty: Eradicate It’
Interview with Sylvia Borren, Executive Director of Oxfam-Novib

ROME, Oct 8 (IPS) - Sylvia Borren is one of the three co-chairs of GCAP, together with Kumi Naidoo (Secretary General of Civicus) and Ana Agostino (Member of GCAP’s Feminist Taskforce).Marking the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on Oct. 17, IPS Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutierrez speaks with Borren about what the GCAP (Global Call to Action against Poverty) campaign means for people.

IPS: Last year GCAP and the UN Millennium Campaign set a Guinness World Record for the largest single coordinated mobilisation in history, when 23.5 million people in more than 100 countries stood up against poverty on Oct. 17. Malawi President Bingu wa Mutharika joined the demonstrations; in Jaipur, India, 38,000 cricket fans stood up; and in the Philippines thousands of people marched against poverty, among many other events. Do you expect to break the record this year?

Sylvia Borren: The amazing record of 23.5 million people around the world standing up against poverty can still excite me — but how sad that there was virtually no publicity about it. That will be very different this year I expect. I find I can’t predict the numbers, but this time there are different forms chosen to demand justice. There are stand-up actions, speak out and sing out performances, and football games ‘blowing the whistle on poverty’.

IPS: You have written the lyrics of the Poverty Requiem, to be performed by orchestras and choirs in several countries on Oct. 17. In what ways do you think singing can make a difference?

SB: The global song against poverty is taken from the Poverty Requiem which I wrote together with composer Peter Maissan. A dance was designed for it by le Grand Cru. We expect it to be performed in 20 countries. In the Netherlands it will be performed outside parliament, and in Maastricht and Heerenveen (both in the Netherlands), with a choir of more than 700 people. Last Friday we heard that the global song will be done in 16 places in India.

The Poverty Requiem is very moving, and connects the audience at an emotional level to the daily realities of poverty. And even more important: anyone can sing it, and anyone who does can’t get the music and the lyrics out of their head. It is a piece written for four choirs, two soloists, and dancers, and we have found that some people come again and again to sing it in different performances around the country.

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There it is my new article on democracy in Peru.

Q&A: “Just Keeping the Achievements of Democracy Means a Daily Struggle”
Interview with Gustavo Gorriti, President of Instituto Prensa y Sociedad

Gustavo Gorriti

ROME, Sep 25 (IPS) - With former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori and his intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos in jail, Peru faces a new era. How did it come to happen, and what is in store?IPS Editor-in-Chief Miren Gutierrez speaks with Gustavo Gorriti about the unprecedented decision of the Chilean Supreme Court to extradite Fujimori, who was president 1990-2000, and its significance.

Gorriti, an award-winning investigative journalist, covered Peru’s internal war in the eighties. He followed former head of intelligence service Vladimiro Montesinos’s career since 1983 — Montesinos was the source of Fujimori’s power, and his downfall. It was his actions that led to the allegations of murder and drug trafficking.

Gorriti is author of ‘The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru’ and the recent ‘Calavera en Negro’ (Skull in Black). He is columnist for Caretas newspaper and president of Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, a Latin American association that promotes independent journalism and freedom of expression. He was earlier associate director of Panama’s La Prensa newspaper, and co-director of Peru’s La Republica.

In the aftermath of Fujimori’s dissolving the Peruvian Congress in 1992 and seizing wide powers, a coup as it came to be called even though Fujimori was president already, Gorriti was kidnapped, and held in the Intelligence Service area of the Pentagonito, the army headquarters, where so many others were tortured and killed. Because of an international outcry, he was finally released.

IPS: This is the first time in history that a court orders the extradition of a former head of state to be tried for human rights violations and corruption in his home country. Fujimori’s extradition also means that all the main public servants involved in the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres are arrested. (The Barrios Altos massacre took place in the Peru suburb of that name Nov. 3, 1991; 15 were killed by a death squad of the Peruvian armed forces. In the La Cantuta massacre, a professor and nine others from Lima’s La Cantuta university were abducted and ‘disappeared’ by a military death squad). Do you feel somehow vindicated?

Gustavo Gorriti: Fujimori’s extradition doesn’t vindicate me. It means that justice has, so far, been partially served. It also somehow closes an extraordinary period in our history filled with incredible paradoxes, ironies and twists of fate. Its lessons are that consistent action in defence of democracy and human rights, while exposing the crimes of tyrants will in due time end up with a similar scenario as the one we have in Peru: with Montesinos and Fujimori in jail, facing the results of their past misdeeds.

As for me, it has been a long road fraught with the kind of conflict and peril no journalist should have to face. Do I feel any kind of elation now? None at all. It took too long, most of the time uphill. It cost too much to many people and to the country as a whole. Much was lost, and will never be recovered. We’ll have to make sure that our democracy becomes unassailable to the Montesinos and the Fujimoris of the world, and severe measures may have to be taken. But there is no joy in it. At least, I don’t feel any.

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Artículo en español…