From: taipale@kiloapo.tele.nokia.fi (Pekka J Taipale)
Subject: Re: Immigrants and employment
Organization: none
	<1992Aug20.100850.25723@cs.joensuu.fi>
	<1992Aug20.114653.28248@ugle.unit.no>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 12:49:16 GMT

In article <1992Aug20.114653.28248@ugle.unit.no> jafitv@termo.unit.no (Jan Arne Fagertun) writes:
>You could find lots of examples during the history. The worst is
>probably the western countries exploitation during a very long time.

Yes indeed, but...

>Now the African countries are stuck - the international community
>forces them to pay huge amount of money (loans and interests).

What exactly do you mean by the international community "forcing"
third world countries to take loans and then pay them? I cannot think
of such situations. Yes, leaders of many African nations have been
dumb and taken loans that they cannot pay. Western countries, or some
financial branches in them, have been dumb when they gave those loans.
But I cannot understand who has "forced" third world countries to
take these loans. 

This does not, of course, mean, that in my opinion the poor countries
have to pay their debts to the last penny. Some arrangements to
forgive some of the loans and organize payments in a reasonable way
are absolutely necessary because any other approach will mean immense
human tragedies while resulting in less actual payments (ok, the
latter is happening all the time...). 

However, I cannot quite understand why all Western people should feel
guilty of the debts taken by African countries.  Theoretically,
everyone should pay back any loans that they take. In practice, errare
humanum est, which means that leaderships of countries err as well,
and this must be taken into account. But I don't think that it means
that those who have taken big loans should just be able to skip them.
Everyone must be responsible for one's actions, and this means nations
just as well as individuals.

Whether or not people in Western countries should feel guilty about
colonialism is a different thing, though it's really difficult for me
to understand in which way I have been colonialistic - after all, my
country was under a colonial rule, first Swedish, then Russian - for
centuries but still we don't suffer from such post-colonialistic
symptoms as does much of the third world. And the rest of the Nordic
countries haven't had much of colonies anywhere either. England,
France et al are a different thing, of course.

True, we buy tea, coffee and other products of third world countries
at ridiculously low prices, but it's simply not realistic to expect
that the world market would not work according to the rules of global
market economy. The true reason for the great suffering in the third
world is not only Western exploitation, but exploitation of those
peoples by their leaders. I think that usually (unless there is
outside intervention) a country has the kind of leaders it deserves,
and the personal ambitions and greed of third world leaders - which
has resulted in distorted production structures, for example - are the
major factor in current hunger tragedies in Africa.

Third world dictators are not producing food for their people because
producing tea, coffee, peanuts etc. gives them hard currency that they
can use to buy weapons to keep in power and grow more influence.  This
will not change until there is no one to sell arms to them (situation
is better now that the USSR exists no more, so the struggle for global
balance is not so hard, but there are still plenty of arms suppliers,
and not all of them are Western) or until the people themselves decide
that they need food, not arms (I think this will happen sooner).

>Of course there are millions of people needing food and water, but they
>can't afford buying it. According to your "definition" they don't need
>it !

With the economical and cultural structures of those countries, it
takes a long time before they can buy food. They have to produce it
themselves, just like most people in Western countries used to.

--
Pekka.Taipale@hut.fi

Software Engineering
Helsinki University of Technology