Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 30 2005 (IPS) — The United States, which has brushed aside international treaties relating to war criminals and prisoners of war, is being accused of consistently reneging on its longstanding commitments to help resolve some of the social and economic problems of the world’s poorer nations.

Clearly, there is a pattern, says Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

Woods is challenging an assertion by Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), who told a high-level U.N. meeting on development financing that Washington had never agreed on disbursing 0.7 percent of its gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance (ODA) to poorer nations.

The United States wasn’t committed to that target, Natsios was quoted as saying, "no matter what we do, we will never reach 0.7 percent."

Woods noted that the United States was party to a consensus resolution going back to the 1960s when the U.N. General Assembly approved the 0.7 percent target.

Perhaps in acknowledgement of mounting criticism that Washington’s rhetoric has not lived up to its actions, Pres. George W. Bush announced plans Thursday to double annual U.S. aid to Africa by 2010 and launch new initiatives to cut the number of its malaria deaths by half and boost enrollment, especially of girls, in primary schools.

A report issued earlier this week by the Washington-based Brookings Institution found that instead of a tripling of U.S. aid to Africa between 2000 and 2005, as Bush has frequently insisted, the administration has increased aid by only 56 percent in real terms.

The longstanding commitment of 0.7 percent GNP has been met by several Scandinavian countries, Woods pointed out, and last month the 25-member European Union (EU) established a firm timetable for reaching this goal.

"Yet the (Bush) administration prefers to ignore or ‘unsign’ key international agreements and play a dance with words to avoid its commitment to do the right thing," Woods told IPS.

In May 2002, the Bush administration withdrew from the Rome Treaty creating the International Criminal Court (ICC) despite the fact that the treaty was signed in December 2000 by the previous administration of Pres. Bill Clinton.

As a result, Washington came under fire for an unprecedented act: walking out on a treaty the country had already signed.

Bill Pace of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC) pointed out that the Bush administration was "willing to have a strong treaty as long as the United States is exempt, and the United States can control the treaty."

Pace cited several U.S. "precedents" in withdrawing from international environmental treaties, disarmament treaties and children’s rights treaties. "Across the board it is abandoning multilateralism," he added."

Werner Fornos, president of the Washington-based Population Institute, says the same applies to U.S. international commitments on social and economic issues approved at high-profile U.N. conferences since the 1990s.

"The Bush administration is backing out of virtually every commitment made by previous administrations – including the Cairo Programme of Action on Population and Development, the Beijing women’s conference, the Copenhagen Social Summit to eliminate poverty, and the commitment of 0.7 percent of Gross National Product to ODA," Fornos told IPS.

"This is a clear indication of the administration’s arrogant and reprehensible policy of ‘You-Go-With-Us-Or We-Go-Alone’. It pretends to promote democracy while actually pursuing a delusional agenda of global dictatorship favouring bullets and bombs rather than rational compassion and reconciliation," he added.

Woods said that the Bush administration has also been dragging its feet over the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which it is a party to, after having voted for it at the Millennium Summit in September 2000.

"At the International Conference on Financing for Development held in Monterrey, Mexico in 2002, and at every opportunity since, the Bush administration has painstakingly avoided the term ‘Millennium Development Goals’," she added.

According to the Bush administration, the United States did not agree to the goals, Woods said, which includes the reduction of poverty and hunger and the achievement of universal primary education, among others.

"Somehow they skip over the fact that the United States was one of the 189 countries that signed the Millennium Declaration in 2000 committing to halving global poverty by 2015," Woods said.

All this because the United States refuses to recognise its agreement dating back to the 1960’s to commit a portion of its national budget to development assistance, she added.

"The Bush administration has repeatedly said that carving out a portion of the national budget is outdated and irrelevant. Somehow when it comes to defence spending, proportioning out a percentage of the national budget seems fine for the administration, yet when it comes to development dollars, the same commitment of concrete portions of the budget is deemed outmoded and undoable," Woods argued.

When the target was announced in the 1960s, the United States gave 0.58 percent of its GNP. Today, even with the ill-fated Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), the United States remains the least generous of all donors, giving only 0.13 percent of its wealth.

The Bush administration created the MCA in 2004 in an attempt to disburse aid money to countries "that govern justly, invest in their people and maintain policies and institutions that support market-led growth."

Even though 17 countries were selected as eligible to receive MCA assistance in 2004-2005, Washington has so far signed compacts with only four countries: Madagascar, Nicaragua, Cape Verde and Honduras.

Woods said that unless the Bush administration makes a real commitment to provide more development financing to impoverished countries and create an enabling environment for long-term sustainable development, the United States will remain the least generous of all the donor countries.

"Surely in the aftermath of the Iraq debacle, committing just seven cents out of every dollar, instead of a miserly one cent, can go a long way to assuring the global community that the U.S. can be a good global neighbour," she said.

When all is said and done, Woods said, 0.7 percent or 25 billion dollars is the amount spent in Iraq every 4-5 months.

"The administration is playing a dangerous shell game – refusing to make real commitments to tackling global poverty, even in an age of unprecedented prosperity," Woods added.