CANCEL ILLEGITIMATE DEBTS!
CANCEL DICTATOR DEBTS!

The International Conference on the Cancellation of Illegitimate Debts was attended by 150 representatives from Southern and Northern social movements and civil society organizations from 15 countries of Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Also present were parliamentarians and government officials joining the people's efforts against the yoke of enslaving debt. held in Jakarta, Indonesia from 27-29 May 2006.

The conference participants aimed to deepen their understanding of the extent and impact of illegitimate, odious and dictator debts on the poor peoples of Southern countries. The global struggle against the debt has already achieved so much and we resolve to continue, build up and intensify our resistance to these.

The people of the South have suffered trillions of dollars in debt and debt servicing for decades which has been among the greatest burdens causing their continued and deepening economic backwardness and social underdevelopment. Yet even as hundreds of billions of dollars are paid every year to creditor banks and organizations in the world's wealthiest countries these debts are not going away and indeed are growing ever larger - reaching US$2.6 trillion as of 2004
There are national governments that spend up to half of their budgets just on debt servicing. This has caused untold hunger, poverty, misery and deprivation for generations of peoples across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Debt servicing is happening at the cost of the exploitation of people, the denial of their basic rights to social and public services, the plunder of Southern agricultural, forest and mineral resources, and the destruction of sovereignty. The debt is even being used to impose destructive and one-sided policies of neoliberal globalization. This grotesque situation must be ended or else the greater majority of the world's people who are poor will be driven ever deeper into debt and poverty.

Northern governments are called upon to support the Norweign governments acknowledgement that illegitimate debts exists.

Conference participants were unanamous in stating that:

• So much of Southern debt is patently onerous, imbued with corruption, forced by creditors, used for projects that have been harmful to the people and environment, a result of self-serving Northern economic policies or merely borrowing to repay debt.
  
  
• We are particularly appalled at debt willfully given by Northern creditors to the world's worst dictatorships including Marcos, Suharto, Pinochet, Duvalier, Mobutu, the apartheid regimes, juntas and many others. This debt of some US$451 billion accumulated over the 1950-1996 period not only merely enriched these regimes and their Northern collaborators but directly resulted in the killing, disappearance, torture and abuse of human rights of hundreds of thousands of people.
  
  
• Southern debt and debt servicing have grown to such monstrous proportions and taken such different forms that we do not even know the true extent and depths of the problem. Northern creditors have used this to obscure the extent of their culpability and the vastness of the damage.