Aid With Strings Attached The G8 and the Arab World

http://counterpunch.org/tresilian06162011.html

Meeting in the French resort town of Deauville, the leaders of the G8 group of the world's leading industrialised nations announced a package of measures, part of a so- called "Deauville Partnership", designed to support democratic and free-market transitions in the Arab countries, notably Egypt and Tunisia, and to help these countries rebuild their economies.

However, commentators in the French and British press reacted to the measures by asking whether what was being offered was sufficient, the French newspaper Le Monde saying in its editorial on 27 May that not enough had been done by the G8 leaders to help the economies of the Arab countries in transition.

The amount pledged was "derisory when compared to the amount of money poured into the bottomless pit of Western military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan," the paper said, adding that "the assistance the Tunisians had asked for represents just two months of what the Americans are spending in Baghdad."

The limited nature of what was on offer was also pointed to by the economist Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, in an opinion piece published in the London Financial Times last Thursday.

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