STORY:
Celebrities Back Jubilee 2000

U2's Bono leads coalition backed by Pope, Dalai Lama to cancel Third World debt

Celebrities led by U2's lead singer Bono are throwing their considerable public relations weight behind Jubilee 2000, a coalition of rights activists who want to pressure world leaders to cancel third world debt in time to celebrate the millennium.

Bono has announced that Pope John Paul II has invited a delegation of Jubilee 2000 supporters to his summer palace to mark 100 days to the millennium on September 23rd. Bono, Quincy Jones, Jeffrey Sachs (Professor of Economics at Harvard), Sir Bob Geldof, Youssou N'Dour, Randall Robinson (the anti-apartheid champion) and other artists, economists and religious leaders will be part of the delegation.

The international Jubilee 2000 movement is a coalition of religious faiths, aid agencies and trade unions, organized in 50 countries around the world and has the backing of the Pope and the Dalai Lama according to a Jubilee 2000 press release.

At the launch of the UN's NetAid website U2's lead singer Bono attacked the "fuzziness" of the UN's anti-poverty efforts. He argued that the new global website needed to concentrate on one tangible goal -- the cancellation of the debts of the world's poorest countries by the millennium.

"In Jubilee 2000 we want to take the energy that's going into New Year's Eve '99 and the millennium celebrations and give it a meaningful goal. We think this is the only big idea-big enough to fill the shoes of the date. NetAid needs to become debtaid," said Bono in the press release.

"It was an amazing thing, that moment in time where Bob Geldof and a bunch of popstars raised $200 million for famine relief in Africa ... Then I learned that Africa spends $200 million every week servicing its debt to the west," said Bono in a speech at the UN Race Against Poverty Awards.

"Is it not barbaric," he asked, "and economically inefficient, that in countries like Tanzania more is spent on paying debt service to the West, than on health and education combined. And that in Guyana-one of the poorest countries that pays debt-life expectancy is only 47 years old?"

DATE: 9/10/99

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