http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1499462,00.html
Kenya: "the corruption of President Mwai Kibaki's new administration makes Daniel arap Moi's regime look almost restrained."
Ethiopia and Eritrea: their "leaders are arms-shopping while relying on the international community to feed their drought-hit millions."
~~~~
The 2004 survey by Transparency International.
The scores range from 10 ( clean) to zero (very corrupt).
Hungary (US ally; had troops in Iraq)
4.8
Italy (US ally; has troops in Iraq)
4.8
Kuwait (US ally over Iraq)
4.6
South Korea (US ally; troops in Iraq)
4.5
El Salvador (US ally over Iraq)
4.2
Bulgaria (US ally; troops killed in Iraq)
4.1
Slovakia (US ally; troops in Iraq)
4.0
Colombia (US ally)
3.8
Panama (US ally - The School Of the Americas was founded in Panama in 1946)
3.7
Thailand (US ally; Thais killed in Iraq)
3.6
Poland (US ally; troops killed in Iraq)
3.5
Saudi Arabia (US ally)
3.4
Egypt (US ally)
3.2
Morocco (US ally)
3.2
Turkey (US ally)
3.2
Romania (US ally; troops in Iraq)
2.9
Philippines (US ally; had troops in Iraq)
2.6
Uzbekistan (US has military base here; recently troops reportedly killed 500 protesters)
2.3
Kazakhstan (US ally in Iraq; US military base in Kazakhstan)
2.2
Ukraine (US ally in Iraq)
2.2
Pakistan (US ally)
2.1
Indonesia
http://smsmy.net/cgi-bin/balinuts/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=5160
2.0
Tajikistan (US has military base here)
2.0
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1505816,00.html
Quotes from an article by George Monbiot, 14 June 2005, in the Guardian:
"Corruption has seldom been a barrier to foreign aid and loans: look at the money we have given, directly and through the World Bank and IMF, to Mobutu, Suharto, Marcos, Moi and every other premier-league crook...
"Rwanda's Paul Kagame or Uganda's Yoweri Museveni are repeatedly cited by the G8 countries as practitioners of 'good governance'. Their armies, as the UN has shown, are largely responsible for the meltdown in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has so far claimed 4 million lives, and have walked off with billions of dollars' worth of natural resources. Yet Britain, which is hosting the G8 summit, remains their main bilateral funder. It has so far refused to make their withdrawal from the DRC a conditionality for foreign aid...
"Kagame... has eagerly supplied us with the materials we need for our mobile phones and computers: materials that his troops have stolen from the DRC....
"To qualify for World Bank funding, our model client Uganda was forced to privatise most of its state-owned companies before it had any means of regulating their sale. A sell-off that should have raised $500m for the Ugandan exchequer instead raised $2m. The rest was nicked by government officials. Unchastened, the World Bank insisted that - to qualify for the debt-relief programme the G8 has now extended - the Ugandan government sell off its water supplies, agricultural services and commercial bank, again with minimal regulation...
"In the late 80s, the IMF and World Bank forced it to impose "user fees" for basic healthcare and primary education. The purpose appears to have been to create new markets for private capital. School attendance, especially for girls, collapsed. So did health services, particularly for the rural poor...
"The G8 governments claim they want to help poor countries develop and compete successfully. But they have a powerful commercial incentive to ensure that they compete unsuccessfully, and that our companies can grab their public services and obtain their commodities at rock-bottom prices.
"Attaching conditions ... to aid ... amounts to saying: 'We will give you a trickle of money if you give us the crown jewels.'"
http://www.monbiot.com/
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