By William Bole

He and other Genoa-bound campaigners have a point. Even after those 22 countries get all of the debt relief coming to them under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative, they will still put out more in debt payments than they spend on healthcare or education, on average. Meanwhile, in return countries will face stricter financial "conditionalities" of the kind embedded in International Monetary Fund-designed Structural Adjustment Programs, which often include, among other adjustments, charging citizens prohibitive "user fees" for primary schooling or basic healthcare. Many developing-world campaigners are livid to the point of smelling a "debt-relief hoax."

How much steam the Jubilee debt-relief engine has left in it is hard to judge. It is, after all, a millennial movement, a successful one at that. By the end of last year, it had become rightly regarded as the world's most successful single-issue campaign since the struggle that toppled the apartheid system of racial subjugation in South Africa. Scarcely anyone thinks that serious relief would have flowed back to many impoverished countries without Jubilee 2000. If the debt campaign's Cinderella coach didn't shrink into a pumpkin at year's end, it is at least fair to say the millennial theme is a quickly "diminishing asset," as readily acknowledged by Lovett, whose organization, Drop the Debt, is designed as a short-life successor to the Jubilee 2000 organization.

On that, he wouldn't get an argument from the IMF or World Bank. Officials of the Bank especially have saluted the "historic contribution" of Jubilee 2000 to combating world misery, as policy aide Anthony Gaeta allowed by telephone from Washington. "Historic," though, is the shrewdly operative word in that praise. Essentially, the World Bank is calling on Jubilee battalions to declare victory and go home, or move onto something else, like child poverty. Gaeta and other officials argue the Third World debt is now sustainable, meaning it no longer hinders development and social wellbeing. Of course, they said that in the mid-1990s when the debt burden was clearly catastrophic. Still, the load has been lightened and admittedly there is much else to do, like beating back the internal demons of corruption and strife in many a debt-stricken land.

Beyond Genoa, what comes of Jubilee intensity in a post-Jubilee time? Does it follow the letter of Leviticus, the prime biblical text calling for absolute debt forgiveness (along with the freeing of slaves and return of land lost to indebtedness)? Or is that a case of financial fundamentalism, as some intimate? Do the millennial forces regroup on the broader battlefield of globalization? How?

Much of this is still to be revealed. At the New Economics Foundation, a London think tank, Ann Pettifor is mustering a new initiative called Jubilee Plus, another official successor to Jubilee 2000, which she directed. Jubilee Plus is fixing to highlight the root causes of the debt crisis -- which are, in Pettifor's understanding, the bitterly unjust structures of international finance, stacked in favor of creditors, investors, and shareholders. She wants to stretch the Jubilee Year analysis, of a piece with the Sabbath and every-seven-year Sabbatical traditions, in that broad direction. In ancient Israel, the exhortations included letting land rest and sharing whatever it yielded naturally. To Pettifor's mind, it's a notion of discipline that 
defies the near anarchy of globetrotting finance.

Other Jubilee stalwarts are pushing down other trails. In Washington, at the U.S. Catholic Conference and Bread for the World, an ecumenical Christian anti-hunger lobby, this year's most favored poor-nation issue is American foreign aid, not debt. That is chiefly because the United States ranks dead last among rich countries in its dispersal of international development assistance. Yet that choice also betrays doubt about whether 100 percent debt cancellation -- the Drop the Debt agenda -- is morally imperative. In Britain, relief agencies including CAFOD are propelling that agenda but also looking beyond Genoa to complex questions such as free and fair trade. Which appears to be the dual direction of the Vatican, where Pope John Paul II clearly feels the debt crusade isn't over.

There are ready explanations of why the Jubilee contingent has made strides where others have just made noise. All have something to do with being issue-focused, non-ideological, and faith-based. These virtues led to a preposterous coalition that included at several turns Third World militants and conservative Republican congressman, while sparing us the woollier critiques of global capitalism. Jesse Helms and others could see the face of debt, the Africans and Latin Americans aided by agencies like CAFOD and Catholic Relief Services, the thousands of children who die every day due to notoriously preventable illnesses.

After a wholly unexpected debt-relief triumph in Congress last fall, David Bryden of Jubilee 2000 USA remarked on a lesson of the cause, that "we should not be so cynical that we no longer rely on moral arguments to win support from politicians." Cast further, debt-relief disciples haven't been afraid to ride this once-arcane policy debate, this affair of international finance, onto some stretch of transcendental terrain, some ground of ultimate concern. It is hard to think of a squishier sentiment from any Realpolitik perspective, yet equally hard to picture a spunkier start for a far-reaching faith-rooted movement of global engagement, if that is to come.

William Bole is a journalist based in Lowell, Massachusetts, and an associate fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University in Washington.