How poverty relates to peace

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Mon, 10/16/2006 10:24 AM  |  Opinion

HS Dillon, Jakarta

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh for ""developing micro-credit as an instrument in the struggle against poverty"".

Although most of us think the prize goes to those promoting peace, reconciliation, and human rights, there's actually a strong precedent for awarding it to people serving other causes.

The founder of the Red Cross, Henry Dunant, was the first recipient, at the turn of the twentieth century. He was followed by the likes of physicist and anti-nuclear campaigner Linus Pauling, agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, and, of course, Mother Teresa.

What has peace got to do with poverty, one might ask? Everything: peace is essential before real development can occur, ideally leading to prosperity for all.

As we all know, but tend to conveniently forget, half the world ekes out a living on less than US$2 a day. As former UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar noted, even though the iron curtain has fallen, ""the poverty curtain still separates two parts of the world community."" Our own statistics tell a similar story.

What has Muhammad Yunus actually accomplished? Nothing short of a revolution: he has turned conventional theory on its head.

Even though Nobel Prize-winning economist T.W. Schultz had shown that the poor farmers of India were ""small but efficient,"" and development pioneer Art Mosher had worked as a small farmer while teaching in India to prove that development must start with agriculture, the dominant paradigm was that you needed a great deal of money to wage war on poverty.

Yunus has shown that reaching into your own pocket to help the poor get on their feet is a very effective first step. No need for the international conferences, summits, meetings, and countless heavy books; no use for grandiose initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals.

What is needed is real compassion, an attempt to enter into discourse with the poor; to see the world through their eyes, not to pontificate.

What can the world, and in particular our elite, take away from this award? Recognition that we have the means to help our brethren regain their dignity.

As head of the Coordinating Agency for Poverty Reduction in 2001, I was shocked to obtain figures from one of our foremost young economists, Raden Pardede, that showed 20 percent of the income of the top 10 percent of our earners would completely fill the poverty gap. Can you comprehend that?

There wouldn't be a single poor person left in Indonesia if our richest citizens had the heart to give away just a fifth of their incomes! Imagine what the impact would be if these generous souls -- as they so often portray themselves to be -- were to give a fifth of their wealth to the poor and needy?

How do our elite compare to the likes of Yunus? They are the conglomerates who have pilfered the Bank Indonesia liquidity supports, as well as the officials, police, prosecutors and judges who colluded to let them get away with the biggest robbery in modern Indonesian history.

We almost left out our other friends, the self-serving officials and experts of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, who provided the theoretical underpinnings for bailing out the swindlers and shifting the debt burden onto the poor. How will they fare on judgment day, this unholy alliance of those bent on stealing from the poor?

In her acceptance speech in 1979, Mother Teresa said, ""the poor must know that we love them."" Little did she know that many centuries earlier the Prophet Muhammad had gently urged his favorite wife, Aisyah, ""Get closer to the poor, love them, certainly Allah will be close to thee.""

In this month of Ramadhan, when the faithful are reminded of the folly of claiming as their own what rightfully belongs to The Bountiful alone, are any of our elite willing to step forward?

The writer is a member of the Board of Trustees at the Bandung Institute of Technology.

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