Having helped to cripple the economy of the gold- and commodity-producing
South American country of Suriname, the International Monetary Fund is on the
way there to put a mortgage on the little multi-racial democracy's vastly
undervalued natural resources.
The IMF and Suriname's government announced the mission this week.
Appended are the IMF's press release and a ham-handed English translation of
a news report in De Ware Tijd (The True Times), the country's largest
newspaper, based in the capital city, Paramaribo. (As Suriname is the former
Dutch Guyana, Dutch remains the official language.)
Suriname's economy is built on gold and bauxite mining and oil extraction and
exploration -- Iamgold, Newmont, and Alcoa have operations there -- and the
recent collapse of commodity prices has almost wiped out the country's
foreign exchange reserves.
But the spectacular hypocrisy here is that the IMF itself is a primary
perpetrator of Suriname's problem, as the IMF long has been a crucial part of
the gold price suppression scheme of Western central banks. The IMF's
participation in the scheme was disclosed three years ago by GATA's
publication of the agency's secret March 1999 staff report, which described
how the agency was allowing its member central banks to conceal their gold
swaps and leases to facilitate their secret interventions in the gold and
currency markets:
http://www.gata.org/node/12016
GATA appeals to Suriname's government and all Surinamese journalists and
patriots to question the forthcoming IMF delegation about the agency's
culpability in gold price suppression.
No developing country deserves better than Suriname, whose people,
Wikipedia notes, "are among the most diverse in the world, spanning a
multitude of ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups." People get along
there virtually without regard for differences that routinely plunge other
countries into chronic political and social turmoil and even civil war. The
Reporters Without Borders organization ranks Suriname 29th among 180 nations
judged for freedom of the press -- 20 spots above the United States:
http://tinyurl.com/muyx49c
But like so many other developing countries, Suriname is a rich country
insisting on being poor, a country that, while bravely independent, has not
yet fully shaken off centuries of imperialism.
Suriname doesn't need charity and international debt. It needs a free and transparent
market for its primary natural resource, gold -- the world's natural money
and reserve currency.
