Blog

A poor developing nation exceeding expectations against an EU powerbroker replete with grotesquely paid Champions League stars.

The duty of a WSCIF? blogger should be self-evident. But I’m less a fan of William of Occam than of Adrian Monk. Why accept the obvious solution when there is a perfectly perverse and convoluted alternative just waiting to be put together?

Spain are the only team to follow in the fourth quarter-final of the 2010 World Cup; now I just need to construct a logical case.

In this age of transparency and accountability, the following interest should be declared: I am a football fan and as such hopelessly biased towards Spain. Art historians can enjoy the superficial joys of the Renaissance to their hearts’ content but Europe has never produced an aesthetic spectacle to match Xavi, Andres Iniesta and David Villa working in tandem.

Happily, this blatant conflict of interest does not require justifying propaganda. A closer inspection of the facts reveals Vincente del Bosque’s men really might be the good guys.

Paraguay is the most unequal nation in the World Cup and its low military spending belies a strong naval tradition – 34 surface vessels seems rather high for a landlocked country. Even their creditable 30.8% female representation in government is trumped by Spain, whose 50% is disconcertingly just.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Paraguayans do not even have strong colonial guilt cards to play at this point. Economic irrelevance and geographical distance ensured indifferent Spanish governance virtually from its ‘discovery’. Paraguay has since revelled in its eccentricity, exemplified by their choice of revered national hero, Francisco Solano López.

Solano López was a megalomaniac misogynist dictator who brought Paraguay to the brink of total destruction by instigating the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70) with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. It’s as if tomorrow Albert II of Monaco sent the troops into France, the air force to Italy and the navy to Algeria with inevitable annihilation – only to be remembered with a national holiday of celebration in his name.

This maverick approach is also evident in their current choice of President: Fernando Lugo, a former Roman Catholic bishop with little political experience. In a single week last year Lugo was the subject of three paternity suits from his time in the church but those remain his most noteworthy headlines. An ambitious redistributive agenda has been repeatedly blocked by other branches of government.

In short, while Paraguay is second in our rankings they are an enigmatic curiosity rather than irresistibly deserving of support.

Spain are not without their faults but a WSICF? ranking of eight, below only the Netherlands among European nations, is an encouraging start. The Zapatero Government is the only centre-left administration in any large EU nation and has an admirable list of legislative achievements: withdrew from troops from Iraq, legalised same-sex marriage, reformed abortion law, reduced inequality and increased Catalonian autonomy. The memory of their election victory amidst Aznar’s ‘3/11 bombing’ manipulation – a nation showing intelligence to defeat fear in a moment of crisis – seals the deal.

And so, back to the football. It shouldn’t matter, of course. In fact it doesn’t. But people come together for the World Cup like for nothing else because at its best it’s magnificent. This Spain team is football at its best and if they were also orphan-eating, gun-toting despots it would still be difficult to hide a sneaking admiration for the way they play the game.

Posted in: Paraguay, Paraguay-Spain QF, Spain

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

In the UK  and across the globe, debate, anger and  fear are raging over the austerity measures  that are being imposed to cure economic ailments. The World Cup has offered us welcome distraction from the constant scare mongering generated by governments’ PR machines that tell us the debt problem (or really any problem you can think of) must be solved by cuts, cuts, cuts. They all say tell us ‘We know what is best for you, shut your eyes, open your mouth, take the medicine it will cure all our ills. Watch the football, drink your beer, stay on the sofa there’s a good chap.’

But the World Development Movement and others don’t want you to stay on your sofa. We have campaigned for decades to stop institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank from forcing developing countries to introduce public service cuts, privatisation and reductions in government  spending. Sound familiar?

We campaign against these measures  because the evidence categorically shows that these policies hurt people in developing countries making them poorer, and the gap grows chasmic between the richest and poorest. We have been vindicated, in the late 1990s even the World Bank and IMF slowly slowly began to change their neoliberal tune.  Ok so they weren’t exactly singing the Internationale, but they introduced measures to try and provide a safety net to cushion people against the worst aspects of poverty that these policies brought. And ok it wasn’t that sucessful, but we were somewhere in the argument that more privatisation and less government spending on, let’s say schools and midwives salaries, do not in fact cure the debt crisis, do not cure poverty but do bring unemployment, more children and mothers dying in childbirth and plummeting literacy rates .

But somewhere along the line we’ve lost the argument again because those same policies are being introduced now in the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Spain, the UK…. read behind the spin of ‘free’ schools or of ‘efficiency savings’ in the NHS and you’ll see they are the same old policies with prettier names. So our governments are singing loudly that neoliberal anthem that’s been discredited and discarded by its inventors for over a decade.

Brazil is one of the many countries that had to undergo the structural adjustment or economic shock therapy imposed by the IMF during the 1980s and 1990s. This included the economic policies described above to try to reduce its debts. Analysis from Oxfam showed the results:

• 43% of Brazilians – over 60 million people – lack the essentials of a decent life
• One in three children drop out of school without completing primary education
• 90% of sewage is untreated

Brazil now is also being hit by the economic recession, but they are still a growing economy. Having seen his country decimated by the cuts agenda in the past, President Lula does not sing from the neoliberal song book, instead   Lula wants to invest in new roads, highspeed trains and new homes for people on low incomes.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the new coalition government will be bringing in austerity measures that Brazil eshews. The Guardian argued that people voted for austerity with a conscience. The argument seems to be that the coalition is softened, in a similar way to the UK, by the Dutch equivalent of the Lib Dems. Not so soft?

I can’t make predictions for the match, but my prediction for the countries that bring in austerity measures: inquality and poverty will increase. I feel like sitting on my sofa, having a beer, watching the match to forget that the next generation of kids might go to a school run by Tesco where they are trained to work for Tesco, they will live in a Tesco housing estate and they will eat Tesco food.

But I won’t – what I will do is check out No Shock Doctrine for Britain who are campaigning against the cuts, and work to force those in power and in wealth see that austerity is not the medecine that will cure us, it is the medicine that no matter how much sugar we pile on top of it will only hurt us.

Posted in: Brazil, Global injustice, Netherlands, Uncategorized, Who am I cheering for?

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

Both Japan and Paraguay will be pleased to have made it to the second round and a fourth match in this World Cup. This is the fourth time Paraguay have made it to the second round, but on previous occasions they have always gone out. The South Americans will fancy their chances this time against a Japanese team who have qualified from the group stage for the first time away from home.

Although it’s not one of the glamour contests of the second round, Paraguay-Japan draws an interesting contrast in the Whoshouldicheerfor.com rankings. Japan is the most equal country taking part in the World Cup, Paraguay the most unequal.

One way to measure inequality is to contrast how much the poorest 10 per cent earn compare to the richest 10 per cent. In Japan, the rich get 4.5 times more. In Paraguay the rich get 65 times more. Japan is the most equal country in the world. Paraguay is almost off the scale in how unequal it is.

Inequality tends to be higher in developing countries. In our globalised world, there is increasingly an upper-middle class in most countries, but the absolute level of poverty is much greater in the developing world. The gap between rich and poor tends to be greater the poorer a country is.

For the past thirty years, policy across the world has been dominated by the view that inequality does not matter. New Labour Ministers in the UK to World Bank officials have argued that as long as absolute poverty is falling, it does not matter if some people are getting filthy rich at the same time. The rising tide of globalisation would lift all boats up, even if some are lifted up more.

This argument is fundamentally wrong for many reasons. The simple injustice of some people having so much in a world of such poverty is the main one, followed by that inequality allowing the rich to exercise power and keep the world spinning in their own interest.

But to tackle the ‘inequality doesn’t matter’ people head-on, there is little evidence that growth has helped the poor, but a lot that it has helped the rich. David Woodward, whilst at the New Economics Foundation showed that to get £1 more to the poorest 1 billion people in the world requires the global economy to grow by £166. That’s £165 for me, £1 for you… This is such an economically inefficient way to tackle poverty it is like trying to ride a square-wheeled bicycle up a hill. Meanwhile, the fortunes of inequality creating bankers and footballers ballooned.

Furthermore, inequality is a bad thing, and disadvantages everyone; rich and poor. In their book ‘Spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better’, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett show that citizens of more equal countries have longer, healthier, and happier lives, whilst violence, imprisonment and addiction are lower. Furthermore, it is not just the poor who are affected by inequality. Men from the poorest Japanese social classes are healthier than those from the richest social classes in England. Inequality destroys the relationships between everyone in a society, to the detriment of all.

In 2000, the CIA made a prediction which reads more like a statement of the bleeding obvious:

“The rising tide of the global economy will create many economic winners, but it will not lift all boats. [It will] spawn conflicts at home and abroad, ensuring an ever wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today. [Globalisation’s] evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide. Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation.”

Posted in: Japan, Paraguay, Paraguay-Japan

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

Paraguay are actually one of only two teams at the World Cup I’ve actually seen play in the flesh. Back in September 2008 I stood, blond haired and blue eyed, in the middle of the churning away section of Buenos Aires’ Estadio Monumental watching Argentina take on Paraguay, desperately trying to hide my Argentina shirt and keep my counsel when Messi set up Sergio Aguero for a sublime second half equaliser.

It was an interesting afternoon, the atmosphere in the Paraguay end was actually much better than from the home support, boisterous without ever having much of an edge. The highlight may have been spotting one Paraguayan wearing a Man City training top circa 1994. Big Gary Flitcroft fan, I can only presume.

Paraguay, both the crowd, and the team, were hungrier, compared to Argentinas calm, and ultimately ill-founded, superiority. It finished 1-1, and formed another nail in the coffin of manager Alfio Basile. The rest is history.

Paraguay sit behind only Ghana in the Who Should I Cheer For standings, thus shaming me for my Messi-supporting ways that day in Buenos Aires. They have the lowest national income of any participating nation outside Africa, emit extremely low levels of carbon and spend comparatively very little on the military. They spend even less on their military than the most peaceful country in the world, New Zealand.

However, to their discredit, Paraguay also sport utterly deplorable levels of inequality, with the richest 10% earning 65 for every 1 the poorest 10% earn. This can be attributed to 60 years of elite rule by the Colorados, first under military dictatorship, and then in the early nineties, under a fledgling civilian democracy.

In 2008, Catholic Bishop Fernando Lugo was elected President, representing a coalition of opposition forces and finally breaking the Colorado Party’s hold on power. While he promised to eradicate inequality, the far reaching tentacles of right-wing elite rule have frustrated any attempts to alleviate the grinding poverty of one of South Americas poorest countries.

New Zealand however, are no bad guys in this fixture. They are strong mid-table performers in our rankings, and in footballing terms, even minnows look down on them, such is their stature. They are so far underdogs, they’re subterranean, and their giant-killing, or at least giant-neutralising, exploits against Italy make them attractive candidates for support.

Nonetheless, despite not being surrounded by singing and jumping South Americans this afternoon, I will be cheering on Paraguay, and hoping their road out of tyranny and poverty becomes easier in the coming years.

Posted in: New Zealand, New Zealand-Paraguay, Paraguay

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

The Samba boys of Brazil will be gaining my support this World Cup. It’s not just because the are the past masters of the beautiful game, using their flair and talent to hypnotise supporters and the opposition, nor the fact they have held aloft the World Cup more times than any other country.

No, it’s mostly because I didn’t get my head kicked in during the 2002 world cup when I was living in Brazil. I watched the infamous England v Brazil game in a scuzzy down town bar in southern Brazil, I was the only Brit so thought I’d keep my head down, but when Owen scored my cover was blown as I shouted for joy. In any other country I don’t think I would have been left unabused but the locals didn’t seem phased and even let me join in their wild celebrations in the streets when their ten man team knocked out England.

If that isn’t enough Brazil is also a vision of what is possible. Having been ruled by foreign powers and more recently dictatorships the newly democratic Brazil lurched toward the development policies of the West during the 80s and 90s. This lead to massive wealth for a few and massive poverty for the vast majority and rapid destruction of the natural habitat including the Amazon. As inequality grew people started to fight back.

A group called the Landless Peasants Movement (MST) formed to challenge the inequality of land ownership, a situation where 90% of the land was owned by 10% of the population. Soon this movement was legally recaliming unnused land from rich land owners who weren’t afraid to shoot on site.  It has now become the  largest social movement in Latin America, with over 1.5 million members and has created homes and farms for tens of thousands of families.

At the same time the labour movement was starting to organise and out of it’s ranks came a leader known as Lula. Initially he was sidelined as a firebrand lefty,  but by the end of the 90s he was a prospective presidential candidate. He came to power in 2002 as the head of the Workers Party, with western experts predicting chaos and disharmony or Chavez type democracy. However he has proven his critiques wrong, he has launched a series of successful poverty alleviation schemes and the economy is growing at one of the fastest rates in the world.

Don’t get me wrong Brazil is still a country of horrendous inequality, the police human rights record is dismal and the destruction in the Amazon is still taking place at a phenomenal pace. But for me this is really a progressive country, that has decided to do things it’s own way, that values all people and is trying to make good the problems it has rather than ignoring them and focusing souly on keeping world markets happy. Also the recent UN climate change talks and resolution on Iranian sanctions have shown that they are stepping up to the mark internationally, showing that there are other ways to solve the worlds problems, that the line of old western governments isn’t the only one.

Posted in: Brazil, Who am I cheering for?

Like many people from Northern Ireland, I support two international football teams: Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

This isn’t being greedy – constitutionally speaking, anyway. One of the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement power sharing peace deal of 1998 was the recognition of “the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose”.

But while some more hardline Catholics / nationalists would choose not to support Northern Ireland and some Protestants / unionists would choose not to support the Republic, I would say with confidence that they’re both as likely, give or take, not to support England. Myself included. Something that living in England for the last ten years has done little if anything to change.

Tonight the Three Lions line up against a country with colonial baggage who play in white and green, Algeria. Hmmm, tough one.

But let’s set aside unwavering partisan bias for just a few moments, and instead look at cold hard social justice data, which Who Should I Cheer For has so kindly assembled in one handy place. Who should I be mindlessly honking my vuvuzela for tonight?

Well, with a national income per person of less than a quarter of the size of the UK’s (£21,604), Algeria (£4,490) are clearly underdogs in development terms, as well as on the football field. Their (pretty charitable) FIFA ranking is 30, 22 below England’s.

In the inequality stakes, the North African country perform better. For every £1 the poorest 10 per cent earn, the richest 10 per cent get £9.6, compared to £13.8 in England – a big tick in Algeria’s favour.

It’s far from cut and dried, though. While Algeria’s carbon emissions per person, 5.5 tonnes, are around half that of England’s, they’re still pretty sizeable. Only 1 in 10 of those in government in Algeria are women, much lower than the UK, even with the current regime’s pitiful lack of women at the top cabinet table.

Even worse, the former French colony’s military spending is actually marginally larger than England’s (2.9% of GDP compared to 2.7%). In fact, if you discount South Africa, who are let down by massive, Apartheid fuelled inequalities and large carbon emissions, Algeria are the least supportable African team according to WSICF stats, at 22 out of the 32 teams.

However, before I unfurl my miniature St George’s cross, a couple of mitigating factors should be taken into account. Firstly, Algeria’s high military spend can partly be explained by the fact that the country only came out of its decade long civil war against Islamic extremists in 2002. Secondly, the fossil fuels sector accounts for over 95% of Algeria’s export earnings, which have helped the government improve infrastructure, industry and agriculture since the end of the civil war.

So I’m sorry Fabio. Even on ethical grounds I can’t support you.

Posted in: Algeria, England, England-Algeria

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

I was surprised to find that that South Korea is ranked only 29th out of the 32 countries by ‘Who should I cheer for’ below even England and only two places above the US! The issue South Korea really loses out in the ranking is the amount it spends on the military (as well as its high carbon dioxide emissions). South Korea spends on weapons 2.6 times the amount that Argentina does and emits 9.7 tons of  carbon dioxide per person compared to just the 3.7 tons per person which Argentina emits.

With a nuclear armed North Korea as a neighbour, perhaps this high military spending is understandable? After all it is easy to put the blame on North Korea with the many horrendous human rights abuses committed by the fascist regime of Kim Jong-il. But to understand how we ended up in this precarious situation of a Korea split in to two heavily militarised states; which are still officially at war it is necessary to understand the history of the division. Korea was liberated in 1945 from Japanese rule, in the south of the country by the US and in the north by the USSR.

It is often held that the Korean War was started by the war mongering North Korea simply invading the South. This ignores the complexities of the issue. In his insightful book, Rogue State, William Blum highlights that under US occupation their progressive wartime allies (who were extremely popular) were violently suppressed and the US instead supported the conservatives who had collaborated with the Japanese. This made unification of Korea near impossible and essentially made the Korean War, in which 2.5 million civilians were murdered, inevitable.

The war would see many war crimes and not just ones committed by the North, which had a policy of assassinating all intelligencia located in the South. Just as horrific was the South’s mass killing of anyone suspected of being a communist sympathiser which led to up to 100,000 bodies being dumped in trenches, mines and the sea. The US too committed many war crimes. For example, concerned that there might be some northern soldiers mixed in with group of 400 civilians they decided to machine gun all of the unarmed civilians and massacred hundreds more by happily blowing up bridges packed full of fleeing refugees. Not only did the US repression cause the Korean War and cost nearly four and a half million people their lives, it also led to a long line of corrupt, reactionary, and ruthless dictatorships in South Korea.

The blame must be layed squarely at the door of the US, UK and other NATO countries, but given the memory of the dead and the many fears for the future; I will find it hard to cheer for anyone during the games which either of the Koreas are playing in.

Posted in: Argentina, Matches, South Korea, Teams

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

At my primary school only boys were allowed to play football. At the age of 8, I remember feeling like this was a terrible injustice, because I hated netball. My secondary school was a girls’ grammar school where all sports except football were taught, including rugby and cricket.

If I had the opportunity to play football at school, would I feel more of an affinity with the sport now? Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a man’s game and has very little to do with me.

In the public arena, it is still a man’s game, even if it’s changing slowly. Now, the girls at my old secondary school play in football leagues, and it’s pretty much the norm for girls to play football at school. Will this eventually lead to women’s football being as popular as men’s football? I wonder.

In 1921, women’s football was banned by the FA on the ground that “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.” The ban was only lifted in 1971. Women footballers had to wait until 1991 for the first Women’s World Cup.

Many international women football players have to work full time to subsidise their football careers because they don’t get paid enough. Is women’s football still sidelined and devalued because it is deemed to be “unsuitable for females”?

In the new UK coalition government, one would be forgiven for thinking that those in charge see politics as unsuitable for women. 75.5% of elected MPs are men, with only one female cabinet member. And perhaps it’s not just those in charge.

The day after the recent UK election, I had a conversation with a politically far-left-leaning man. His explanation for the lack of women in government was that “maybe it’s because women don’t want to get involved with a bunch of slimy politicians. They’re probably wise to stay out of it.”

I wonder if that’s what men in Switzerland thought during the referendum in 1959 where the majority of men voted ‘no’ to oppose women’s suffrage. And if that’s what the conservative women’s group ‘Federation of Swiss Women against Women’s Right to Vote’ were thinking.

Is women’s representation in government really just about whether women are interested in politics, just as, I ask, is the lack of coverage of women’s football really about not enough people being interested enough to watch it? Surely it’s more about a society’s lack of encouragement and commitment to equal opportunities?

Today, only 14.3% of Switzerland’s government are women. It sounds worse if you look at it in another way: 85.7% of people in government are men. It’s hardly surprising given the long struggle for women’s suffrage in Switzerland. Switzerland was the last country in Europe to grant the vote to women; women didn’t gain the right to vote in federal elections until 1971.

If politics is a dirty game and women can act as atrociously in power as men, some ask whether having more women in politics would necessarily bring about a fairer world? The president of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, is a self-avowed feminist and thinks it does matter – on  principle of fairness and equality.

“One thing that really awakens my rebellious streak is 20 centuries of one sex dominating another”, he said. “We talk of slavery, feudalism, exploitation, but the most unjust domination if that of one-half of the human race over the other.”

Zapatero was elected in 2004 in part on his promise to improve women’s position in society, in what is still a machismo culture. Now, because of a gender equality law, 50% of people in Spain’s parliament are women. It wasn’t difficult to get 50% representation, it just took political will at the top.

So, that’s why I’m cheering for Spain. My own disenfranchisement from football at school and the lack of representation by my own sex in the UK parliament means I have little interest in supporting England in the Men’s World Cup 2010. And besides, Spanish players are better looking. Oh, and a tip for those thinking of making a trip to the bookies: I have it on good authority that Spain are going to win.

Posted in: Global injustice, Matches, Spain, Switzerland, Teams

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

I am a soft touch when it comes to underdogs: I wear a badge that says: ‘I heart migrants‘; I buy the Big Issue; and I work for the World Development Movement to combat the injustice that is rife through out the world. And now I am faced with a choice between Ghana – the top dog of the underdogs according to Who Should I Cheer For?; and Serbia – the country that shot to fame in the 1990s as an international pariah. So for most people, the choice of which team to cheer for based on ‘underdog’ criteria would be simple. For me, not so simple.

But life, politics and war is never simple. Let me announce my bias: my father’s family is from Serbia, from a city called Kragujevac, which is known for a massacre of up to 5000 people in 1941 at the hands of the Nazis. My grandfather fled the country and walked across Europe with nothing but the clothes on his back.

Massacres and deeply held resentments have been prominent in the former Yugoslavia’s turbulent history for centuries and the war crimes that took place at the hands of the Serbs in the 1990s are clear to everyone. And now to the Serbs themselves, who because of the propaganda pedalled by Milosevic and the closure of independent media, did not know of the true extent of the genocidal war that was being waged in their name.

But what they did know is that they were under attack from sanctions, from NATO bombing and economic collapse. By the year 2000, Serbia was the poorest country in Europe. It was the year that I went to visit my family in Kragujevac and saw the embarrassment and anger in my cousin’s face when admitted that she had been ‘paid’ in eggs that week.

This was also the year that Milosevic was finally forced from power.  The Milosevic regime’s tactics to stay in power were violent and omnipotent, including hundreds of thousands of fake ballot papers, the arrest, detention and ‘diasppearances’ of journalists, opposition activists and judges who sympathised with the opposition. One judge was murdered when he refused to issue an arrest warrant for two opposition leaders. And the disappearance and death of Ivan Stambolic, the former Prime Minister, who turned against Milosevic and gave support to the leader of the opposition party, Vojislav Kostunica.

Kostunica was leading a shakey coalition of 18 opposition parties, and despite Milosevic’s repression, they organised election monitors, mobililsed people, and collaborated with the powerful student movement, Otpor.  After the contested election of September 2000, a month of mass strikes and one million people descended on Belgrade from across the country, including elderly  farmers on tractors and bulldozers. They broke through police lines and faced tear gas and stormed parliament forcing Milosevic’s resgination on October 5th.

The last decade has not been easy for Serbs. The chasm between the rich and the poor has widened. Although, there’s no data available in government numbers for the clever people behind whoshouldicheerfor.com to crunch, inequality has increased after the IMF imposed its usual draconian economic conditions, like privatisation of electricty, education and health care, in return for loans.

The poorest people in Serbia (and Eastern Europe) who have suffered greatly are the Roma population. Roma people are widely discriminated against, are the target of racist attacks and fail to access public services. Currently, in Serbia the situation of Roma people is particularly worrying with 30 per cent of the population living on less than $2 a day; entire communities unable to access health care, education and live in shanty towns. It’s my bet that data for the Roma population is not included in official government stats, because Roma people tend not to have birth certificates, ID or permanent addresses. If the stats for Roma people were available to us the maternal mortality, hunger and life expectancy results would be a lot worse.

So I will be cheering for Serbia: for the Roma people – the underdogs of Europe; for the Serbs who bravely and peacefully overthrew a genocidal dictator; and for my family, and all families, who are still struggling to get by.

p.s. Amnesty International is running a campaign to stop forced evictions of Roma communities in Serbia, please do get involved.

The symbol of Otpor's resistance against the Milosevic regime, it appeared in badges, stickers, posters, banners, graffiti, t-shirts and as a tattoo on my colleague, James' arm!

Posted in: Ghana, Global injustice, Serbia, Serbia-Ghana, Teams, Who am I cheering for?

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

Group E

Netherlands

Tipped in the WDM office as possible dark-horse winners, despite injury putting Arjen Robben’s participation in doubt, the Oranje are an attractive bet at 10/1. They can also lay claim to being the ethical punters’ choice, being the most generous aid donor at the tournament and one of only two competitors that have met the long-standing target of giving 0.7% of their gross national income as overseas aid. The Dutch give 0.82% of GNI in 2007, edging out, by a mere 0.1%,…

Denmark

…the other country to receive an overseas aid gold star from the OECD. The Danes have the distinction of winning a major championship – Euro 92 – after receiving a place only as a direct result of a UN Security Council Resolution (number 757, which ended Yugoslavia’s tournament before it had begun). They’ve never come close to repeating the trick and, with a strong Cameroonian challenge for second place, may well fall at the first hurdle for the first time in their history.

Japan

The first World Cup to be held in Africa features both hosts of the first in Asia, the joint Japan-South Korea tournament of eight years ago. The Japanese caused England problems last week, but their one goal was the only one in a four-match warm-up schedule, and their qualifying campaign was none too convincing either. Japan enjoys mid-table security/obscurity in the WSICF? rankings, but it’s hard not to like a country where the Prime Minister resigns because he broke an election promise – especially when that promise was to close foreign military bases. Expect another resignation – from Head Coach Takeshi Okada – before June is out.

Cameroon

With Didier Drogba (Ivory Coast) doubtful and his Chelsea teammate Michael Essien (Ghana) out of the tournament, Cameroon’s Sameal Eto’o could be set to be the continent’s hero in South Africa. Pity he doesn’t have the team around him to make a repeat of their 1990 quarter-final run all that likely. 1990 hero Roger Milla’s criticism of Eto’o – that he has performed well for European bosses but done nothing for Cameroon – would be a rather fairer description of the country’s famous rainforests and shrimp fisheries, both of which have been exploited enthusiastically by Western entrepreneurs while the Camerounais suffer the second-worst rate of chronic hunger in the tournament, with 23% not getting enough to eat.

Group F

Italy

The home of this author’s forefathers, it’s fair to say that La Patria is dodgy at best on both a footballing and social justice estimation. The ageing champions will be doing well to progress beyond the quarter-finals, with the Netherlands their likely opponents.

If Italy’s midfield feel a little past their sell-by date, Silvio Berlusconi’s leadership is positively rancid. With total control of the media, Silvio has shifted the Italian mainstream to the right and encouraged the rise of ultra-nationalist groups such as the Lega Nord. The effect is visible in our rankings: Italy’s overseas aid commitment is less than a third of the OECD target, and its economic inequality is worse than any other European competitors’ – except England.

Paraguay

Known to football fans mainly for the heroics of former keeper Jose Luis Chilavert, who – lest we forget – has scored more international goals than Emile Heskey, Paraguay qualified strongly, finishing ahead of Argentina in the 10-team CONMEBOL mega-group.

That campaign featured only 3 draws – a feast-or-famine record that seems appropriate for the most unequal country at the World Cup. The richest 10% of Paraguayans collect over £65 for every £1 earned by the poorest 10%. I wonder what a similar comparison between the richest and poorest players here would look like?

New Zealand

The All Whites qualified for this World Cup – their second – from a group which comprised Fiji, Vanuatu and New Caledonia. As a native of the Old Caledonia, whose group included the Netherlands and Norway and whose players are therefore not in South Africa but relaxing at home with a pizza supper, this fills me with rage.

How frustrating, then, New Zealand is top of the Global Peace Index and boasts the kind of legislation banning nuclear weapons in her territorial waters that has been proposed, but not progressed, by Scotland’s government.

I’d love to hate New Zealand. But it would be like kicking a kitten.

Slovakia

This may be the Slovaks’ first World Cup but they look good bets to qualify from a weak group. Plus, be fair, they’ve only been a country since 1994.

The country is has experienced rapid economic growth since the break-up of Czechoslovakia, yet enjoys the most equal distribution of wealth in the tournament and enviably low carbon emissions – less per capita than those of the hosts.

Posted in: Cameroon, Denmark, Group previews, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Paraguay, Slovakia

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.