Pop stars and poverty in Africa will share centre stage on Saturday at the Live 8 mega-concerts, but doubts remain over whether the biggest music show on earth will be enough to spur world leaders into action.
Ten linked concerts across the Group of Eight (G8) most powerful nations and South Africa will draw millions of people to hear top talents such as Madonna and U2, while also learning about the daily misery of the developing world.
The organisers, led by rocker-turned-activist Bob Geldof, hope to use the event to focus a huge global effort into pressuring G8 leaders to strike a deal on debt, aid and trade for Africa at a summit in Scotland on July 6-8.
”It is the biggest and best concert the world has ever seen,” said Oliver Buston, European director of Data (Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa), the Africa campaign group of U2 singer and activist Bono, which helped plan Live 8.
”It is going to be spectacular and the whole thing is being organised with the sole purpose of putting serious, political pressure on the G8 to deliver what is needed for Africa,” he said.
Thrown together in a whirlwind few weeks, the organisers on Wednesday added Moscow to a list of concert cities, joining London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Philadelphia, Toronto, Tokyo and Johannesburg, plus a separate Africa-themed event in Britain.
British band the Pet Shop Boys will perform to a crowd in Red Square on Saturday along with ”top national artists,” they said.
On the same day, mega-stars such as Paul McCartney, Robbie Williams and Pink Floyd will rock Hyde Park in London, while glittering shows in the other cities have drawn headline names such as Bryan Adams, Green Day and Bon Jovi.
Following criticism about a lack of African artists taking part, the Live 8 organisers have also set up an African-only event, entitled ”Africa Calling” at the Eden Project in St Austell, Cornwall, southwest England.
To press home the message, each concert is expected to fall silent for a period while artists and fans click their fingers at three-second intervals to symbolise the fact that a child dies due to extreme poverty every three seconds.
While the big name acts will attract people who may not otherwise have rallied on behalf of the thousands who die each day in Africa, these fans will leave with a much better understanding of the situation, said Buston.
”They will turn up because the music is going to be good but in the process they will become aware of these issues,” he said.
”The musicians are kind of like the Pied Pipers for us. They are the people who draw attention to the issues.”
Geldof, who organised the original Live Aid charity concert in 1985, wants people to travel to Edinburgh after the gigs to take part in a series of rallies during the G8 summit at the nearby resort of Gleneagles.
He and other activists, however, have expressed doubt about whether the G8 leaders will meet their demands in full to cancel debt, double aid and facilitate a fairer trade system for Africa.
”What we don’t know though is whether they are going to respond or not and it is not looking good at the moment,” said Matt Philips, a spokesperson for Save the Children, one of the charities that is helping to organise the demonstrations in the Scottish capital.
G8 finance ministers meeting in London earlier in June made a good start by agreeing a landmark deal to immediately write off all multilateral debt owed by 18 countries, 14 of them in Africa.
”It’s a crucial principle accepted, but in practice they have not extended it to the 60 countries that need 100% debt cancelation,” said Philips.
The deals on the table ”are in the realms of what they are prepared to do rather than what they could do and that, to us, is not the historic moment that the world is demanding of them this year.”
Live 8 will take place one day after International White Band Day when people across the world will demonstrate against Africa’s misery by wearing white wrist bands — the symbol of the so-called Make Poverty History Campaign.
The concerts will also be in full swing as tens of thousands of people converge in Edinburgh for the first of the rallies to call for an end to poverty in the developing world. – Sapa-AFP