The revolt of anti-globalists

NEW YORK — Suddenly, there appears to be a lucrative market for rubber bullets, water cannons, tear gas canisters and riot-control equipment— and not just in Sri Lanka.

The anti-globalisation demonstrators, who brought the Group of Eight summit in Genoa to a virtual standstill last week, are now gearing up for the next major assault: the World Bank-IMF meeting in Washington DC at the end of September.

Police and security officials in the US capital, who are expecting more than 40,000 angry demonstrators to show up for the meeting, are bracing themselves for the largest demonstrations since the days of the Vietnam War in the 1970s.

The weeklong series of meetings, to be attended mostly by the world's finance minsters, will be given extra protection with additional police reinforcements from New York city.

The sanitised streets of Washington DC will also be scruplously free of rocks and stones: the handy weapons of choice by protesting demonstrators. In Genoa, the Italian police reportedly stockpiled body bags in anticipation of fatalities.

A 23-year-old Italian protester was shot dead, the first death since the anti-globalisation protests began at a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in the State of Washington in 1999.

The WTO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are three institutions that demonstrators love to hate because they are perceived not only to be insensitive to the problems of developing countries but also because they are manipulated by the world's rich nations.

Perhaps the only sympathy for the demonstrators in Genoa came from French President Jacques Chirac who remarked: "One hundred thousand people don't get upset unless there is a problem in their hearts and minds."

The Genoa Social Forum, a coalition of over 700 anti-globalisation groups which gathered in the medieval Italian port city, was trying to deliver a strong political message.

The world's industrial nations, it said, is trying to force open markets in poorer nations before they have the ability to compete in a level playing field.

Worse still, the West has continued to protect its farmers and its textile manufacturers by restricting or barring cheaper imports from developing nations— even as they preached the gospel of free trade to others.

The government subsidies for European farmers— which guarantee high prices for their products — run into billions of dollars annually and run counter to the concept of a free market economy.

The anti-globalisation forces, which have resorted to violence, are convinced that international organisations such as the United Nations have not really succeeded in forcefully advocating the cause of the world's poorer nations.

And so, they have taken to the streets.

After Washington DC, they will surface at a key WTO meeting in November in Qatar where thousands of government delegates will be accommodated in luxury cruise ships because of a shortage of hotels in the capital Doha.

The New York Times said that at the Genoa summit, the leaders of the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia, did discuss health, debt and the poor — "exactly the topics that demonstrators have complained that rich countries ignore."

The outreach session of the Genoa summit was also attended, for the first time, by a number of heads of developing nations, including Nigeria, South Africa, Algeria, Mali, Senegal, Bangladesh and El Salvador. But they were not part of the summit proper.

The discussions, at a dinner hosted by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, centred on new strategies for poverty reduction.

Currently, there are about 1.2 billion people living below the poverty line of less than one dollar per day, and almost 3 billion on less than two dollars per day compared with a global population of over 6 billion people, according to World Bank figures.

"Even these statistics fail to capture the humiliation, powerlessness and brutal hardship that is the daily lot of the world's poor," says UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

But the global campaign to eradicate poverty— one of the key issues facing developing nations— is being derailed by rising debt burdens, declining development aid, volatile commodity markets and proliferation of military conflicts.

"The world does not lack good intentions to eradicate poverty," says Harri Holkeri of Finland, president of the 189-member UN General Assembly. But the good intentions are not being matched by deeds as the number of poor people keeps increasing, not decreasing, he adds. Until it does, the anti-globalisation demonstrators will continue to have a legitimate cause to fight for.