Feb 27, 1998

CIVIC GROUPS LAUNCH COALITION AGAINST WTO

Geneva, Feb 25 (IPS/Gustavo Capdevila) -- The first global movement opposed to the liberalisation of trade and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was created Wednesday in Geneva by 303 delegates of civic groups from every continent. 

The new group's strength will be put to the test May 18 to 20 with worldwide protest demonstrations, scheduled to coincide with a WTO ministerial conference here in Geneva.  

A coordinating body, People's Global Action (PGA), will concentrate information on the demonstrations, which will be adapted to the needs and realities of each region. "We have a common strategy, but will adopt different forms of protest," said Medha Patkar, the head of India's National Alliance of People's Movements, and of NGO movement against the Narmada dam projects in India.  

But the political manifesto of the PGA, approved at the close of the conference Wednesday, underlines that the protests against the WTO and neo-liberal economic model will consist of non-violent acts of civil disobedience.

"Such democratic action carries with it the essence of non-violent civil disobedience to the unjust system," says the document.  

The PGA conference accepted the peaceful character of the disobedience after some debate. But at the request of Latin American indigenous delegates, an article was added that reads "however, we do not judge the use of other forms of action under certain circumstances."  

"Even democratically elected governments have been implementing these policies of the globalisation of poverty without debate among their own peoples or their elected representatives," the document stresses, and says "the people are left with no choice but to destroy" WTO-led trade agreements.  

"We want to tell the governments that they are destroying humanity with these policies. We aspire to a more just world," said Argentina's Alejandro Demichelis, of the Confederation of Education Workers.  

Demichelis' union was one of the creators of the PGA, along with the Peasant Movement of the Philippines, Brazil's Landless Movement, the Sandinista Central Workers union in Nicaragua and Mexico's Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN), and many other groups.  

Rene Riesen, with France's Confederation of Farmers, maintained that developing countries were not the only ones disturbed by the expansion of the neo-liberal model. Agricultural and food products should be excluded from globalisation, as they cannot be put in the same category as other merchandise, he added.  

The PGA issued a call to people world-wide to cooperate in the action against "anti-democratic development."

"We call for direct confrontation with transnational corporations harnessed to state power for short term profit," the document says, while underlining that direct democratic action against globalisation should be combined with the constructive building of alternative and sustainable lifestyles.  

Spain's Sergio Hernandez, with the Fair Play organisation, pointed out that all other attempts to organise movements against neo-liberalism at an international level this decade had failed. But he added that the example provided by the Zapatista movement, which burst on the scene in Mexico in 1994, contributed to the success of the PGA conference, which was organised with a broad-based outlook along the lines of the EZLN call for "a world in which all worlds fit."

PGA leader Hernandez added that like the Zapatistas, the global movement "is not interested in power."