A Utopian vision

By Faiza Rady
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services. Everyone has the right to education, to work and to social security."
From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Municipal security preparations for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) of heads of state, ministers and big business representatives convening from 25 January to 30 January in the chic Swiss Alpine ski resort of Davos took on the appearance of a war zone. With a massive deployment of police sporting heavy combat gear, helicopters circling overhead and barbed wire fences barring access to all strategic roads leading to the conference venue, this elegant playground of the rich was turned into an impenetrable fort.
The well-organised siege was set up to prevent ragtag anti-globalisation demonstrators from disrupting the high-powered WEF trade meeting, and a replay of the December 1999 Seattle street protests that closed down the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting.
Hosting the bigwig gurus of globalisation, it is ironic that Davos was transformed into a virtual no-go area. Literally cut off from the "global village" -- except for the regular mobile phone networking and e-mail trafficking -- the town shut down. Most stores closed and McDonald's, which had its windows smashed by anti-globalisation protesters last year, all but disappeared from sight behind protective boards.
In an additional effort to bar access to the town, the Swiss authorities halted railway services to Davos between 7am and 7pm. Also barring access to the town from all other ports of entry, security officers turned back five buses carrying some 300 anti-globalisation activists near the town of Lanquart, about 35 kilometres from Davos.
Turned back from Davos, a 24-year-old anti-globalisation protester from Zurich expressed her outrage at the violation of her constitutional rights: "I have a right to move freely in my country any time I want. Until today I did not really realise I lived in a police state," she said.
Nevertheless, despite the state of high alert and optimal security measures, a ragtag crowd managed to outwit the police -- barricades and all. Under heavy snowfall on Sunday, hundreds of protesters forced their way into Davos chanting slogans and carrying banners reading: "Money, power, profit destroy the world," and "Wipe out the WEF."
"More than half of the world's population live in absolute poverty," commented one of the demonstrators, blasting the deals struck "behind the WEF's closed doors" which exclude those affected by decisions made by transnationals and carried out by subservient politicians.
The Davos police, however, would have none of it. Protecting civil liberties -- including the much-touted right to freedom of expression in Western democracies -- did not figure high on their agenda. Instead, the security forces went on a rampage, attacking the protesters with clubs, water cannons, tear gas and rubber pellets. Yet the police also showed some measure of self-control. They refrained from spraying the crowd with cow manure -- a bizarre strategy which had figured in earlier anti-riot plans.
Meanwhile, thousands of demonstrators who were turned back from Davos congregated in Zurich, Switzerland's financial capital. Met at the train station by the Zurich police, the activists were tear-gassed and threatened with drawn guns. Undaunted by the brutality, the activists responded by setting fire to cars, smashing windows and spray-painting banks and financial institutions with militant anti-globalisation slogans.
Echoes of the protesters' anti-globalisation rage effectively reverberated thousands of miles away from Davos, in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. Hosting an alternative to the Davos meeting, the Porto Alegre Global Social Forum (GSF) was the first international session of its kind. Gathering more than 10,000 anti-globalisation activists -- including workers, trade unionists, political activists, grassroots representatives and NGO delegates -- the GSF aims to provide an alternative programme to the oppressive neo-liberal US-led economic agenda.
Intending to reclaim the concept of democracy as a people's inalienable right to shape their own destiny, delegates called for the direct involvement of citizens in economic decision-making through local referendums at the national level, and the participation of grassroots representatives at the international level. Failing that, former freedom fighter and first president of Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella, explained that people should take up arms and reclaim a right usurped by force. "We are here to reclaim democracy, but if the way is blocked, as in Colombia, Palestine or Algeria, then taking up arms is a sacred right," said Ben Bella.
Translating words into action, GSF activists joined some 1,300 members of Brazil's militant Rural Landless Workers' Movement -- known by its Portuguese acronym MST -- who occupied the grounds of the North American biotechnology transnational Monsanto that conducts experiments in biogenetic engineering in neighbouring Nao Me Toque. Led by Jao Pedro Stedile, head of the MST, and French farm trade unionist José Bovin, the workers decimated Monsanto's production facility. They uprooted corn and soybean plants, burned seeds and destroyed files from the company's office. "Let this be a warning," said Stedile. "If Monsanto continues its research into genetically modified corn and soybeans, we will have to come back and we will only be satisfied when we put the company's directors in a plane and send them back to the US."
On a more theoretical level, GSF activists said that they wanted to redefine the focus of globalisation: from an enterprise geared to maximising transnational profits to a project guaranteeing the equal redistribution of available global goods and services. Ideas for solving the obscene income disparity between the rich and the poor, the North and the South evidently include the often tabled debt cancellation for countries of the South. "The need to break the infernal cycle of debt" was a top priority on the GSF agenda.
Blasting the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) for inflating the value of the Third World debt in order to continue depleting Southern resources, analysts denounced the international money lenders for using the debt as a purely ideological tool. In the context of global indebtedness, the Third World's external public debt in fact only amounted to five per cent of the creditors' portfolio in 1999, explained economist Eric Toussaint.
However, scrapping the southern debt would only be a first step on the way of achieving global equity through the redistribution of resources. In the words of analyst Riccardo Petrella: "It is a matter of political urgency to set up a new global financial and monetary system, breaking away from the norms of the IMF and the WB."
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