The 10,000 or so demonstrators who converged on Washington last weekend with a point to make and a message to deliver ended their three-day protests on Sunday afternoon in Farragut Square by holding what they called People’s Assemblies, a kind of town hall meeting where people sat in small circles and discussed the challenges of their movement, which first gained notoriety in 1999 in Seattle after protesters shut down World Trade Organization events.
The demonstrations brought together anti-war activists, anti-capitalists, environmentalists, pacifists, anarchists, feminists and other street theater subversives who arrived in town ostensibly to protest corporate greed, and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund latest annual meeting, attended by finance ministers and central bankers from 184 countries.
Though they were met by a massive riot-ready DC police force, whose tactics in arresting hundreds were criticized by activists and their attorneys as overly aggressive and unconstitutional, a great time was had by all. (Some demonstrators stripped down to their underwear outside the Gap store in Georgetown, to protest its use of "sweatshop labor" in Third World countries.) Notwithstanding these fellows’ hedonistic style and penchant for street theater, we need to ask this: Are these young activists, despite their disparate agendas, saying something relevant to us? Are the IMF and the World Bank, along with the rich countries that determine their policies, deserving of criticism?
The fact of the matter is that these two organizations (ideally, the IMF specializes in short-term loans to help countries overcome financial setbacks, while the World Bank makes long-term loans for economic development projects such as roads, schools, health systems and the like) continue to raise doubts about their credibility as political, not economic, goals increasingly take a front seat in their decision-making process.
Protest leaders have repeatedly pointed to how, over the last year, for example, the US and its allies in the G-7 group of industrialized nations, the dominant shareholders of both institutions, have used their influence to funnel billions of dollars in loans on easy terms only to those strategically important governments, such as Pakistan, that are currently mobilized as partners in the anti-terrorism coalition.
Not only these critics, but many even on the IMF and World Bank staffs, are convinced that Washington’s foreign policy goals always override economic concerns in determining how and where the dollars are given out.
This is from a FIBIS clipping I have in my files: On Nov. 20, 2001, the Turkish Daily News proclaimed, "Osama Bin Laden Saves Turkey." If you’re baffled by the headline, then read the lead sentence in the piece, by columnist Mohammed Ali Berand, "We are about to get fresh funds from abroad because Turkey’s strategic importance has increased in the post-Sept. 11 climate ... If it wasn’t (sic) for Bin Laden, we would not be getting anything."
A touch hyperbolic? Perhaps. But cynics here will perceive a geopolitical quid pro quo, for it was no coincidence that the IMF announced in the middle of November that it planned to boost lending to Turkey by $10 billion in the hopes of "quelling the country’s latest financial crisis." This came about soon after Ankara declared its intention to dispatch special forces and "peacekeeping troops" to Afghanistan, providing valuable support to the US military presence there.
Clearly what is going on here is pressure, exerted by the heavies who run the IMF and the World Bank, to expand lending, and even giving outright grants, to whatever countries that have lined up to be allies in the war against terrorism, despite their dismal record over the years of boosting economic growth, improving living standards and respecting human rights.
And you only need have passed your Economics 101 to know that during the Cold War, the US, again using its considerable clout in these two organizations, steered loans to countries purely on the basis of whether or not governments in these countries had established anti-Soviet credentials.
The results, predictably, proved of little benefit to the long-term economic development of the countries involved, because the aid was used simply to prop up inefficient and corrupt governments. (A notorious example was the case of Mobutu Sese Seko, Washington’s buddy in then Zaire.)
Street theater aside, these demonstrators worry about what they correctly call "putting profits over people," as in the case of poor countries in Africa and middle income ones in South America that are expected by the World Bank to privatize basic services, such as, say, water. What happens here when slum residents in these countries can’t afford the fees that private firms ("pond scum" to the activists) charge for clean water? Some of them end up getting sick, or dying, from diseases they contract from drinking dirty water.
They worry about the environment too because the World Bank funds projects such as dams and electric power systems that end up not raising living standards but damaging the environment and forcing people off their land. Example: A road the World Bank helped build through the Brazilian rain forest in the early 1980s, which attracted thousands of migrants who razed a vast stretch of forest, spreading deadly epidemics among the aboriginal population.
The kids who demonstrated in Washington last weekend have a point. As I joined them downtown on Saturday, I found myself standing next to a couple from upstate New York. The man, in his early twenties, told me: "We’re not against globalization — the globalization of human rights, the globalization of environmental protection, and the globalization of transparency in international financial deals. We are, however, against the globalization of exploitation and corporate greed, exercised at the cost of poor people in poor nations around the world."
His lady friend, who was there to protest imminent war against Iraq, was not speaking to the press. She didn’t have to. The sign she held over her head said it all: "Our grief is not a cry for war."
These demonstrators are representative of America’s idealistic side, a side that in these dangerous times many of us forget is out there. ([email protected])
