SPRING MEETINGS: PERSONS OF COLOR WANTED TO BATTLE EVIL WORLD SYSTEM. There's not much time left before the folks who turned last year's Seattle trade talks into an uprising against economic injustice face their next challenge - demonstrations aimed at shutting down the World Bank/IMF spring meetings on April 16 and 17, report the Wall Street Journal Europe and the Wall Street Journal (p. 1A). While the anti-globalization crowd purports to speak for people of color worldwide, in the US the protesters themselves tend to be white.
Amid the poster-hanging and pepper-spray first-aid training, activists are frantically trying to recruit some black and Hispanic protestors to join the demonstrations planned for the meetings. "This effort, though it can at times be embarrassing or scary, is not only morally necessary, but essential to long-term movement-building," Juile Barnet, a white woman from suburban Washington says in an email to fellow social activists.
So far, it hasn't been easy. Many US blacks and Hispanics-already skeptical of a white-led movement-are more interested in local issues or everyday life than the perceived evils of global trade and finance. And those who do sign up are often middle-class, much like their white counterparts.
Meanwhile, the New York weekly Village Voice (4/5) reports that activists hope the D.C. event will be a worthy sequel to last November's success in Seattle, where more than 30,000 came to protest at the WTO meeting. Last weekend at a protest in New Jersey, Andrew Kircher, a spokesman for the World Bank, said that, "People are frustrated at the pace of global change and they're using us as proxies for their frustration." As for the protests in D.C., he said, "we don't understand why they would want to shut down the meetings when we're looking at serious development issues like AIDS, trade, and poverty with development leaders."
Separately, Reuters notes that with the protests aimed at shutting down the spring meetings of the World Bank and the IMF just days away, activists are divided on whether to use violence and vandalism to try to shut down the nation's capital. Organizers have pledged that the protests-seen as a sequel to the mass demonstrations at last year's trade talks in Seattle-will be peaceful. But some want to smash windows, turn over cars, and do whatever it takes to disrupt the city and bring attention to their distaste for economic globalization.
Hoping to avoid a repeat of that negative publicity at the IMF protests, a major effort has been made to ensure the destruction seen in Seattle is avoided here with organizers pressing all involved to agree to a set of nonviolence principles.
But some disagree with those guidelines saying they limit the options of protesters, making it less likely that the goal of shutting down the IMF/World Bank meetings will be achieved. "If we are serious about shutting down these meetings, we would have to think of a strategy to hold the city center hostage for quite some time," one activist wrote on the organizers' web site (www.a16.org). "How can we hold the downtown hostage without making barricades? It's impossible. And how will we protect ourselves if we aren't allowed to tip the dumpsters or overturn the cars needed to shut down the city?"
Police have been preparing for the protests for months. They plan to allow peaceful demonstrations but say they will not allow a Seattle-style debacle to happen in Washington.
Meanwhile, one World Bank official said, "A lot of [Bank staff] are bemused as to why the Bank and the Fund have been singled out from the great global morass to suddenly have all the sins of mankind put at their front door. It's simply absurd."