|
WEF
Elite, Anti-Globalization Protestors Meet In New York
NEW
YORK, Feb. 1 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - International business and
economic leaders opened the five-day World Economic Forum here Thursday amidst
tight security in the terror-shaken city of New York, seeking to put a kinder
face on capitalism as their anti-globalization opponents prepared to make their
opposition heard, news agencies reported.
The
forum - held outside the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the first time in 32
years - faces heated opposition from protests here and from a rival meeting, the
World Social Forum, gathering up to 60,000 activists in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
While
the rich and powerful gather at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel from Thursday to
Monday, thousands of people will take part in activities organized by leftist
groups and associations, AFP reported.
Although
all involved have firmly rejected violence, the New York police department is
not taking chances and says it is monitoring anywhere from a dozen to several
hundred potential troublemakers.
Police
officers, some on horseback, blocked traffic from streets in several blocks
surrounding the hotel. Two sections of the sidewalk on Park Avenue were all the
space they allotted for protesters.
Haunted
by the memory of Seattle, where protests against the World Trade Organization
turned into a frenzy of violence and destruction that brought the meeting
screeching to a halt, New York dispatched some 6,000 police officers to the
Waldorf and other nearby hotels.
But
an organizer for a coalition of protestors said that such measures served only
to create a "climate of fear" to discourage people from participating.
"Our
plan is to have a peaceful and spirited rally," said Tony Moran, from the
New York office of the International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism)
coalition. "Our desire is to protest injustice."
"They're
really just trying to create a climate of fear… We actually have a police
permit for the rally," he told IslamOnline. "It doesn't exactly make
sense that you would grant a permit and then say you're worried about
violence."
Students
for Global Justice spokeswoman Yvonne Liu has announced that a meeting parallel
to the WEF would be held with numerous discussion groups and participants from
all around the world at New York's Columbia University.
Liu
said her group demanded to be included in global economy discussions and
complained that her generation was under-represented. What her people wanted,
she added, was a world based on clear policies, not on laws designed by
corporations.
At
the Waldorf Astoria, around 2,700 participants - including more than 300
political leaders and dozens of top business people, religious authorities and
media company officials - will meet for five days of talks.
Dozens
of workshops on poverty reduction, economic recession, restoring business
confidence, security, shared values and cultural differences, will take place,
Frederic Sicre, a WEF managing director, said.
Sicre
said there would be "unprecedented participation from the Islamic
world," and noted that Hamid Karzai, chairman of the interim administration
in Afghanistan, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohammed were among those attending.
But
not everyone has such high expectations for the workshop-packed weekend.
Globalization expert Ronald Walters, a government and politics professor at the
University of Maryland, said he has little hope for forums such as these.
"I
have very little confidence that they are going to come up with anything,"
Walters said. "We don't see coming out of these forums the kind of transfer
of financial technology that would make it possible for less developed countries
to compete in this global economy."
Walters
gave the specific example of development and trade in and with Africa, saying
that while the WEF had encouraged many nations - including the U.S. - to
consider debt relief, much more was needed to deal with immense human need.
He
said that the "blood diamond" trade, for instance, had only been
"winked or nodded at" by more powerful countries, and given only lip
service. "There's a tremendous need for the Davos forum to discuss
regulation of this kind of trade," he said.
Walters
said that the failure of leaders to take action unless some
"Enron-type" disaster moves them constitutes a "kind of global
economic racism, oppression to maintain economic advantage by not doing
anything."
"These
were the kind of issues that were raised in Durban," he said, referring to
the World Conference Against Racism in South Africa last year which the U.S.
boycotted for the third time. "There's a connection between human rights
and globalization that we try to make."
And
among the activists protesting at the site of the WEF, Jobs for Justice
spokesman Simon Greer said union leaders from several countries would hold
several meetings, AFP reported.
Greer
said WEF participants had ostensibly come to New York to show support to the
United States in its war on terrorism, when in reality their intention was to
push an agenda for deregulation and privatization.
His
group, Greer said, had a one-word answer for them: Enron, referring to the
energy giant that surprisingly went bankrupt, leaving thousands of employees and
stock holders in the lurch.
The
ANSWER coalition is holding an all-day teach-in today covering a range of
topics, including "Racial and Political Profiling" and "From
Palestine to Iraq: Understanding U.S. Strategy in the Middle East."
Moran
said that during the major demonstrations planned for Saturday opposite the WEF,
ANSWER demonstrators would be promoting one simple message: "Money for
jobs, not war."
"The
World Economic Forum represents a very rich grouping of a very few that cause
suffering for a lot of people all over the globe," he said, describing
issues such as homelessness - which is on the rise in New York - job layoffs,
immigrant issues and others.
"There's
a sort of corporate strategy behind all that, and the WEF represents the people
who create these corporate strategies, whether they're NAFTA… or whether it's
war policies."
"So
everybody's affected by these things and they're all coming together" to
protest, he added.
Besides
the meetings and counter-meetings, several demonstrations are planned in New
York, the biggest of which will take place Saturday leaving Central Park to the
Waldorf Astoria, under heavy police escort, AFP said.
The
prestigious hotel has begun to resemble an armed camp, with 41,000 police
officers ready to crack down on the smallest sign of violent dissent.
Police
have warned "troublemakers" that an 1845 law designed to hamper the Ku
Klux Klan will be invoked to place under arrest any group of people covering
their faces.
With
Additional Reporting by Ayesha Ahmad
|
