John Pilger lashes IMF

BY MAX LANE

Spread the word now! John Pilger's vivid and evocative writing and film-making, and the voices from the Third World that he brings onto the screen, will make his new documentary New Rulers of the World a landmark event in explaining the truth about globalisation.

Pilger is now in the process of completing the new documentary. The documentary will be screened on television in Britain in July and negotiations are presently underway for it to be screened in August in Australian cinemas by Green Left Weekly and Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor (ASIET).

The film sets out to describe how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as well as the sweatshop multinationals, are rorting the Third World.

Pilger interviews internationally renowned critics of neo-liberal globalisation, including Vandana Shiva and Susan George, and confronts the top officials from the World Bank and IMF in Washington, DC.

Much of the documentary was filmed in Indonesia where IMF and World Bank interventions have wreaked havoc on the people.

Pilger took his camera team into the working-class areas of Jakarta, where tens of thousands of garment and footwear workers are crammed into atrocious living conditions. He was able to speak with many of these workers and hear their reports of working conditions in the factories which make brand-name clothes and shoes for consumers in the United States, Britain and Australia.

He talks to them about how they live and what they think about the future — and he also talks to the representatives of their bosses.

Pilger also travels into Indonesia's rich, green countryside to talk to rice farmers about the impact of IMF policies on their livelihoods.

Worker and farmer leaders, non-government organisation activists, journalists and others also join in explaining what impact global capital has had on the people of Indonesia.

Pilger also sought out Indonesians who had fought, as early as the 1960s, for an alternative path of development to that of offering open slather to global capital. Many had suffered imprisonment for their resistance to foreign domination.

One of those he talked to was Indonesia's great revolutionary writer and opponent of imperialism Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who spoke of the links between political developments in Indonesia since the 1960s, the rise of the dictator Suharto and the invasion of Indonesia by the international financial powers.

From GLW issue 445