Could the anti-WTO protests been bigger?

BY PIP HINMAN

SYDNEY — The NSW state government and corporate media's blitz in
the weeks leading up to the World Trade Organisation mini-ministerial meeting,
which claimed “violent protesters” and “society's dregs” were intent on
“arson” and “trying to provoke the police”, would have kept many people
away from the protests. Still, a significant number turned up to the first
two protest days, defying the march ban, and a smaller number went out
to Homebush, where the WTO meeting was held, on the third.

NSW ALP police minister Michael Costa's attempts to close down web sites
organising for the protests and his refusal to issue march permits for
the November 13 pro-refugee march and the anti-war, anti-WTO march the
following day were attempts to discredit and isolate the protesters.

The Daily Telegraph ran a concerted campaign in the lead-up to
the protests with headlines such as the November 13 “Police batten hatches
for WTO protests” and Costa and radio shock jock Alan Jones frothed as
if all their Christmases had come at once.

“Let me be clear”, Costa said on November 13, in reply to the Greens
MLC Lee Rhiannon about whether the police would be violent during the WTO
protests, “people are coming here to have a violent confrontation with
the police. Let me say to you: The police will be prepared and I will back
the police in what they do.” The November 15 Daily Telegraph led
off with “Violent misfits cost the city $5 million”

But the state's tactics backfired. Around 1000 people turned up in defiance
on November 13 and the march was lively, colourful and peaceful. One letter
to the November 16 Sydney Morning Herald asked why so many
Tactical Response Group (TRG) officers were there: “The crime they were
waiting to deal with? As far as I could tell it was a couple of hundred
mainly young people, most of them women, listening to people talk about
the problems with the WTO. The scene was not exactly a seething pit of
violence...”

The next day some 1200 people gathered through the morning to join the
protest outside offices of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The protest soon became mobile, targeting various “corporate scumbags”
through the city streets. Buoyed by the previous day's march-ban defiance,
the marchers were lively and upbeat, though disorganised.

Police violence

That was until about 16 mounted police spooked everyone by galloping into
part of the march that had veered the wrong way down a one-way street.

Then all hell broke loose. Various cameras caught the action, showing
the police's claim that the protesters were responsible for the assault
on Patricia Karvelas, a journalist with the Australian, were false.

The next day at Olympic Park in Homebush, the TRG went in hard against
around 500 protesters, arresting 35. The police even used force to bust
up the orderly departure of the demonstrators.

The heavy-handedness of the police on November 14 and 15 was obvious
and there was little, if anything, that police spokesperson Dick Adams
could say to either justify or counter this. It was clear, for all who
cared to open their eyes, that what violence there was came from the police.
This gave protesters the high moral ground and won us public support.

Public sympathy for the anti-WTO protests was dramatically expressed
in the letters column in the November 18 Daily Telegraph, perhaps
the most anti-protester of the tabloid press.

Ben Cubby, slammed the Daily Telegraph's coverage of the
event as “biased and melodramatic”. “As for the protesters attacking police”,
he went on, “there are no photos of this happening, despite the fact that
dozens of cameras crowded around every flash point”.

Laura Allison couldn't “understand how police could be fearing for their
lives at the WTO protests when your story also says that police outnumbered
the protesters. Aren't the police the ones with the lethal weapons and
the training to use them? ... Next time don't invite the police at all
and the protests will be much more peaceful.” There were five other letters
in the same vein.

Anti-WTO sentiment

But it wasn't just the police violence that gathered sympathy to us. The
issues the protests highlighted are of concern to a growing number of people
the world over. Since the spectacular 1999 protests outside the WTO meeting
in Seattle, the WTO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank
have been more exposed as instruments of rule for the global corporations
and the governments that serve them.

As the anti-corporate globalisation movement has grown, these institutions
of capitalist rule have been forced onto the defensive. The WTO's various
makeovers, along with “sophisticated” public relations have still failed
to convince a growing number across the globe that the WTO is out to help
the world's poor.

So trade minister Mark Vaile's attempts to paint the protesters as a
“lunatic fringe”, barking up the wrong tree because the meeting would assist
Third World access to pharmaceuticals, was not convincing.

As another letter to the November 18 Daily Telegraph put it:
“We have been hearing about the so-called trickle-down effect that free
trade is supposed to deliver to poor countries. The fact is that it is
not working. The rich countries are the ones getting richer at an ever-increasing
pace, and the gap is getting wider with every year.”

Workers in rich countries are also being forced to pay the price for
corporate globalisation — through longer working hours, reduced penalty
rates, cuts to social spending and privatisation. So trade unions should
play a strong role in cementing solidarity between their members and workers
in the Third World, who are even more exploited.

But while this is starting to happen in many parts of the world, it
was not the case in NSW, where union leaders, including from the Construction,
Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and the Australian Manufacturing
Workers Union (AMWU) who describe themselves as “left”, decided against
joining the anti-WTO protesters.

This is not the first time unions in NSW have refused to mobilise their
members for anti-corporate protests. May 1 (M1) protest organisers have
tried in vain to involve unions in peaceful protests outside the stock
exchange in 2001 and, this year, outside the Australasian Correctional
Management (ACM) offices.

In sharp contrast, in Melbourne the militant leaderships of the CFMEU,
AMWU and other unions have supported the M1 protests for the last two years.
They also joined the S11 protests against the World Economic Forum summit
in 2000.

War and neo-liberalism

In Sydney, in the lead-up to the WTO meeting, the Australian Fair Trade
and Investment Network (AFTINET) initiated meetings to organise what was
first mooted to be a march of up to 50,000 unionists on November 14. Activists
argued, unsuccessfully, that this “unity march” should focus on opposition
to both the WTO and the pending war on Iraq.

As the weeks wore on, the union officials were reluctant to commit to
specific numbers for the unity march. Then, on November 1, just two weeks
before the demonstrations, AMWU state president Brian Beer and officials
Alistair Kentish and Jan Primrose declared that their union opposed a march.
There was only to be a lunch-time rally.

The “no march” position was a bolt from the blue to all but those with
a direct line to the ALP machine, and it generated some heated debate.
A range of arguments, but most notably concerns about “protester violence”,
were used by these AMWU leaders to “justify” why they wouldn't join the
anti-WTO protests. Several more efforts were made by various protest groups
to get the AMWU and the CFMEU to reconsider, but to no avail.

In the end the 30-50,000-strong “unity” rally did not take place. In
fact, if it wasn't for the vibrant and peaceful rally of some 1200 people,
which had regrouped after the police charged protesters in Clarence Street,

marching into Hyde Park, the “unity” rally would have consisted of a stage,
speakers, a handful of union officials and their associates in yellow marshal
smocks, and an audience of about 200.

The unions' abstention explains why, despite the broader public sympathy,
the anti-WTO protests ended up being as small as they were. Yes, they were
a victory for the right to protest and march, our message did get out and
we took the high moral ground in relation to the police violence, but they
could have been much bigger.

[Pip Hinman is a member of the Democratic Socialist Party national executive.]

From Green Left Weekly, November 27, 2002.

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