Protests planned for Sydney WTO meeting

BY AMY MCDONELL

SYDNEY — Less than a week after trade minister Mark Vaile announced that 25 delegates from around the world will be attending a World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting in Sydney on November 14 and 15, activists have taken up the challenge of organising mass demonstrations at the event.

An August 20 meeting called to discuss "autonomous, decentralised" protests against the meeting was attended by around 50 people, despite being organised in only a few days. During discussion, several ideas were thrown up as to what form the protest should take, including organising a blockade of the conference, a November 12 "refugee rally" in the style of the "immigrants march" during the anti-G8 protests in Genoa, Italy, in 2001. The meeting also discussed raising demands that support refugees' rights as well as opposing corporate globalisation and the "war on terror".

The meeting launched a group called "No WTO", which will organise spokescouncils on September 3 and September 21. No WTO also decided to draft a call to action with the aim of drawing in broader forces interested in protesting the WTO.

The organising collective for the Sydney Social Forum, which will be held September 21-22, also discussed a response to the WTO meeting. It decided to change the agenda of the social forum in order to accommodate the September 21 spokescouncil. Other changes, such as the inclusion of a plenary session on alternatives to corporate globalisation, mean the social forum will be a valuable opportunity for participants to engage in discussion and debate before the November protests.

Although the venue of the WTO meeting is not yet known, what is certain is that "N14-15" will be an opportunity for all those who oppose the WTO's corporate globalisation agenda, and support a society that places people's needs before corporate profiteering, to raise their voices in protest.

Simon Butler, national coordinator of the socialist youth organisation Resistance, commented that "the announcement of this meeting of the WTO throws up a challenge to left-wing activists in Sydney. Our task is to make the protest a coming together of all those who stand up for the rights of refugees, who oppose the occupation of Palestine, who have called for the abolition of Third World debt — and who stand against the globalisation of capital and for the globalisation of solidarity."

From Green Left Weekly, August 28, 2002.

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From GLW issue 506