By Rick Mercier
KUALA LUMPUR — Representatives of non-government organisations met in Malaysia's capital for the fourth annual Asia Pacific People's Assembly at the time of the APEC summit.
Assembly delegates harshly criticised the neo-liberal development model, which they say promotes a form of globalisation that favours transnational corporations and national elites.
"Far from its promise of development, globalisation has wrecked societies, destroyed economies and financial systems, destroyed production systems, resources and the environment, brought small entrepreneurs and producers to ruin and led to famine conditions in many countries in Asia and the Pacific", said a statement ratified by the assembly's 636 delegates, who represented 30 countries and more than 300 NGOs.
The delegates cited "historic levels of joblessness", referring to the 26 million workers without jobs in Asia (excluding China and south Asia).
The crisis of neo-liberalism has set back the standard of living in some Asian nations by 20 years, according to delegates.
One assembly resolution condemned the US government for its support of "anti-people regimes sympathetic to American neo-liberal policies".
Participants in a human rights forum denounced the Indonesian military's occupation of East Timor. East Timor activists say that the holocaust there could not have occurred without western complicity — most notably that of the United States, which provides the Indonesian military with the bulk of its arms and equipment.
Participants in an indigenous women's workshop argued that neo-liberal globalisation "is the continuation of the colonisation which we have suffered since the search for raw materials and markets for the industrialised world's economies started".
Philippines indigenous activist Geraldine Fiagoy said that there is "a mad scramble by business to claim indigenous knowledge and resources". Indigenous peoples are being pushed off their traditional homelands, and these areas are opened up "for research and extraction by big business", she said.
Assembly delegates condemned the violation of the human rights of Mexico's indigenous peoples, particularly in Chiapas state. The assembly observed that neo-liberal policies have led to the increasing militarisation of rural areas all over the Pacific rim.
Neo-liberalism has led to an unprecedented migration of peasants from the countryside to the cities in underdeveloped countries. The rural poor then become the urban poor, and their needs cannot be met by governments or the private sector.
More than 200,000 families in Asia are evicted from squatter communities every year to make room for development projects.
The radical instability that neo-liberalism has introduced into the lives of so many has forced more and more people to go abroad in search of work. Driven from their home countries, migrant workers find themselves doing "3-D" jobs — work that is dirty, dangerous and demeaning.
Delegates also pointed to destructive aspects of neo-liberal growth. They said that it is frequently accompanied by cultural and environmental devastation.
Delegates agreed that the type of growth pushed by APEC and other neo-liberal forces suppresses growth in democratic space and in civil and human rights. "APEC proposes only liberalising economic structures, without any liberalisation of ideas or expansion of democratic space", said Ken Bhattacharjee of the Union for Civil Liberty, a Thai NGO.
"This kind of approach only leads to a race to the bottom, in which governments compete to provide conditions in which people will work for the lowest wages, without representation of unions."
The assembly convened as people once again were taking to the streets in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta to demand democratic reform.
Malaysian pro-democracy activist Tian Chua said that the concerns of assembly delegates and those of the protesters in Malaysia and Indonesia were linked. "The struggle against imperialism and the struggle for democracy are one and the same", he said.
[Rick Mercier is a freelance writer based in Japan.]