Today the Second Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) starts in Geneva, in the context of a hundreds of protests all over the World.
Nearly a million of people from all social sectors (farmers, indigenous peoples, workers, women, ethnical groups, unemployed and many other groups) are expressing since the 1st of May our rejection to the WTO, the multilateral trade system, and neoliberal policies - participating in the first international days of action of Peoples' Global Action (PGA) against "Free" Trade and the WTO.
On Saturday, at the same time as the beginning of the G8 Summit, over hundred thousand people throughout the world protested against the WTO and their neoliberal policies:
Global Street Parties were celebrated in 35 cities all over the world, for example in Geneva, Birmingham, Sydney, Toronto and Prague with several thousand people in each town.
In Brazil, a protest march of 40 000 landless and homeless people reached the capital Brasilia; 10 000 unemployed joined them on Monday. On Wednesday, the final day of the WTO conference, a demonstration through the government district of Brasilia is planned.
In India, 23 regional conferences against the WTO are occurring today. In Hyderabad, WTO symbols are being burned in several public places. On Saturday, there were more than 100 actions against the WTO and on May 1st, hundreds of thousands of peasants and workers urged the Indian to withdraw from the WTO in a massive national rally.
In Canada, a protest against the planned Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) is scheduled for today. There will be further demonstrations and direct actions in different Canadian cities on Wednesday. The OECD meeting starting this weekend in Montreal shall be blocked throughout its duration.
On "Peoples" Trade Day today, actions are being carried out in the United States and in Geneva against different symbolic centers of global capitalism.
Meanwhile, an incredible wave of repression is hitting Geneva: throughout the town, people are being stopped by the police at random, arrested and jailed for hours without any given reason - without judicial basis. Foreign persons which "do not carry enough money on them" (about 500 SFrs.) are registered for police records and then deported with a prohibition of re-entry.
Many people got heavily injured by the police on Saturday evening, although they behaved passively. At least one young man from Geneva still is in intensive care due to inner bleeding. The bicycle caravan "Money or Life" organized by WiWa Wendland in Germany was already stopped before reaching Geneva, all foreign participants were arrested, deported and are not allowed to re-enter Switzerland for two years. 40 Italians were arrested on their arrival at the train station in Geneva and also deported.
On Sunday afternoon, the caravan traveled to the French border to return the wagons, tractors and further equipment back to the German participants banned from Switzerland who were waiting at the other side of the border. On their way back to Geneva, ten people were arrested, among them two journalists from Switzerland and from Berlin. These were also registered for police records and had to spend hours in a freezing cold civil service building wearing summer clothes. After this custody they were given a paper written in French accusing them of having participated in all actions and demonstrations and were urged to sign it.
We condemn these arbitrary acts of the Genevan police and justice. These arrests are clearly illegal. We especially protest against the detention of journalists.
Peoples' Global Action is a worldwide alliance of organizations and grassroots movements that was formed the last February in a conference where representatives of grassroots movements from 56 countries of all continents came together. The conference produced the Manifesto of the PGA (available at www.agp.org) that states:
"We live in a time in which capital, with the help of international agencies like the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB) and other institutions, is shaping national policies in order to strengthen its global control over political, economic and cultural life.
Capital has always been global. Its boundless drive for expansion and profit recognises no limits. From the slave trade of earlier centuries to the imperial colonisation of peoples, lands and cultures across the globe, capitalist accumulation has always fed on the blood and tears of the peoples of the world. This destruction and misery has been restrained only by grassroots resistance.
Today, capital is deploying a new strategy to assert its power and neutralise peoples' resistance. Its name is economic globalisation, and it consists in the dismantling of national limitations to trade and to the free movement of capital.
The effects of economic globalisation spread through the fabric of societies and communities of the world, integrating their peoples into a single gigantic system aimed at the extraction profit and the control of peoples and nature. Words like "globalisation", "liberalisation" and "deregulation" just disguise the growing disparities in living conditions between elites and masses in both privileged and "peripheral" countries.
Land, water, forest, wildlife, aquatic life and mineral resources are not commodities, but our life support. For decades the powers that have emerged from money and market have swelled their profits and tightened their control of politics and economics by usurping these resources, at the cost of the lives and livelihoods of vast majorities around the world. For decades the World Bank and the IMF, and now the WTO, in alliance with national governments and corporate powers, have facilitated maneuverings to appropriate the environment. The result is environmental devastation, tragic and unmanageable social displacement, and the wiping out of cultural and biological diversity, much of it irretrievably lost without compensation to those reliant on it.
The WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and other institutions that promote globalisation and liberalisation want us to believe in the beneficial effects of global competition. Their agreements and policies constitute direct violations of basic human rights (including civil, political, economic, social, labour and cultural rights) which are codified in international law and many national constitutions, and ingrained in people's understandings of human dignity. We have had enough of their inhuman policies. We reject the principle of competitiveness as solution for peoples' problems. It only leads to the destruction of small producers and local economies. Neo-liberalism is the real enemy of economic freedom.
The need has become urgent for concerted action to dismantle the illegitimate world governing system which combines transnational capital, nation-states, international financial institutions and trade agreements. Only a global alliance of peoples' movements, respecting autonomy and facilitating action-oriented resistance, can defeat this emerging globalised monster. If impoverishment of populations is the agenda of neo-liberalism, direct empowerment of the peoples though constructive direct action and civil disobedience will be the programme of the Peoples' Global Action against "Free" Trade and the WTO."
In a press briefing that took place today at United Nations the representatives of PGA declared: "The struggle that takes place in these days will continue until the disappearance of the WTO and all other institutions and agreements that cause misery and death. It is part of a process of convergence of millions of people fighting all over the planet for a just society in harmony with the environment. The movements that participate in this process want to send a clear message to the WTO: we will not allow economic globalisation to destroy our environment, our culture, our future, our lives. Consequently, we reject the treaties of the WTO and we will not allow their implementation".
For more information please contact our press office:
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