Activist from Germany
People's Global Action
She was invited to speak at the International Camp for Justice and Dignity of people's.
The process of building PGA in Europe started with the founding of PGA in Feb.1998, and in the summer of 98 we had a fortnight-long seminar in Geneva, on the very basics of economics, world structures, up to more complicated things like revolution, gender, etc. At this meeting the idea started to have a caravan of 500 people from southern countries.
There are groups present from different countries at the seminar. We worked on this project in the autumm of 98, until the summer in 99. The caravan began in May, the project was first called TCP (Totally Crazy Project) and then the InterContinental Caravan. And that was Something where different groups had to work quite closely together to organize this project.
So in the summer of 99 we had this project with nearly 500 delegates, most of them from India, from the small farmers' movement, but also from other Asian and Latin American Countries, one month in different European countries. That was like the real begining of the European PGA network.
Then we had the protests against the IMF/WB summint in Prague, the prague compas said they needed help to organize a project of this size.
Yes, INPEG is part of PGA, and also nearly all of the European groups were there.
This process is growing, and now it's much bigger. Some of the organizations and people who participated in Prague maybe didn't even know that PGA existed.
That was the begining of the process.
The first were Reclaim the streets, then Ya Basta in Italy, and now it's MRC (Global Resistance Movement) in spain and the people in Leider in Holland, from the Eurodisney squat.
Well, we had 2 conferences in the last year, I was in March in Milan, and a second one in Holland, and one in Spain, but one was a more internal meeting.
The idea arose basically after a process of self-criticism after the caravan, to have a European Popular Consultation
That means first having an internal consultation in the social movements, as broad as possible, not only within PGA.
And then more broadly among society.
The idea is that the whole process is very dependent on global activists, who work themselves full time to social change. Well nowwe can have 500.000 people on the streets, like in Barcelona last weekend, but despite the strong criticism of capitallism, we are still isolated within society.
The best thing for Irish people to do would be to contact Reclaim the streets. The idea is to start with promotion groups, a group consisting of people from different groups at city, region an village level, an consultin with other groups too, to elaborate proposals. The idea is to have coordination in Europe but the process itself should of course be regional. This proposal is on the PGA website agp.org