Yesterday, massive police violence stopped a peaceful protest of 500 people from Third World countries, during the World Economic Summit. Because of this experience of police repression – they were stopped from taking the tram into the city centre, enclosed, partly mistreated and taken into custody – only few of them felt confident to take part in the demonstration on Saturday 19 June. This shows once more, that protesting against the world economic order is being repressed with all possible forces.
Among the people in custody was Vijay JAWANDHIA, President of the Inter-State Co-ordination Committee of Farmers' Organisations, the Indian network of farmers‘ movements, as well as his wife. 32 persons were kept until the next early morning, and there were 5 arrests. Three films of journalists present at this incident, have „disappeared“ while being developed in the G7 Press centre.
With the World Economic Summit, the InterContinental Caravan for Solidarity and Resistance comes to an end. For one month, a Caravan of Protest has toured throughout Europe. The majority of the participants come from India, but there are also delegations from Brazil, Bangladesh, Nepal, Mexico, Colombia, Pakistan, Chile, and the Ukraïne. They have been doing non-violent actions in 10 European countries.
At the demonstration on Saturday, Prof. M.D. Nanjundaswamy, President of the Indian farmers‘ movement KRRS, referred to this historical event of confrontation of people enforcing a central global power structure and people struggling for empowerment., with simultaneous actions in all continents - for example in London and New York, anti-capitalist demonstrations with tens of thousands of people. He stressed that a growing international solidarity is necessary:
"We have come here to build bridges between people, who wish to reclaim their future, who will not obey to any institution any longer, that build and support the existing system of self-destruction: the system of one global economic, political and military. People, who want to build a better world in a self-determining way. A world, in which people have control over their own local economy, where centralised economic and political power disappears, where economic growth is used for a better quality of life for all people as a common goal, where militarism and aggression will become as bad memories from history
We do not want money from the West, or technologies or "experts" that force your development model upon us. We also reject to be used as a political tool for asking the elite for reforms that we never demanded. We do not aim for a seat at the international negotiation table, nor for a bloody revolution; we aim very simply for a long-term project of building another world, a world, that extends from the local to the global, for a change of values and daily actions of millions of people. We in the South feel that it is not enough to do symbolic and isolated direct actions, or to search for alternatives on your own, to destroy the forces that push for the new world order. It is our aim to work together and co-ordinate our actions. After this Caravan, both direct actions and the development of alternatives should be on our common agenda."