Balance sheet

Given the deal passed by the WTO, is this an unmitigated disaster for the global justice movement?

Well, yes and no.

For those who looked to the WTO and certain negotiators to deliver trade justice it’s a complete disaster. For those who believed the WTO could help “Make Poverty History” it’s been a particularly rude awakening. Bob Geldof must be crying on Bono’s shoulder having been revealed as so-naive-you-wouldn’t-believe.

For many NGOs who place so much importance on their negotiations, their lobbying and their relationship with governments and officials a lesson should be learned.

Oxfam condemned the text of the WTO agreement “as failing to deliver on development promises. The proposal, which emerged after all night negotiations, was unacceptable and reflected rich countries interests far more than those of developing countries.”

I mean… duh? the only results of the WTO HK could have been a bad deal or no deal. The radical end of the movement repeatedly argued this. I have beside me a headband distributed at the protests which reads “No Deal is Better than a Bad Deal”, there is no subtitle “But a good deal which helps developing countries would be very nice thank you”. Perhaps if some of the people representing the NGOs and in turn ‘speaking for’ people of the global south bothered to haul their arses out of the convention centre and onto the protests they might learn a thing or two.

Too often we saw a small group of western NGO workers come down to the Wan Chai Cargo Bay and have a photo taken with a couple of farmers as props. If there had been half a dozen Oxfam representatives, one or two from all the western NGOs with us on the street when holding the sit-in, just perhaps the police wouldn’t have been so aggressive and brutal, it would have been so much more difficult to traet protesters so badly with such an esteemed audience. It would have made no difference on the inside, but certain people were inside being esteemed.

Organisations and people across the board should realise that the WTO is an organisation set up to protect and promote the interests of the rich countries and the corporations they represent.

And ‘Yes’, the deal is a disaster because so many of the people that were directly concerned are going to take a hammering if the WTO actually gets it’s way. Korean farmers are facing the loss of their subsidies. Developing countries are going to experience yet more corporate colonisation of their economies. flexible working and lower pay will gain a stronger footing on the world economy. If the WTO is able to implement it’s policies.

This will have an effect on the west as well, as more services are outsourced to countries with cheaper labour, I can see Blair on the TV in my mind right now, explaining that ‘these job losses are an inevitable part of globalisation, it’s out of my hands’. Well that process was aided and speeded by the UK government, they presided over the deal which consigns millions of people to misery.

But all is not despair. Just yesterday in Bolivia another breakthrough for our movement was made, with the election of Evo Morales. And the awareness and knowledge of the movement grew once more because of the ministerial in HK. From HK convention centre to policy implementation on the ground across the planet is a significant distance.

The protests in Hong Kong were an inspiration, and they did have an effect, an article in the Sunday Morning Post was entitled “Protests threaten convention centre” it reported that Mandelson, Danish delegates and others were forced to travel by boat to a key early evening meeting after protests on the streets of Wan Chai cut off their overland route.

Delegates leaving the centre in the evening were warned that they might not be able to get back in that evening. “If I were you, I would go and have dinner and a beer” a delegate was told by a cop.

The discipline and tactics of the Koreans will be impossible to repeat in other places (The role of military service under a dictatorship has helped to achieve this kind of discipline, a price most demonstrators will not be willing to pay!!). But there are lessons we can learn. Being targetted and focussed, respecting and winning the support of the mass of people, working hard and with principle all help the movement move forward.

But being militant and radical and not falling for the cheap tricks of the likes of Mandelson, Geldof and Blair is the real lesson of Hong Kong.

I would rather have 100 korean farmers in the convention centre facing off Peter Mandelson than 1000 NGO and trade union representatives. Perhaps they might have resorted to language that even Mandelson could have understood.