Raj Patel, anti-WTO activist

Raj Patel has worked for both the WTO and World Bank, and is currently active in campaigns against them. He is based in Ithaca, N.Y., where he is a Ph.D. student at Cornell University and a co-editor of the Voice of the Turtle.

As the protests in Seattle continue, it's becoming increasingly difficult to navigate the torrent of misinformation in the media. It is true that downtown Seattle has been transformed into a nominal war zone. But I say "nominal" because, other than a couple of hours of exceptionally violent street-clearing by the city's finest, downtown Seattle was pretty quiet yesterday. (The main disturbances seem to have happened in a neighborhood a little removed from the downtown area.) The mayor has, however, in effect created a war zone downtown. By signing a declaration of a state of emergency, he has overridden the peaceful reality of nonviolent protests and militarized 60 city blocks.

This means that all rights are suspended for the duration of the WTO conference. All of them. A group of protesters came in to the city center at 7 a.m. the day after N30 to help clean up the mess. The police wouldn't let them in because they were wearing anti-WTO paraphernalia. And any civilian found in possession of a gas mask within the no-protest zone will have it confiscated and face an additional six months in jail. Notice how, as soon as you enter the zone, you stop being a citizen with rights, and become a civilian, a threat, a subject for military control. All because someone drew up a map and signed some paper.

The transformation of space is never so complete, though. I was out after curfew last night, wandering the streets looking for friends. I wasn't alone. The shops in the downtown area were still open. Expensive restaurants still catered to delegates. Liquor stores still sold grain alcohol to anyone who could afford it. The police drove up to me and very politely reminded me that I was in violation of the state of emergency, and if I'd please move along, they'd be very grateful. Different from the random beatings earlier in the day, no?

So don't be believing the sweeping generalizations about downtown being in the iron grip of Terror. This is a very selective persecution. Only people who want democratically to express their dissatisfaction with the present regime are being targeted. (The targeting skills of the police aren't terribly good, though -- there was a great deal of "collateral damage" earlier on today, when office workers and passersby were also caught in the clouds of tear gas and beaten by the police.) For us, the protesters, Seattle is a police state. But for the rest of Seattle, it's business as usual. This is very, very frightening. Think about it for a second. The delegates can go about their business, the downtown homeless can eke out a living, the stockbrokers can make their fortunes, even some NGO members can shuttle back and forth and not notice the difference between a state of emergency where rights are suspended, and regular everyday times, when the rights exist but no one wants to use them. This is the land of the free, but everywhere, it would seem, people are in chains.

I heard some important perspective on this from a friend from the Philippines. She told us that two weeks ago, in Manila, a few days before an Asian ministerial meeting, a shantytown near the convention center was gassed and bulldozed. Two people were killed -- an elderly woman died of a heart attack, and an infant suffocated on the CS gas (made in America, traded around the world). This violence happens everyday in the Third World, but the voices raised in protest there don't seem to carry very far. Now the violence is on the streets of a developed country, it is visible, in our faces, and inescapable. Ultimately, the Battle of Seattle could just be chickens coming home to roost -- the economic deprivation and social division brought about by inequitable institutions isn't limited, after all, to the South.

So what about the voices raised here? Reading the popular press, you could be forgiven for thinking that the only thing the protestors are doing is having the crap whacked out of them. This isn't true. Sure, there's blood on the streets (drawn by King County's finest, never by protesters). I have yet to find information in the national press, though, on what the protesters have done since being arrested.

They're still resisting, and resisting with humor. There was a fantastic image of them on local TV yesterday at the police holding facility specially set up to "process" them. The busses had arrived, and the fingerprint takers had their ink pads all set up. But the activists wouldn't get off the bus. They were staying there until they were given access to a lawyer and given a phone call. And the police really didn't know what to do with them. They were let off the bus to go to the bathroom, and then let back on the bus. And last I heard, they were still there, after 18 hours. Fighting back, nonviolently, and with compassion.

Resistance isn't just limited to the streets, though. Governments can resist other governments too. Not all governments are the same. It is possible, just as the protesters on the streets have been doing, for delegations from the South to speak truth to power. In the WTO sessions themselves, you can see small, and uncoordinated, but nonetheless real acts of resistance. A quick bit of WTO background first.

At the Singapore ministerial meeting in 1996, the U.S. and EU decided that they wanted to have some new issues brought to the negotiating table. It was decided that committees would be formed on these new issues, and would report back to the member states. The committees still haven't completed their work, but the U.S. and EU are getting impatient. They're pushing through a declaration on new issues at the moment. And developing countries are furious. There was an official session yesterday to debate this. Developing countries took the floor and vented their anger. In the afternoon, the New Zealand chairperson brought out a draft text for discussion. It was the same text on new issues that had been circulated in Geneva a few weeks ago, and which had been rejected by developing countries even then. The morning session had, in effect, been entirely useless -- an opportunity for developed countries to appear to listen to developing ones, without actually doing so.

It gets worse. The U.S., EU, and Canada have been selectively buying off key developing countries with bilateral concessions. This means that solidarity between developing countries is weakening. The game plan seems to be that these client countries will sit, together with the big players, and draft a document which will be rushed through a brief committee meeting early tomorrow. This is how things get done by consensus at the WTO.

Developing countries aren't as well organized as the protesters on the streets, but they are acting. I've seen delegates pushing the bigger developing countries (e.g., India and Brazil) to take a stand. I've seen documents being leaked to developed country NGOs, which will then take them to their governments to embarrass them. And I've seen delegations from the South talking for the first time, if only sotto voce, about some sort of coordinated non-cooperation. It's not much, but it's a start. And it's just as much a fight against power as the street politics outside.

The last thing I want to touch on is the disturbing division in the popular press representations of the violent and nonviolent protesters. On the local TV station last night, a report showed an encounter between a young masked, white man and four or five young Latinos. The masked man was trying to argue against violence and property damage, and the Latinos were saying, "Well, why not, it's just some fun."

The argument made explicitly by the reporter was that not all protesters are violent, but it's just a hard core of unrepresentative people who spoil it all for everyone. This is called "balanced reporting." But there's always a subtext. In this case, the subtext was that these undesirables are Latinos, and that they are not open to reasonable dialogue. Maude Barlow, of the Council of Canadians, was movingly eloquent on this issue yesterday. Her words (and I'm paraphrasing here, unable to do justice to the force of what she said) went something like this:

"The press tells us that there were undesirable elements, that there were some people who didn't know why they were protesting, that they didn't know what the WTO was, who were smashing windows just because they could. So what? They are our children, products of our social system. You can't tell me that they don't know what politics is. They are hungry, and they are angry. They are the street politics that the WTO regime has spawned, and the people inside the WTO building can't hide themselves from that."

We oughtn't to let ourselves buy the divisions peddled to us by the thoughtless and the privileged. What's important about the protests, both inside and out, is a confrontation between the powerless and the powerful. If we're serious about redistributing that power, we must resist the demonization of friends who are as angry as we are, but whose protest we don't find as "articulate" or informed.

Sorry not to write about the gender and trade things, which happened yesterday but were disrupted by the street fights. I want to write about these, and will next time.