"Europe's Seattle"

The 2000 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in late September in Prague, Czech Republic became the occasion for what might become known as "Europe‚s Seattle." Thousands of activists from just about every country in Europe (and many others) descended on Prague for demonstrations and related events in opposition to the policies and practices of the international financial institutions.

More important than the media coverage garnered or the strength of the demonstrations staged was the opportunity for people from around the continent to meet and work together toward a common goal, overcoming different languages, histories, and traditions. Several experienced European activists remarked that although the size of the demonstrations was not unprecedented for Europe, the variety of nationalities represented was.

There was, of course, communication among the various European activist groups before Prague. But I suspect that as the movement for global economic justice and against the corporate globalization guided by the IMF and World Bank builds and achieves more success, Prague will be looked upon as the moment when groups from around Europe -- especially those within the former Soviet bloc and those without -- really started to understand each other and find ways to work together.

Even before people in Washington conceived of the "A16"/Mobilization for Global Justice demonstrations at the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank, activists in Prague had met and formed a coalition, known as the Initiative Against Economic Globalization (usually referred to by its Czech acronym, INPEG), to make plans for the fall annual meetings of the institutions. Indeed, the first international planning meeting was held in early December 1999, just days after the hugely successful demonstrations in Seattle at the meeting of the World Trade Organization. The actions in Prague, then, were not conceived as an attempt to follow up on the actions in the U.S., but they did naturally end up building on the momentum established here.

Counter-Summit and Other Meetings

Quite a bit was happening in Prague, and there is far more to report on than space will allow. Some of the highlights follow.

On September 20, the Central & Eastern Europe Bankwatch Network began its series of "skill-sharing" sessions aimed chiefly at an audience of about 70 activists who from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union who were relatively new to campaigning on the international financial institutions. Russian translation was provided for most sessions.

On Friday, September 22, INPEG opened its three-day "counter-summit," with an audience of about 300 listening to speeches and panel discussions featuring academics and activists, mostly from Europe and North America. Speakers included myself and Walden Bello and Nicola Bullard of Focus on the Global South (Thailand) and the 50 Years Is Enough South Council; Canadian columnist Naomi Klein; and Russian political analyst Boris Kagarlitsky. Dennis Brutus, a long-time supporter of 50 Years as well as a renowned South African poet and anti-apartheid activist, was part of the closing panel.

Bankwatch organized a public forum from the evening of the 24^th through the 27^th. Attendance at the forum was probably inhibited by the mass demonstrations on the 26^th, but otherwise a fairly impressive number of Czechs showed up to learn about the IMF and World Bank and related issues like debt.

Counter-Strategy: The IMF & World Bank Engage Their Critics

With Prague, the IMF and World Bank evidently decided that the best way to counter the onslaught of criticism their opponents were leveling at them was to seek to engage us in public as often as possible. To this end they arranged and engaged in several meetings with NGOs.

Czech President Vaclav Havel, a renowned former dissident whose role as an international statesman far exceeds his very limited powers as President, hosted the first event at his official residence, the Castle, on September 23. This debate featured Walden Bello, Ann Pettifor of Jubilee 2000 U.K., and Katarina Liskova of a Czech environmental organization on the "civil society" side, and World Bank President James Wolfensohn, IMF Managing Director Horst Köhler, and South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, the current chair of the joint IMF/World Bank Board of Governors, representing the institutions. The 50 Years Is Enough Network was not invited to be in the audience of about 300, but by all accounts Wolfensohn and Köhler were utterly vanquished by their opponents. Among the best soundbites were Bello‚s summation of the institutions‚ public relations function in light of structural adjustment‚s devastation: "So why does the Bank continue to pontificate about going about its Œnoble mission‚ to end poverty? Because it has learned from Joseph Goebbels that a lie repeated often enough eventually attains the status of truth." Liskova asserted that if the World Bank and IMF had applied their current economic policies to Europe after World War II, "we'd still be living with food rationing today."

In another forum at the Congress Center, the site of the official meetings, to which the 50 Years Is Enough Network declined to seek official accreditation, Wolfensohn made pointed statements to distinguish the "good" NGOs that were seeking to dialogue from those not in attendance -- like 50 Years, which Wolfensohn said has been working to "close it [the Bank] down" since its founding. Several representatives from European NGOs were dismayed by this attempt at division. One commented, "I‚ve never felt so co-opted in my life," and another said that his organization was considering abandoning future attempts to engage the Bank in conversation. Indeed, in a debate hosted by Bankwatch, Tomasz Terlecki of Bankwatch indicated that he felt the Bank was not taking the input of NGOs seriously and the overall sense from these encounters was that the Bank and the Fund were merely putting on window-dressing to improve their public image.

Throughout the preparations for the annual meetings and during the meetings themselves, a clear Bank strategy emerged. They want to engage with their critics in order to appear open to criticism and debate. However, they counter every criticism with plaintive expressions of their good intentions. Wolfensohn, on at least five different occasions in the months leading up to Prague and in Prague itself, put forward a version of this line: "I [or we] do not wake up in the morning and start thinking about how we can screw the poor today." At the Prague Castle, he insisted, "I have a heart." Mats Karlsson, a public relations officer with the Bank, also adopted this approach, announcing at the Bankwatch debate that he and his colleagues at the IMF are, we should know, working to improve the world, that they took their jobs to do good.

However, despite the realistic, even childish, exasperation Wolfensohn sometimes displays when making his stands, there is, I think, a very clever strategy at work here. Instead of dealing with the questions about World Bank policy head-on, instead of having to defend the global economic structures that give institutions like his the power to impose economic policies further impoverishing people in country after country, year after year, with no accountability, Wolfensohn and his employees can divert the media by talking about their hurt feelings, about their good intentions, about their personal reactions. These officials are taking advantage of journalists‚ tendency to go for the "human face" of the story by talking about their own face, their own feelings. The real failure is on the part of the journalists who become diverted, who print a stock line about the World Bank president‚s morning routine instead of recalling that their original question was really about the fate of millions of "human faces" that can‚t be in the room for the interview or the press conference.

The question is not what a few people think about when they get up in the morning, or even their individual moral character, but about how the institutions and the systems they‚re a part of are thoroughly skewed: without a complete transformation, the IMF and the World Bank will always work for the benefit of the corporations and the wealthy and against the interests of the great majority of people in borrowing countries. One person‚s character or a morning‚s intentions cannot change that.

The Demonstrations

And of course there was the mass action. A crowd I would estimate at about 15,000 gathered at Namesti miru (Peace Park) near downtown Prague beginning at 9 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday September 26 -- the same day that solidarity actions were going on in cities across the U.S. and the world (see p. 4-5 & x).

The atmosphere was decidedly festive, with large balloons, banners, and dance music. The composition of the crowd was amazingly cosmopolitan: look in one direction and see 300 Greek workers marching; look in another to find a group of Dutch and British environmentalists in clever outfits; look in others and find Turks, Germans, French, and others. The most remarkable characters, by far, were those from Ya Basta!, a citizens resistance movement in solidarity with the Zapatistas that began in Italy but has now begun spreading to Spain as well. Members of Ya Basta! protect themselves by wrapping foam, such as that used for camping mattresses or old couches, around their bodies, then covering themselves with sheer white "overalls." Thus protected they practice their version of assertive non-violence, attempting to march through police barricades while accepting any blows aimed at them.

The march kicked off at about 11:15. Marchers were designated as belonging to one of three groups, distinguished by color. The march proceeded as one group, peacefully winding through downtown Prague in the direction of the Congress Center. The bulk of the crowd went to a bridge connecting central Prague with the Congress Center, which lies on the other side of a deep ravine. The police had blocked off the bridge with tanks and hundreds of riot officers. The Ya Basta! troops approached first, got involved in minor skirmishes, but made little headway. Meanwhile, the other two groups scurried through the valley below and up toward the Congress Center. It was these groups that engaged in the most heated encounters with the police. A group of about 50 succeeded in nearly getting to the Center itself. A few days later I was astonished to see graffiti on buildings a mere 50 meters away from the Center.

By the time those encounters took place, I was safely back at a computer terminal, relaying updates to the U.S. (My asthma having been stirred by something in the Prague air, I was eager to avoid any interaction with tear gas.) A recent report by INPEG states that a total of 350-400 were treated in the streets for injuries, of which 30 needed to be hospitalized; and that 859 people were arrested, of whom 17 were charged. As of this writing, we believe that 2 people remain in jail for reasons stemming from the Sept. 26-27 actions.

While the vast majority of demonstrators on September 26 were peaceful, there were people who threw rocks and paving stones at police and towards delegates attending the meetings or their vehicles. There were also several Molotov cocktails used. Some 18 police were injured badly enough to require hospital treatment. Of course many more protesters sustained injuries, many of them after being arrested. In fact, while the Czech police were remarkably circumspect in public (more so than those in Washington, Seattle, etc.), acts of great brutality were committed against those who were arrested once they were in prison and out of public view.

Reports of provocateurs -- in many cases Czech skinheads (neo-Nazis) in disguise -- were too numerous and substantial to be dismissed. Indeed, for one short period I found myself crouched down on the floor of INPEG‚s downtown press center as skinheads attacked it during the spree of evening violence that was largely attributed in the media to IMF/World Bank protesters. But it is probable that at least some of the Molotov cocktails and rocks were thrown neither by provocateurs nor in defense.

The 50 Years Is Enough Network rejects the violence perpetrated by some of the protesters in Prague. However, of greater concern to us is the structural violence of the global economy. There is no foolproof way to exclude provocateurs or people who have made a deliberate decision to use violence from public actions. Our responsibility lies in focusing greater public and media scrutiny on the violence of structural adjustment and the burden of debt. We must not allow ourselves or the media to be distracted by trivial acts of destruction committed by a handful of protesters.

The demonstrations certainly caught the attention of the IMF and World Bank. For weeks before the meetings, delegates were warned to exercise extreme caution and be inconspicuous, and during the protester‚s offensive on the Congress Center, delegates were ordered to stay inside. They eventually left the site by closing the entire subway line serving the center and bringing in special trains for the delegates. Their suffering was quite temporary and mild compared to that of the protesters and by-standers arrested by the Czech police, or to the plight of those living under structural adjustment programs in Southern countries.

After closing the meetings a day early (see the "Prague Declaration" on p. ), there was speculation, from Wolfensohn among others, that the large fall meetings had become too unwieldy and should perhaps be scaled down or abandoned. The fact that many in the Czech press were questioning the wisdom of hosting the meetings no doubt frightens the institutions, as must the decision by Qatar a few weeks after the Prague meetings ended to withdraw its offer to host the next ministerial meetings of the World Trade Organization. The IMF/World Bank annual meetings are held outside Washington every third year; the 2003 meetings are scheduled for Dubai, in Qatar‚s neighbor, the United Arab Emirates. Until then, we plan to continue making the voice of opposition heard at both their spring and fall meetings.

The Official Results of the Meetings

The IMF and World Bank chose Prague in order to highlight a region of the world -- the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR -- where they have been active for only the last ten years. In 1997 they held their joint meetings in Hong Kong and scheduled special seminars on the "East Asian miracle" -- seminars which assumed an ironic character in light of the fact that the East Asian financial crisis erupted in Thailand just over two months before the meetings. In 2000 they did not make the same mistake. Indeed, rather than attempt to say that IMF-style capitalism had led to economic nirvana, the World Bank issued a report on the "transition economies" in conjunction with the meetings and reported that the ratio of people living in poverty had increased from 2% to 21%.

Another high-profile World Bank report released at the fall meetings was the World Development Report (WDR) on Poverty. The WDR is an annual document that the Bank highlights as its major policy and research statement for the year. The 2000 report was supposed to be especially important, focusing as it does on the Bank‚s stated core mission, poverty reduction. After an extensive series of Internet-facilitated consultations with civil society as part of the preparation for the WDR, the lead author, Ravi Kanbur abruptly resigned in June, saying that the report was being compromised by demands from the U.S. Treasury Department that the final version emphasize the role of market-oriented growth and de-emphasize what Kanbur‚s research had led him to, the need to empower impoverished people. The final document, watered-down as it apparently is, nonetheless still supplies a strong critique, from within, of the Bank‚s historical emphasis on growth as the cure-all for poverty.

The meetings themselves did not produce great decisions. In fact, they seldom are deliberative, "working" meetings, but rather an occasion for seminars, cocktail parties, and informal gatherings of finance ministers, their staffs, institutional staff, and private bankers. Much of the official discussion concerned the price of oil and the value of the euro. Thus, the meetings themselves only further illustrated what the protesters were proclaiming in the streets: that the World Bank and IMF are functionally illegitimate and in dire need of transformation.

Jubilee 2000

The morning of Sunday, September 24 offered a remarkable Jubilee 2000 event. Starting with a service at an ornate church in Prague‚s beautiful Old Town, a crowd of about two thousand proceeded across the Vltava River to a hilltop park, led by a band playing funeral dirges and featuring 19 long poles topped by death masks, symbolizing the 19,000 children UNICEF estimates die every day because of preventable causes that could be eliminated with funds freed up by debt cancellation. At the hilltop park, the Jubilee 2000 organizers suspended large puppets over a three-story concrete wall to symbolize the IMF and World Bank. Seven individuals with t-shirts emblazoned "G7" and wearing masks of the different G7 heads of government manipulated long poles connected by string to the puppets: the puppet masters. Powerful speeches from representatives of Jubilee 2000 Czech Republic, the World Council of Churches, and Jubilee 2000 U.K. preceded the march back to Old Town and a closing ceremony featuring a symbolic break in the "chains of debt."