“If the summit does not speak to the needs of the poor, then of what use is it?” South African president Thabo Mbeki.

Marches Highlight Breach in Trust between the Talkers and the Talked About

Marches Highlight Breach in Trust

By Farah Khan

A teetering World Summit inside the Sandton Convention Centre -- the reasons volubly displayed outside where a sea of protestors arrived after a nine-kilometre long march.

The series of protest marches on Saturday highlighted the issues still cleaving apart the summit as ministers arrived to sign a final deal: how to define globalisation, how to deal with an unjust trade regime, how to deal with debt and what to do about social exclusion.

"The landless have landed; water for the thirsty," shouted a leader aboard an open truck as it wound its way to a stop at Speakers Corner, the barricaded spot the United Nations has set aside for the range of protests that have wound their way to the World Summit venue throughout the week.

Saturday's first march was the largest, at between 15, 000 and 20, 000 people. It yoked together the nationally and internationally excluded; and the glitterati of the left, including the Canadian author Naomi Klein and Food First's Annuradha Mittal.

It was a sea of mostly red, from the Anti-Privatisation Forum t-shirts to that of the Landless Peoples Movement shouting for "Land. Food. Jobs."

That the United Nations now provides a speakers corner speaks to the institutionalisation of protest against globalisation, from Europe to Asia and Africa. "Seattle", "Genoa", "Prague" are no longer only the names of cities, but also codes for the protest movement that pits us (the excluded) against "them" (the system). The United Nations, on this Saturday had come to represent something other than the people sitting on the tarmac outside.

Activists like Klein complained about the massive sea of blue police out she said, "to protect the conference from itself". Indian activist Vandana Shiva told BBC Television what was going on inside the halls of the Sandton Convention Centre was "disastrous; the Earth has disappeared from the Earth Summit". Tellingly, on Sunday, heads of state met with business leaders, yet they barricaded themselves from the marchers the day before.

"Johannesburg" will become part of the code of a global uprising, said speaker after speaker on Saturday unhappy about the direction the World Summit was taking, worried about a gamut of issues.

U.S. President George W. Bush came in for a series of criticisms from environmentalists, Palestinian supporters and anti-war protestors. "USA, Israel, UK - the axis of evil," read a banner carried by Muslim protestors on their long walk. "What are we going to do about Bush?" was the T-shirt on an American activist, worried that the summit was moving further away from multilateral environmental agreements.

At a second, smaller gathering on Saturday of about 3,000 people in Alexandra, a community of 300 000 poor Africans outside Johannesburg, President Thabo Mbeki tried to bridge the gap between “us” and “them”. He stated his support for genuine Palestinian statehood and made Alexandra a universal symbol of the world's poor. If the summit did not speak to the needs of the poor, then of what use was it? asked Mbeki

Alexandra still uses the bucket sanitation system, where workers come twice a week to clear human excrement. In Sandton, targets to halve those without access to sanitation could be a deal-breaker. Yet, Mbeki was confident the summit would deliver; the protestors were much less optimistic.

At the heart of their unease is a questioning of the economic fundamentals of the summit. Globalisation is not a universal good, they argue, and they want to see this captured in the summit's final political declaration.

In Africa, the recipe to meet the U.N.'s development goals as enshrined in the Millennium Development Goals, is increasingly the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). But NEPAD does not yet have popular support because it embraces the tenets of globalisation like foreign-investment led-growth.

The most common image of protest at the marches was a headscarf with the words "Phantsi (down with) NEPAD" emblazoned on it.

And that became a symbol of the day of the protests -- the trust gap between what was going on inside the summit and the people outside had been breached.