FINANCE: Hundreds protest at World Bank, IMF meetings

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Oct 9 1995 (IPS) - A dozen black-shrouded, scythe-wielding, grim reapers danced their way Monday onto the lawn of the palatial Sheraton Hotel, site of this week’s annual meetings here of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), at the head of a procession of hundreds of protestors.

From Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea to Port-au-Prince in Haiti, activists from some 50 countries sang and chanted to bring their message to the finance ministers and central bank governors who have been meeting all weekend to discuss global economic issues.

“More world, less Bank. Feed the people, starve the Bank,” chanted a group of young activists who had travelled from states as far away as California and Vermont as they waved banners and placards denouncing the policies of the two Bretton Woods agencies.

The rally was organised by a Washington-based coalition of environmental and social groups called “50 years is enough.” The coalition was put together last year in Madrid where the Bank and the IMF celebrated the 50th anniversary.

The Bank and the IMF are the largest source of money for countries in the Third World and the former communist bloc. Together they approved close to 50 dollars in new loans during the past year for projects and policies ranging from agriculture to structural adjustment.

Waiting to receive the demonstrators was Tim Cullen, the Bank’s chief spokesman, who distributed statement to journalists condemning the protests.

The one-page release said that only a few members of the “50 years is enough” coalition were taking part in the protest while others were working with the Bank to help reform it.

“Yes, some groups like Oxfam have agreed to work with the Bank and to hold a joint press conference with the Bank, but it is not true that only a few of us are protesting,” said Danny Kennedy, an activist with the Student Environmental Action Coalition in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

“The number of protesters here is unprecedented — there must be thousands here compared to the two dozen that have gathered over the past decade. We have members of parliament from Mexico and farmers from the highlands of Lesotho,” he said.

The Monday rally was the culmination of a weekend of discussions convened by “50 years” activists. Dozens of speakers gave lectures and led strategy sessions on the campus of American University here. They included representatives of groups which continue to press for the demise of the two agencies and others who believe that the Bank, in particular, can be reformed.

The sessions ranged from the ongoing debt crisis to Bank plans to fund specific projects, like coal-fired power plants in Singrauli in central India.

“How many 16-year-olds, how many dancers, how many maids, how many prostitutes must be exported, before these institutions understand what is happening to my people?” asked Leonor Briones, an activist from the Freedom from Debt Coalition in the Philippines.

She explained that thousands of Filipino women leave the country every year to work in Europe, Japan and the Middle East in order to support their families. A large chunk of the 2.9 billion dollars that these women send back every year is used to pay the 35 billion dollars in debts that the country owes to creditors, including the Bank.

The rallies this weekend have been augmented by four large contingents which have not attended the annual meetings of the Bank and the IMF here in the past.

One of the largest contingents consists of U.S. students who have sponsored some 30 international partners, from Argentina to Papua New Guinea. They belong to a coalition called Action for Solidarity, Equality, Environment and Development (A SEED).

The National Committee for Democracy in Mexico has also brought a number of supporters from the southern state of Chiapas, where the Zapatistas, a rural insurgent movement, launched a guerrilla war in Jan 1994 in protest against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Coincidentally, they will be here during Tuesday’s state visit to Washington of Mexico’s president, Ernesto Zedillo.

“World Bank and IMF money for Chiapas are being used by politicians to favour the state-controlled structures which are anti-democratic, unjust and corrupt,” said Carlota Botey, an opposition member of the Mexican parliament who heads up the commission on agrarian reform. “Some of these agencies are tied to drug-traffickers while others were set up to destroy the Zapatista movement.”

Two other groups new to the protests are the Native Forest Network from Vermont, a grassroots group of activists fighting logging and dams in the northern United States, and social activists from Haiti who have come to protest Bank and IMF policies to cut the minimum wage in their country and privatise some state enterprises.

The groups intend to hold more rallies over the next three days to coincide with the annual meetings. Clandestine protests to disrupt the meetings are rumoured although no details have been made public.

Other activists, like Mark Dubois of Worldwise in California and Michelle Chan of Friends of the Earth, are walking the corridors of the meetings and telephoning visiting delegates and staff to arrange meetings to convince them to change specific projects.