Karen Fletcher, spokesperson for the CHOGM Action Network.
"For years its been possible for people in the First World to treat worldwide poverty and oppression as if it isn't real", Karen Fletcher told Green Left Weekly.
"And now reality has just landed in one of the Western world's biggest cities. We've got two choices — to tell lies to ourselves, or to solidarise with people suffering around the globe."
A solicitor for the Prisoner's Legal Service, Fletcher is a spokesperson for the CHOGM Action Network (CAN) and a Socialist Alliance candidate for the Queensland senate. As the US military builds for war, CAN has decided to re-focus its planned "People's March" on opposing war and racism.
According to Fletcher: "The horrific deaths of thousands of workers is being used for racist war mongering and a real deepening of the 'Fortress Australia' approach. The challenge for opponents of corporate globalisation is to stand firm in the face of intense pressure."
A socialist activist since the late 1980s, Fletcher was "elated" by the November 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organisation.
"It was a long 10 years in the lead-up [to Seattle]", she said. "There was massive resistance to imperialism in the Third World — I was fortunate enough to be in Indonesia just before and just after Suharto was overthrown — but I really wondered if we in the First World were so comfortable nothing could shake us up. Seattle was a great triumph for solidarity."
Determined to join the thousands protesting against world economic institutions, Fletcher took time off work for the S11 protests in Melbourne last year. She was elected as a marshal for the protest, and helped to hold a picket line together for 10 hours straight, leading chants, telling jokes and holding people together when the police attacked the picket line.
"I was so impressed by the courage and creativity at S11", she told GLW. "These protests have so many strengths: a strong connection to the struggle of the world's oppressed and an openness to work in an alliance across traditionally separate movements. Of course there is friction — but the friction is a sign of strength: everyone is actually talking to each other."
It is these strengths, according to Fletcher, which may ensure that a protest movement can stop Australian involvement in any war effort.
"Activists knew when protesting against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation that we were up against the elite in the rich countries, especially the US, acting in its own interests. Now that's going to happen through military might."
"The US government appears to have popular support, but the Vietnam War had lots of public support in the beginning too. We have to be as radical as reality, and reality is pretty radical right now."
"Working together we can explode the myth that the First World can live in a fortress. Firstly, it's wrong and, secondly, it's immoral."