PRAGUE — Fresh from disrupting the World Economic Forum's summit in Melbourne, the next stop for the anti-capitalism express is Prague, in the Czech Republic, where on September 26 the two major enforcers of corporate globalisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, begin their annual meeting.
Tens of thousands of protesters are expected from all over Europe for a week of counter-conferences, direct actions and mass demonstrations. The Czech state is also gearing up, planning to mobilise 11,000 police and 1600 soldiers to ensure the meeting goes ahead as scheduled.
Green Left Weekly's SARAH PEART and FELICITY MARTIN spoke to SCOTT CODEY, an organiser with INPEG, the Initiative Against Economic Globalisation, which is one of the main organisers of the S26 actions.
What are the aims and objectives of INPEG and how has S26 been organised?
INPEG is a coalition of human rights activists, religious groups, environmentalists, humanists, anarchists and socialists. It was formed in September last year around issues of globalisation and environmental destruction.
It came together to organise protests against the meeting of the IMF and World Bank in Prague. INPEG put out a call to action in March, calling for activists to come to Prague for the demonstration.
INPEG is united around three basic principles: an end to the IMF and World Bank; an end to economic globalisation; and a commitment to the principles of non-violence. The groups that have joined INPEG have consensus around these ideas, allowing room for dialogue.
What are the plans for S26 itself?
We are expecting tens of thousands. In the morning of September 26, there will be a celebration in a huge park with street theatre, music, puppets and so on. We are aiming at creating a safe space for people to express their outrage at the policies of the IMF and World Bank.
We want to create a celebratory atmosphere that looks to the future and looks at the social alternatives that we want to develop. We also want to celebrate the burgeoning global movement that is developing against capital.
At 11am there will be a march of resistance to the convention centre, which we will surround. The police have rejected our application to march but we will push forward anyway.
We are encouraging groups to engage in autonomous acts of non-violent direct action. There will also be actions in the days after S26.
In the lead-up to the global day of action, there are a range of training workshops being organised and many cultural festivals as well.
There is also a counter-summit being organised September 22-25 that will discuss a range of issues. Participants will hear from speaker such as [Russian Marxist] Boris Kargarlitsky, [French anti-debt campaigner] Eric Toussaint and [British Marxist] Alex Callinicos, as well as activists from various social movements in countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, Sri Lanka and Colombia. The summit will culminate in a march and an "Art of global resistance" social event in the evening.
We have consensus on the fact that we are not trying to shut down the meeting on September 26. We are not trying to prevent delegates from getting into the meeting, like in Seattle or Washington. We are going to surround the convention centre and try to drown out the meeting itself with our voices. We are going to disrupt the exiting of the delegates.
What has been the response of the Czech state and media to the proposed protests?
The coverage we have received in the media here has been bad. We have been totally misrepresented and demonised. They have not conveyed our commitment to non-violence and have tried to portray us as people without a sophisticated analysis of the issues.
In the last week we had a training camp with workshops on banner making, consensus-building processes, non-violent tactics, puppet making. We invited the press along to illustrate to them our pro-active approach to non-violence.
In terms of the police, there has been lots of harassment of young people in the streets. Someone was fined 1000 crowns for jaywalking, while others have been pulled over for smoking in train stations. There are police walking the streets everywhere.
There have also been problems at the Czech border. Recently there was an ecological cooking group stopped for three days. It is hard for me to believe that an environmental cooking group could be seen as a threat to national security.
We used this as an example of the blatant disregard for people's right to political expression. Eventually they were allowed in.
Five Italian activists were stopped three days ago and have since been camping on the border. They joined up with a German cycling group who were also stopped. They have announced that they are going to try to cross and risk arrest in order to draw attention to this.
What has been the involvement of trade unions in S26?
Trade unions in the Czech Republic are supporting the actions but are not actively participating in them. However, there are many trade unions internationally that are organising support actions too.
IMF and World Bank officials claim they plan to make a serious commitment to debt relief at this meeting. What is your response?
We believe this is a deliberate attempt to try to undermine the S26 protest. However, this illustrates that these actions are extremely useful because this is a response to the worldwide movement against globalism.
Institutions like the IMF and World Bank function best when they can fly beneath the radar screen and keep people in the dark about what is really going on. It has only been due to the success of these actions that people are starting to say "Wait a minute, I didn't elect these people. Why do they have an inordinate amount of power in making decisions about the rest of the world?"
The World Bank always calls for dialogue, but our position is that these problems are not new. People in the global South have been struggling against these institutions for years. It is too late now for dialogue.
The World Bank is constantly violating and contradicting their own principles. Dialogue does not need to happen between us and the World Bank.
We believe the World Bank and the IMF are the cause of these problems and therefore ill suited to solve them. There needs to be dialogue at a grassroots level about what kind of society we want to build that will protect the environment and create a more just and equitable world.
How can we continue the movement for global justice and against institutions like the World Bank and IMF after S26?
What we say is: as long as these institutions continue to make policy in secret which serves as the primary mechanism for enforcing the neo-liberal economic model on the world, we are going to be there. We will be there on the streets disrupting their meetings, educating people about the issues.
I think that these large-scale actions are more than anything else symbolic and theatrical. They are intended to disrupt the meetings, as a mechanism to draw attention to injustice.
Work has to continue in our communities when people go home. We need grassroots groups to get together and work for change. We need people to actively engage in the process of figuring out how to further this mass movement against the system that oppresses so many people.
[INPEG has a web site at <http://www.inpeg.org>. There is also an Independent Media Centre in Prague, <http://www.prague.indymedia.org>. Next week's issue of Green Left Weekly will provide detailed reports from Prague on the S26 actions.]