BY LEIGH HUGHES
CANBERRA — "It was five years in the making but worth every minute of it", Australian Greens senator Bob Brown said of the Global Greens conference, held in Canberra's National Convention Centre on April 14-16.
Centred on the creation of a Global Greens Charter that a new international Greens network would commit to, organisers hailed the meeting of around 800 Greens delegates from over 70 countries a great success.
Brown spoke enthusiastically of the "growing Green tide around the planet" and emphasised the importance of the new platform. "The charter is a document of great significance for world politics. It sets out a political agenda to challenge economic rationalism, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the great environmental problems of the age", he said.
A document that will guide the national programs of each Green party, the charter calls for increased democracy, strict environmental restrictions and the defence of human rights around the broad principles of "ecological wisdom, social justice, participatory democracy, non-violence, sustainability and respect for diversity".
Specific demands include "a lifting of the South's debt burden", for "all electoral systems to be based on proportional representation" and for "domestic laws to be applied to mining and logging companies operating overseas".
An international committee was established to develop the charter between conferences.
The conference featured a number of inspirational figures, such as Ingrid Betancourt, the presidential candidate for the fledgling Colombian Green Party. After writing a book exposing corruption in her home country, she received death threats and has had to send her children to New Zealand and have herself constantly protected by 10 bodyguards.
French Green leader and environment minister Dominique Voynet pulled out at the last minute.
Naturally, being a meeting of 800 environmentalists just a few weeks after the United States government sunk the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, both George Bush and "Big Oil" were roundly condemned and deep concerns about climate change were expressed — with delegates calling on consumers and voters to boycott the major oil companies and the parties that support them.
"If you don't reduce emissions, a lot of people are going to pay the costs. This is very unfortunate because some people in the world take benefit of consuming energy ... and other people in the world, especially in the South — Africa, Asia, Latin America — we're the ones who pay the costs. We're the ones who are more vulnerable to droughts, to floods, to all the extreme weather events that are taking place because of climate change", said El Salvadoran delegate Ricardo Navarro, who is also the chairperson of Friends of the Earth International.
Many of the participants of the meeting were inspired by what they regard as major steps forward for the Greens, especially in Europe, and by the unity of the movement.
However, on key areas of policy this supposedly united "tide" appears to be washing up on different and opposing shores. In the last session of the conference, where amendments to the charter were considered, votes were often split between moderates and radicals, between the North and the South, and between parties in government and those in opposition.
One major area of debate was over what should happen to the international bodies of trade and finance.
Nnimmo Bassey of Friends of the Earth (Nigeria) pleaded that "we all be united in the struggle against globalisation" and with many other, mainly African, Latin American and Asian, delegates called for the abolition of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, as well as regional bodies like the Asian Development Bank.
This amendment was defeated by a bloc vote of European delegates, on the basis that "multilateral rules are better than unilateral ones".
The final motion was a considerable compromise on Bassey's original motion, stating that the "WTO, IMF and World Bank would be abolished if reform [was] unsuccessful". The most vocal in opposition to this perceived watering down of the "struggle against globalisation" were the delegates from Africa and from Australia, who argued that the final motion was too soft and too open to interpretation.
Disagreement also arose over what the charter actually meant. Some delegates wanted a stronger statement of guiding principles and a guide to action, rather than a "flowery" programmatic document.
In another telling example of where some Green parties differ politically, the Swiss delegate, Hans Schaffner, demanded to know how the US Greens could have been so foolish as to have run Ralph Nader for president. Nader, a prominent figure in the US anti-corporate movement, has been accused by many moderates of "stealing" votes from Democrat candidate Al Gore and thereby allowing Bush's election. The voluminous conference room echoed with delegates' booing.
Other differences were seen lying under the surface, with no delegates from Britain attending (due to "polluting air travel") and with German Jorg Haas irritating Wangari Maathai of Kenya in a workshop on Cuba. Haas described any discussion of the socialist island nation as "irrelevant". Differences between the French and German Greens over the transportation of nuclear waste were also obvious.
However, despite these divisions, they are less in number next to what the Global Greens have in common. The Charter enjoyed broad support, as any amendments needed a two-thirds majority to pass.
The conference also agreed to create a "Green Fund", that would help address financial inequalities between parties, and a "Green Shield" of international solidarity for Greens in repressive societies.
The Global Greens initiative is a response to what one organiser, Sarojini Krishnapillai, said was a constant theme of the conference: "concern about the dominance of the free trade agenda and that while economic globalisation seems to have been embraced by the world's governments, the globalisation of environmental protection and human rights is coming second place".
Whether the Global Greens can meet this challenge will be based very much on what political trajectory the formation takes from here, on whether the Green "tide" "takes the fight to capital like at S11" (as one Australian delegate put it), or flows instead into a fixation on parliament, preference swaps, policy deals and reformism.