Agence France Presse | November 7, 2001 | BYLINE: FRANCOISE MICHEL
MOSCOW - Anti-globalisation protests come to Russia Friday as an embryonic coalition of militant groups stage what they hope will be nationwide protests to coincide with a World Trade Organisation conference at Doha, in the Gulf state of Qatar.
Around 50 Russians took part in anti-globalisation protests at Genoa, Italy, during the Group of Eight summit last July, but this will be the first time that the groups, opposed to Russia's application to join the WTO, have sought to come together as a movement.
Tentative estimates suggest that several thousand protestors will turn out for the rallies organised in cities in both European and Asian Russia. Organisers are having to face not just the hostility of the Russian authorities but also possible attempts by nationalist movements to hijack their efforts for their own purposes, activists said.
"There has been no debate about Russian entry into the WTO, not even in the State Duma (lower house of parliament). And yet joining the WTO is likely to wipe out our agriculture and cause unemployment to rise sharply," said Oleg Shein, one of two Russian deputies who have espoused anti-globalisation views.
Shein, at 28 one of the youngest deputies in the house and elected on an independent ticket, obtained only 180 votes for a resolution calling for a debate, well short of the 226 needed.
"There is no party or major trade union that reflects the interests of the underprivileged in Russia. They're all working for the well-off," he said.
Shein's political itinerary mirrors that of some of his counterparts in the West: a former history student, he initially joined the Communist party but left it in disillusion to join a leftwing group, the United Workers Front, opposed to the market reforms of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor in the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin.
Like many Russian militants, Shein was scandalised by the "shock therapy" ordered, on the instructions of the International Monetary Fund, by Russian governments of the early 1990s.
Alexander Buzaglin, an economics professor at Moscow University, believes that Russia has already undergone "the most brutal effects of globalisation: an all-round slump in living standards, pensioners reduced to poverty, and deplorable working conditions."
Russian entry into the WTO "will result in a second round of shock therapy," he warned.
Other bugbears for the patchwork anti-globalisation movement -- a motley of youthful Trotskyists, dissident trade unionists and members of alternative groups -- include the government proposal to import nuclear waste and the war in Chechnya which they see as "imperialist".
Tanya, a 19-year-old militant with the Moscow anti-globalisation group which holds its constituent assembly on Saturday, said she had joined up "to defend her future".
"In a few years, health and education services will depend totally on how much you earn. And I won't be able to afford a higher education," she said.
Currently working for the human rights group Glasnost, Tanya said she began militating for animal rights "but then discovered how badly humans could be treated, so joined up with the Trotskyists."
She favoured the anti-globalisation movement "because the other parties are all run bureaucratically".
By contrast, the alternative groups "see young people as a source of militancy, they listen to us, and take our ideas into account".Agence France Presse:
