Chicago Tribune | By R.C. Longworth, staff reporter | September 13, 2001
The next two big global meetings, already threatened by protesters and besieged by controversy, have probably been torpedoed by the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, officials say.
The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization, dominant institutions of the global economy, have major conferences scheduled for this autumn. The terrorists may not have intended to send these organizations into retreat, but that may be the result of Tuesday's assaults.
The IMF and the World Bank scheduled their annual meeting in Washington for Sept. 29-30. As many as 100,000 protesters were expected, and Washington police not only asked for reinforcements from New York but planned to surround downtown Washington with a chain-link fence 9 feet tall and 21/2 miles around.
Officially, the meeting is still on, but the mayor and police chief of Washington have asked the IMF and World Bank to call off the meetings, and IMF sources said that probably would happen. The U.S. government, which is the official host and dominant member of the IMF, has not made its wishes known, but a decision to call off the meeting is expected within two days.
"First, there were the threats of violence from protesters," said William Murrary, an IMF spokesman. "Now, all this has taken on a new, different dimension. We're in totally uncharted territory."
The WTO, bruised by the violence and protests around its last big ministers' meeting in Seattle in December of 1999, had rescheduled its next meeting for Nov. 9-13 in Doha, the capital of Qatar, an isolated and tightly run monarchy that juts off Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf. The WTO drew widespread ridicule for choosing the isolated site, which was selected because it can be easily closed to protesters.
Now, with President Bush promising to retaliate against the terrorists and the countries that harbor them, the Middle East and its nations, such as Qatar, risk being drawn into a war zone.
"Officially, nothing has been said about a possible delay or cancellation," a source at the WTO's Geneva headquarters said. "But I wouldn't be at all surprised that this is what is going on in their minds."
Under the circumstances Qatar is beginning to look less secure. Like many gulf states it relies on imported labor from other countries; in Qatar's case, some 350,000 workers from Pakistan, where the influence of Afghanistan's Islamic fundamentalist Taliban is strong.
"If Islamic fundamentalists are behind this [the terrorism], I can't see a delegation of hundreds of American trade officials shuffling off to the Middle East for this meeting," said Ronnie Hall, the international trade program coordinator for Friends of the Earth, one of the non-governmental organizations most active in the anti-WTO demonstrations.
Hall and other protest leaders noted that, for the IMF and WTO, a postponement might be a relief. The IMF meeting already had been cut from five to two days because of the expected protests, and the WTO meeting faced failure in its main purpose, which is to agree to start a new round of global trade talks.
"They [the WTO] have got an excuse now," said Mark Ritchie, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis. "They're further from agreement now than they were before Seattle," where protests from developing countries also doomed attempts to start a new trade round.
"This is an opportunity for the WTO to untangle this Doha thing and buy six months of time," Ritchie said.
The attacks posed hard decisions not only for the IMF and WTO but for the protesters too. In the wake of the tragedy, protest groups were discussing, in person or via e-mail, whether to cut back or call off demonstrations.
The Mobilization for Global Justice, an umbrella group of NGOs, held a Washington meeting Wednesday to discuss its options but, according to people who were there, most of the conversation focused on the attacks and victims, not on the protesters' tactical reaction to them.
"It's hard to talk about anything else in the face of this tragedy," said Njoki Njehu, director of Fifty Years Is Enough, an anti-World Bank group.
"There's a lot of sentiment for calling off" the demonstrations, said John Cavanagh, president of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies. "These two events are going to be very different from what everyone has been planning for months."
Protest leaders admitted that they also fear that violence from a minority of demonstrators, which has marred big global meetings for nearly two years, could now lead the public to associate the whole movement with terrorism.
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