AP Worldstream / By PATRICK McDOWELL
BANGKOK, Thailand -- Activists condemned the World Trade Organization on Monday as a tool for rich corporations and nations to dominate trade, and demanded that the organization be cut down to size.
Activists from non-governmental groups that helped sink the WTO attempt in Seattle in November to launch trade talks gathered in Bangkok for a meeting of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development.
Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero says the UNCTAD meeting could bridge gaps between rich and poor countries and give a helpful push to the WTO. The U.N. agency seeks to promote trade as a tool for development in poor countries.
But leading activists, filled with confidence after their successes in Seattle, said Monday that reform and tinkering with the U.S.-dominated trade system wasn't enough.
Walden Bello, a veteran Philippines activist for the developing world, said the first thing to go should be Washington's dogma that the WTO was necessary to enforce a rules-based trading system.
"In the Nazi fashion of Joseph Goebbels, if you repeat a lie often enough, it gets believed," Bello said. "The necessity of the WTO is a lie."
Bello said the idea that global trade would enrich everyone was propaganda, noting that since the WTO was established in 1995, its rules have been used by rich nations to force open the markets of developing countries, while freezing out their imports, like agriculture and textiles.
Despite the WTO's claims to make decisions only by consensus of all its 130-plus members, Bello said, consensus really meant only back-room agreements reached by the powerful players: the United States, the European Union, Canada and Japan.
Bello said the WTO and the International Monetary Fund were outdated and should be downsized and limited to giving input in a new economic system that would also heed groups representing poor nations and ordinary people.
While the activists were largely marginalized to the streets in Seattle, where their protests grabbed world attention, they have a place at the table in Bangkok. They will present their views to the conference, which starts on Saturday.
Thai authorities, worried about security, have set aside a small area for symbolic protests during the UNCTAD meeting but will require larger groups to gather at a park two kilometers (1.2 miles) away.
Copyright 2000 Associated Press:
