By Robert Evans
BANGKOK, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Thai Deputy Prime Minister Supachai Panitchpakdi, due to become head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in two years, on Monday urged anti-free trade activists not to destroy his job before he takes it up.
He promised he would bring changes to the Geneva-based body, which many militant environmental and Third World non-governmental organisations say they want to see dismantled, to make it more open to civil society.
The 53-year-old Supachai was clearly in tongue-in-cheek mood when he made his plea -- at a meeting with NGOs during a conference in Bangkok of the United Nations trade and development agency UNCTAD, of which he is current president.
"I made my longest election campaign ever to get chosen for the (WTO) post," he said. "I hope you are not thinking of eliminating the WTO altogether, but will let it survive," he said with a broad grin.
He takes over in September 2002 from current Director-General Mike Moore, a former New Zealand prime minister who took up the post only five months ago after a bruising and acrimonious battle in the WTO between countries backing the two men.
The scrapping -- which pitted the United States, the leading Moore supporter -- against Asian countries including Japan which fought hard for Supachai -- ended in a compromise allowing them to hold the normally four-year job for three years each.
But Supachai and Moore, who has been in Bangkok for the UNCTAD meeting and makes a major speech on Wednesday, have remained on good personal terms.
In more serious mood on Monday, Supachai told NGOs invited to the meeting with him and UNCTAD chief Rubens Ricupero of Brazil that the way to bring about changes in an institution was to work with it or inside it.
INTENDS TO MAKE CHANGES
"If I didn't intend to make changes at the WTO, I wouldn't have taken the trouble to spend nine months campaigning for it," he told the NGOs who range from some only sceptical about free trade to others who say it is a tool of "Western imperialism" and trans-national companies.
And the Thai minister, who will make history when he switches directly from the UNCTAD presidency to the helm of the WTO, argued -- in a clear barb at some NGOs -- that changes could not be brought about by "going to seminars."
"You act by trying to be part of the society -- or institution -- you want to change. To bring change, you have to come in and work on the inside. And that is what I decided to do," Supachai declared.
Tens of thousands of U.S. anti-free trade activists demonstrated, sometimes violently, in Seattle in December during a WTO ministerial meeting there, which was attended by both Supachai, who headed his country's delegation, and Ricupero.
Both were barred by the protesters, some chanting "Death to the WTO," from getting into the meeting on its first day. Many developing country delegates condemned the protesters, saying they were in fact enemies rather than friends of poor states.
At Monday's session, these views were relayed again by Ricupero, who said some member governments of UNCTAD, most of whom are also in the WTO, did not want to see NGOs getting a role in trade negotiations.
These governments, he told the meeting, asked who elected the NGOs, insisting that the national trade negotiators and diplomats were the genuinely legitimate representatives of their peoples.
"If you want to influence decisions, you have to persuade your governments, because that it where the power lies," the former Brazilian finance minister declared.:
