Reuters | January 28, 2001 | By Shasta Darlington
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil - The "anti-Davos" forum in southern Brazil got a taste of its own medicine on Sunday when protesters stormed a press conference to denounce racism and demand greater participation for blacks.
"Brazil, Africa and Central America, the fight for black rights is international!" dozens of protesters shouted as they interrupted the conference hosted by organizers of the World Social Forum, a 10,000-strong meeting called to challenge to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"We are more than 50 percent of the population in Brazil, but at the World Social Forum we only get one hour of a five-day meeting to express our views!" Vanda Gomes Pinedo of the Unified Black Movement shouted at one of the organizers.
The protesters, many wearing African-style gowns, demanded more space in the hundreds of workshops and panels and a bigger voice in a final poetic text that is being prepared.
The experimental forum of environmentalists, left-wing intellectuals and the same anti-globalization activists who stormed elite business meetings from Seattle to Prague took the criticism in stride.
"I hope we can incorporate their complaints since nothing is a done deal yet. We don't want the forum to get bogged down in logistic problems," Maria Luiza Mendonca said.
The World Social Forum has united people from 120 countries and 1,000 organizations in Porto Alegre, Brazil's southernmost state, in order discuss alternative social and economic proposals rather than just protesting those in place.
Organizers do not expect to come up with a single, unifying manifesto at the end of the five-day conference, which began on Thursday, but will debate proposals and seek consensus.
DAVOS VS PORTO ALEGRE
By Sunday afternoon, the World Social Forum was already taking a more united stance as members faced off with participants of the Davos forum.
In a videoconference aired on local television, "prominent personalities" from the WEF, including financier George Soros, were pitted against key figures at the rival social forum for a virtual debate that rarely rose above mudslinging.
While independent French media group Article Z had intended the debate to "promote dialogue" and organizers in Porto Alegre said they would use the opportunity to share their alternative proposals, insults and slogans abounded.
In one corner there was Soros, Swedish businessman Bjorg Edlud and two representatives from United Nations including chief adviser to the secretary general, John Ruggie.
In Porto Alegre, the founders of the forum, Brazilian activist Oded Grajew and editor in chief of France's Le Monde Diplomatique Bernard Cassen, were joined by at least 10 activists who threw the first blows in an event that what was expected to lend legitimacy to the experimental forum.
"The best thing that could happen to those thousands of businessmen in Davos is for you to be loaded into a space ship and for that space ship to take off," Philippine activist Walden Bello said at the start of the debate.
Soros started off on a conciliatory note saying he wanted to share ideas on how to address poverty but after Hebe de Bonafini, a militant Argentine human rights activist, accused him of being a "monster and hypocrite," the Hungarian born financier suggested cutting the exchange short.
"I am looking at your face and all I can do is smile, you have broken off all dialogue," he said.
In the end, the debate lasted the full hour with the Porto Alegre participants winning backing from Soros on a global tax on speculative capital flows, known as the Tobin Tax, but the mood did not improve.
The debate will later be carried on the site (http://www.madmundo.com).Reuters:
