The Seattle Times | August 20, 2001 | By R.C. Longworth, Chicago Tribune
In a step that could signal a more unified opposition in the battle over globalization, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are considering creating an "all-star" team to replace the babel of protest groups that have produced noisy and often violent backdrops to Seattle, Genoa and other recent global-economic meetings.
The idea, one of a flurry of countermeasures to make the NGO voices heard, was born when the World Trade Organization severely cut the number of unofficial observers and protesters allowed at the next big WTO meeting, in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar in November.
The collaboration of NGOs, all opposed to unregulated globalization but in the past each pushing its own agenda, could be a crucial step toward a unified movement protesting the government and corporate control of globalization.
"It's complex, and it has never been done, and we don't want to make any wrong moves, but it could be the wave of the future," said Mark Ritchie, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minneapolis-based NGO that came up with the idea.
After its last big meeting collapsed in the face of street riots in Seattle in late 1999, the WTO scheduled its next ministerial meeting Nov. 9-13 in Doha, the capital of Qatar, an isolated and easily defended peninsula near Saudi Arabia.
The choice of Qatar has since become an embarrassment for the WTO. Qatar not only has no tradition of democracy and little tolerance for dissent, but it is a tiny place, with barely 700,000 people, and a limited capacity to handle all the government delegations, media, NGOs, protesters, experts and technicians who flock to big meetings.
Just how limited that capacity is became clear last week when WTO Director General Mike Moore sent a letter to the 647 NGOs that had requested accreditation, telling them they could each send only one delegate. Given Qatar's ability to close its borders, this meant that the 30,000 to 50,000 protesters and other unofficial delegates that came to Seattle and to later global meetings in Washington, Quebec and Genoa - where a protester was killed by police - would be replaced by 647 people.
There will be room in Qatar for only 4,400 delegates and other participants. By contrast, Seattle drew about 7,200 official participants.
The riots in Seattle brought so much attention to the WTO that thousands more would likely attend the meeting in Qatar, if they could.
Most NGOs travel light, but even these traditionally cash-strapped organizations need analysts, spokespeople, secretarial help and other aides to keep track of the WTO meeting, mount effective opposition and communicate all this to the media. With only one delegate per NGO, this kind of work would be crippled.
Ritchie, who proposed the "all-star" idea, argued that 647 one-person delegations would be 647 different versions of ineffectiveness. Instead, he issued a plea to the 647 organizations to put their individual accreditations into a pool. Each organization would have a vote to elect a committee of trusted NGO leaders, who then would pick a unified delegation.
This delegation, he said, would be carefully balanced so the many NGO interests - such as environment, labor, food groups, public health, Third World issues, education - would be represented. So far, he said, about 20 percent of the NGOs have turned him down "but about 50 percent have said yes." He said he would be satisfied with a delegation of about 50 groups.
"This is an excellent idea," said Anuradha Mittal, co-director of Food First, an Oakland-based NGO. "We're going to give up our slot. This is a whole new form of organization. It takes us beyond single-issue advocacy, past the time when we focused on just one issue, say, agriculture."
Global Trade Watch, a Washington-based arm of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, indicated sympathy for the idea but said it still wanted to send its own delegate.
"Doha makes it clear that you have to think about pooling. In fact, ever since Seattle, there's been an increased focus on the need for cooperation and joint strategy," said Margrete Strand, field director at Global Trade Watch.
Steve Kretzman, an analyst with the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington, expressed skepticism.
"The devil is in the details," Kretzman said. If a unified delegation is to work, he said, "it needs to be handled in an extraordinarily careful way by the NGOs."
With most protesters locked out of Qatar, other demonstrations around the world are scheduled. Some NGOs are talking about a "free-trade flotilla" of ships from Beirut and India that would anchor offshore and provide living space for protesters.
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