Report
#4
World Social Forum, India
January 16 - 22, 2004
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The
World Social Forum was an amazing event – 100,000 activists of every
conceivable stripe and nationality. We surged through colorful crowds and
banners, making way for demonstrators drumming and dancing their way past the
meeting rooms, and sometimes even into them!
This buoyed our spirits, but, diehard activists that we are, we came
for another reason. This was to network toward democratic global governance as
the only long term solution to our world’s problems. And, despite illnesses
that sometimes laid us low, we actually succeeded in our goal of establishing
a new coalition toward a world parliament. This incorporates all our past work
labeled the “Global Peoples Assembly Movement”, in effect relaunching it. Dick came down with an intestinal bug as soon as we moved into the 5 star hotel that the “Alliance for a Responsible, Plural, and United World” had arranged for their associates, offering to pay our expenses for 3 days. Mona still had a sinus infection. It seemed an absurd luxury to move from $5 a day hotels to $82 a day, but cheaper hotel rooms had sold out early. In any case, the filtered air helped Mona’s sinuses, and she sure wasn’t complaining about soaking in a hot bathtub! Dick had to call in the hotel doctor a second time after antibiotics didn’t work. This time the nice doctor got it right with a diagnosis of “amoeba”. Our
entire movement lost momentum after the 9/11 attacks in New York and DC, but
now it is roaring back, stronger than before. We interpret this as a global
response to the unilateralism of George W. Bush. By invading Iraq in defiance
of global law and opinion, Bush has become the symbol of “imperialist
globalization”, to use the parlance of the banners at the World Social
Forum. Now the rest of the world is starting to come together to form a more
equitable world order. Our
workshops and forums were all well-attended, with a host of new faces wanting
to help our cause. The challenge will be to find constructive roles for all.
Perhaps the highlight was our last workshop.
It began with a “debate” between our invited speaker Professor
Andrew Strauss and well-known British journalist George Monbiot, who has a
column in The Guardian. Both are outspoken advocates for a world
parliament, yet they managed to find a few differences. Monbiot was familiar
with the strongarm tactics used in the British Parliament, so he emphasized
the need to improve democratic process when creating a world parliament. He
even suggested that greater representation be given to more democratic
countries, as an incentive toward more authentic local democracy. His new
book, Manifesto for a New World Order, will be published
shortly. Our friend Andy has published numerous articles on the rationale for
a world parliament and how to get it going, in a practical, incremental way.
We distributed many hundreds of copies of his article "Toward a Global
Parliament", from the September 22, 2003, The Nation magazine.
This debate and the many questions that followed were videotaped. The
last half of the evening we conducted our final organizational meeting,
discussing several of the many initiatives that the new coalition could
undertake. High among these were several suggestions for generating a higher
profile for the global democracy movement in future world and regional social
forums and related events. Ultimate success in our endeavor will require (1)
broad grassroots support among activists, (2) strong civil society support,
especially among NGOs, and (3) organized support from a number of the more
progressive countries, like India. Andy and colleagues will concentrate on
task (3), while the seasoned activists in the coalition will emphasize tasks
(1) and (2). Some will also work on improving the democratic process, which
has left many people very frustrated with current legislatures and
parliaments. What with the Internet and the web, there is now a wealth of new
ideas for a better democratic process, and several of our speakers are devoted
to exactly this task. In fact we intend to implement some of these ideas in
our own organization. We
skipped both the opening and closing ceremonies and most other “big
events”, even though some of our favorite firebrand speakers such as
Arundhati Roy and Joseph Stiglitz were on the podium. Just too stressed out,
we guess. The reason we skipped
the closing ceremony was to relax during our last evening in India, teaching
and learning from a beautiful, loving, and spiritual Indian family.
Our Mumbai Servas hosts, the Bajpai family, are very dear to us and
will never be forgotten. We
hate to admit though, it is a relief to leave India behind. This was a very
difficult trip, especially when we weren’t feeling well at the end.
It is not easy to look at the teaming slums which cover two thirds of
the City of Mumbai where poor people live in make-shift tin and cardboard
shanties, where hungry children play in sewers of polluted water and rummage
through garbage to search for anything of value. It is so sad
to carry with us the memory of these sights, sounds, and smells, but to
be present in them is almost too much for our weak hearts to endure.
Yet these memories will help to sustain us in our future efforts to
help poor people throughout the world to participate in international decision
making that affects their local communities. We found the political/spiritual
tradition of Gandhi still very much alive in India, and this gives us hope
that India can actually lead in the movement toward democratic global
governance. When that day comes, the WTO, the IMF, and multi-national
corporations will no longer call the shots which are growing the slums of
Mumbai.
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Dick Burkhart & Mona Lee |