Global Policy Forum

By Caroline Lambert

Most of the discussion surrounding the World Bank/IMF annual meetings, scheduled for 19-28 September in Prague, has so far focused on security. If you were planning a visit to Prague next month, you might want to be prepared for disruption to your plans. As preparations for the IMF/World Bank annual meetings are reaching the final stage, attention is focusing on security issues. Annual meetings are no small gathering: about 20,000 ministers, bank chiefs and top officials from dozens of countries are expected to converge on the Czech capital.

That's enough of a headache in itself. But it's compounded by the prospect of 20-50,000 protestors expected to make the trip to Prague. Some 11,000 police equipped with riot gear are to be deployed during the annual meetings, with a few thousand more in reserve. The US State Department has already advised US citizens to avoid unnecessary travel to Prague during the meetings.

Protest groups have also been busy working on logistics. A host of websites provide information on various groups working on D-day - sorry, S26 - when protests groups are supposed to stage demos, not only in Prague but all around the world. And for those who want to make the trip, travel arrangements and accommodation have not been left to chance. Jubilee 2000, a pressure group advocating debt cancellation has set up a booking system with a UK travel agent, which can arrange "group flights and accommodation on a flexible basis according to your preferences".

If you are in more rustic mood, the Initiative Against Economic Globalization recommends camping. Through their website, you can get in touch with a local Czech company which is happy to arrange accommodation in the local Strahov stadium - and sell a few tents and recyclable paper plates in the process. And in case you are in two minds about what to do on September 26, you can turn to the S26 website for examples of "conceivable actions", which go from carnivals and street theater to "appropriating capitalist wealth and returning it to the working people".

So: is the threat of chaos a real one? It's easy to see why organizers are worried, given the memories of the protests at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle last year, and disruption of the spring meetings of the Bank and Fund in Washington DC. But Czech President Vaclav Havel and IMF boss Hans Koehler have both deplored the fact that so much attention has focused on security. They are probably right. Few of the likely protesters will be anarchists and hooligans with no clear agenda. In Seattle, most groups staged peaceful demonstrations, as, doubtless, will those who show up in Prague.

Nor do all protest groups reject globalization. Many, such as Oxfam and the Jubilee 2000 coalition, are critical, rather, of what they see as its excesses and contradictions. Free trade, they say, is good so long as it is also 'fair.' International financial flows are fine, so long as lenders accept their share of responsibility and refrain from reckless lending. International financial institutions would not be that bad, says the 50 Years Is Enough coalition, if they were democratic and accountable to those who have to live with their policies. In truth, it's when the protesters make their case against the excesses of globalization reasonably that they have most success. Which might explain why Jubilee 2000 and Oxfam carry more weight than a group called Destroy IMF.

Well-organized pressure groups, in fact, have helped transform the World Bank. Under James Wolfensohn, president of the Bank since 1995, what was once a navel-gazing, self-righteous institution has become ready to talk - and listen - to the outside world. In July, a proposed Bank loan involving the resettlement of Chinese farmers in Tibet was cancelled following an effective campaign by Tibetan organizations and their sympathizers. During the preparation of a controversial oil pipeline linking Chad and Cameroon, NGOs and local populations were consulted at length.

Talks with NGOs have been worked into the program of the Prague meetings. And the World Bank has initiated a review of the impact of globalization, the results of which are summarized in a report published on its website (http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/pb/globalization/). That site, indeed, is a fine example of the way that information now flows out of what was once a sealed black box. And the sound of increasingly well-organized protest groups outside the Bank's door is part of the reason for the change. If the NGOs remember what works and what doesn't, anxious American tourists to Prague need fear nothing more troubling than a shortage of hotel rooms.

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