By Emad Mekay
Inter Press ServiceSeptember 25, 2002
When protesters fill the streets here on Saturday to vilify the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for what they consider harmful policies in the developing world, they may also be unwittingly admitting their own failure to reduce world poverty and suffering.
Many activists argue that they have actually succeeded, that the two institutions are not as harmful as they once were.
But their achievements fall short of the mark expected at the height of the recent protest movement, in 1999 when 30,000 supporters of the so-called global justice movement turned up for the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks in Seattle, and a year later when more than 20,000 protested here against the Bank and Fund. After those demonstrations, some of the perhaps more idealistic activists expected speedy progress on decreasing world poverty and ending many global injustices.
But two years later, the activists themselves, ahead of this weekend's meetings of the two institutions, still talk about unlit African villages, inaccessible water, starving children, and HIV-infected mothers. "Most of what we've been able to accomplish has been to lessen the harm that the institutions have done," said Robert Weissman, co-director of Washington-based Essential Action and an organiser with the main umbrella group for this weekend's protest.
"They are powerful. In terms of what we can do, the challenge is still to limit their harm." Activists point to some successes. Pressure from U.S.-based groups, they say, led the U.S. Congress to pass initial debt relief for the world's poorest countries, worth some 34 billion dollars.
Protesters are proud that their movement convinced Congress in 2000 to compel U.S. executive directors of international financial institutions (IFIs) to oppose user fees in primary schools as conditions for poor countries to receive loans. Although those charges accounted for only a tiny part of the structural adjustment policies that often require borrowing countries to make major changes to their trade policies, public ownership and the provision of basic service, the activists hail the changes as a tremendous triumph. "Ending primary school fees is not a small issue," said Robert Naiman of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research. "It has a tremendous impact on whether children are at school," he said, adding, "it's affecting millions of lives. I wouldn't downplay that."
That civil society's victories have been won via pressure on U.S. politicians could mark a subtle shift in the activists' approach - from targeting the Bank and other IFIs to zeroing in on the money (and power) behind the institutions. Yet critics say that the civil society movement is still too unfocused. "Until the protest movement becomes more structured and more focused on the specific problems that they want improved, they are an anti-everything movement and I don't think they really have an impact on the actual content of such meetings," said Carol Graham, vice president and director of governance studies at The Brookings Institution, a prestigious political think tank here. But Weissman says that without pressure from civil society activists, the Bank and the Fund, particularly the Fund, wouldn't even be talking about poverty. "Now in their documents, almost every paragraph has some anti-poverty message," he adds. Defendants and critics of the movement do agree that the protests and lobbying have created an enormous amount of public awareness. "Yes, world poverty hasn't been abolished and there is still a lot of injustice around the world," said Naiman. "But we were in a situation when four years ago there wasn't even a debate in Europe or the U.S. about these policies. Now there's a discussion.." This, he says, is the essential first step towards changing such policies. "There is no way you could do anything to bring any change if fundamental polices are not even on the table for discussion." The tactics, and sometimes violence, of the protestors have managed to put their cause on the front pages of the mainstream corporate media in the rich countries, and, almost consequently, in the South. Graham concedes: "Over time the persistence of these protests have caused some thinking in the developing communities and the IFIs about what we are doing wrong," she says. "If anything, why our efforts are so misunderstood." Nancy Birdsall, president of the Washington-based Centre for Global Development and a former vice president at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), itself often the target of activists' criticism, says the movement is changing. "It is being transformed from an anti-globalisation movement to one of managing globalisation," she said. "A lot of the impetus behind them is trying to get these institutions to do more. Maybe not today or in this year will those protests change the agenda that has already been set," she added, "but in the future, I expect them to put new issues on the agenda, including greater representation of developing countries in the World Bank and the IMF, so those institutions could look more democratic and possibly then be more effective."
But the groups do not have to wait until the future to make their presence felt in the corridors of the two citadel-like buildings, the downtown Washington headquarters of the IMF and World Bank. Citing the cost of providing security for the talks, the meetings have been trimmed from a week to two days.
Nor is the movement short of new ideas. One activity signalling that the next major target on the movement's list could be rich governments is an unprecedented all-night candle vigil later this week, not outside the Bank and the Fund, but at the U.S. Treasury - metres away from the White House.
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