Global Policy Forum

Thousands of demonstrators will pour into the streets of Washington next month to stage non-violent direct action protests against the World Bank and the IMF, organizers predicted here Tuesday. The Mobilization for Global Justice, grouping organized labor, human rights and environmental activists, and faith-based movements, said its two days of protests April 16-17 will target the annual spring meetings of World Bank and International Monetary Fund policymakers.

The coalition said its actions would include teach-ins, marches and street theater. "We're calling for a shut-down of the IMF and Bank meetings," organizer Nadine Bloch told a press conference here. "And it may be that some IMF and Bank officials may not be able to get to their meetings" and could find themselves stuck in their hotels.

But she stressed that the Mobilization is also committed to non-violence and does not condone property destruction. "We cannot take responsibility for people who do things outside those guidelines," she said. "That's the responsibility of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. We lay that down at their doorstep because they're the ones that perpetuate violence against people every minute of every day."

Activists here hope to build on momentum generated in Seattle, Washington last December when a massive mobilization disrupted a ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization. They are now taking aim at the World Bank and the IMF, whose policies and projects they charge have impoverished and exploited millions of people in developing countries and have devastated the environment.

"The record of the IMF and the World Bank is one of unmitigated failure," said Njoki Njoroge Njehu, director of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, one of the main sponsors of the demonstrations. "Their harsh austerity programs and failed megaprojects have disqualified them from any future role in development. It is time to shrink these institutions."

The two lending bodies have been "complicit" with multinational corporations in promoting profit-driven projects at the expense of workers' rights and environmental safeguards, according to the coalition.

Pressed by the Fund and the Bank to institute economic reform, poor countries have been forced to slash spending on education and health care, it said in a statement. Stung by criticism of their handling of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, where the IMF in particular was faulted for having advocated higher interest rates to stabilize currencies, the Bank and the Fund have lately stressed the importance of poverty reduction and social spending in their programs.

In a study released here Tuesday, the Bank said its lending of three billion dollars to community-based development around the world has attracted an additional five billion dollars from donor governments and other agencies. As a result, it added, more than 60 countries have established social development projects that have improved schools and health services and upgraded water supplies and local roads.

IMF officials have answered their critics by pointing to a turnaround in the economies of once-struggling Asian nations, insisting that restoring stability demanded harsh -- but ultimately effective -- measures. But activists with Mobilization for Global Justice see the Bank and the Fund as underpinning a corporate-driven campaign for economic globalization.

"They say keep your country open," noted Kevin Danaher, an author with the group Global Exchange. "Open to what? Open means open to the penetration of big transnational corporations that are interested in one thing and one thing only -- profit maximization. So they'll cut down the trees, over-fish your waters and rip out your minerals and leave poverty and environmental devastation behind."

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