"The good news is that a new round of trade talks has begun that gives American farmers a chance to push back against this anti-trade, anti-biotech, anti-progress coalition... Don't let the lunatics take over the asylum. U.S. negotiators should demand an end to the practice of un-elected, unaccountable non-governmental organizations throwing their weight around in trade talks and effectively dictating to Americans what kind of technology we can develop." [from item 1]
"The world’s ‘neo-liberal establishment’, promoting under the slogan of ‘globalization’ a transnational corporate global governance system and attempting to enforce it on the governments and peoples of the world, in particular of the developing world, ... appears to be engaged in a coordinated attempt to denigrate and discredit civil society movements across the world opposing such policies." [from item 2]
"From everything I have seen, the police in Genoa never did anything other than defend themselves... in Genoa many fools have received their due." [see item 3] - Andrew Apel, Editor of Agbionews and a frequent contributor to the Prakash list
"...a policeman, promised anonymity by La Republicca: 'On some they pissed, others were beaten up if they did not sing Fascetta nera. They threatened to rape the girls with billy clubs...' A free lance photographer from Rome, Alfonso De Munno, tells how he was thrown into a cell when his foot was already broken.; that he has seen how detainees were dragged away by their hair; that Mobile Brigade police extinguished cigarettes on the bodies of arrested people, that officers of the prison police put on black gloves and beat up arrested people for hours and hours." [see item 3] - Tales of Police Violence, by Marc Leijendekker in NRC Handelsblad, [Dutch conservative daily] 27 July 2001
---
1. Truth About Trade
2. Coordinated onslaught on ‘globalization’ critics?
3. Wolves in Black Bloc Clothing: Italian security forces create their own Brown-Shirt Bloc.
---
1. Biotechnology: Feeding the whole world
Utah Farm Bureau News
May 2001
On October 12, Truth About Trade Chairman, Dean Kleckner, gave the following presentation on the acceptance of biotechnology advances nationally and globally. The event was a special symposium sponsored and hosted by the Governors Partnership on Biotechnology. Governor Vilsack (D-IA) and Governor Schaeffer (R-ND) hosted the presentation, scheduled in conjunction with the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa.
Being a farmer today really means being two things, both of which are increasingly impacted by the growth of biotechnology. First, farmers are businessmen and women. We have to produce and sell a product. That means we have to have markets for our product. And that means we have to have open and expanding trade. But being a farmer also means being a part of a larger, moral mission to feed people who otherwise wouldn't be able to feed themselves.
The green revolution led by American farmers saved over a billion people from starving to death. But our job is far from over. Last year, world population passed the six million mark and the United Nations estimates that by 2050, there will be 9 billion of us.
At the same time, the amount of arable land is expected to decrease by half over the next fifty years. If American farmers are to continue to play their traditional role in feeding the world's hungry, we must be able to rely on biotechnology to bridge the gap between our soaring population and limited resources.
But standing in the way of American farmers realizing the promise of biotechnology today is a growing coalition of diverse international actors. Statist governments in Europe, Asia and, increasingly, developing countries have joined with a motley crew of non-governmental groups to present a serious threat to shut down trade in genetically modified foods.
These groups are radical environmentalists, protectionists, unions, Green party members and bored kids looking for thrills. They have different agendas, but they are bound together in a common disregard for the truth in the debate over biotechnology.
The good news is that a new round of trade talks has begun that gives American farmers a chance to push back against this anti-trade, anti-biotech, anti-progress coalition. Discussions that have already begun in Geneva will eventually be rolled into a new round of trade talks conducted under the auspices of the World Trade Organization that some are calling the Millennium Round.
To guide them in their negotiations, Truth About Trade recommends the following areas of emphasis for U.S. negotiators:
- Beware of new trade barriers posing as food safety and environmental concerns. What do you do if you're a country that wants to find a reason to keep products out of your market and you can't do it the old fashioned way with tariffs and quotas? Well, you turn to junk science and scare tactics over products produced using biotechnology.
If a country or a group wants to badly enough, they can always find a scientist who will tell them what they want to hear about the supposed harmful effects of a product. U.S. trade officials must be on alert to this tactic and insist that safety and environmental concerns are real - not excuses for protectionism.
- Insist on sound science over scare science, and reason over emotion. No American farmer is interested in marketing products that are unhealthy and unsafe. Period. And we have ways, through testing and re-testing and re-testing again, to determine if products are safe.
And yet repeatedly, the so-called "science" used to keep American GMOs out of international markets is either demonstrably faulty or missing altogether. How is it, then, that opponents of genetically modified foods have been so successful? By appealing to emotion above reason. When the tabloids carry headlines trumpeting the dangers of "Frankenfood" _ and that eminent British scientist Prince Charles spouts off about "playing God" _with fruits and vegetables, people have a tendency to take note.
- Don't be afraid to tug on some heartstrings. The fact is, morality and emotion are on the side of the American farmer in the biotechnology debate. We have the potential to save millions of people from lives of poverty, starvation and ill health with the technology that is available to us today.
We ought to ask those who demagogue the issue of biotechnology, how many vitamin A deficient blind children will you allow to achieve your objective? How many iron deficient women must die in childbirth for your direct mail fund raising efforts? How many more lives will you sacrifice for your "cause"?
- Don't let the lunatics take over the asylum. U.S. negotiators should demand an end to the practice of un-elected, unaccountable non-governmental organizations throwing their weight around in trade talks and effectively dictating to Americans what kind of technology we can develop.
International bodies like the WTO are supposed to be representative of governments who are in turn (at least in the West) accountable to their citizens. But who elected the members of Greenpeace or Earth First?
Listening is one thing, but as someone once said, you can't have such an open mind that your brains fall out.
- Take a pass on the "precautionary principle". This dangerous and unrealistic philosophy of risk-assessment forbids any action, innovation or product development where there is "a lack of scientific certainty regarding the extent of the potential adverse effects".
But what sounds like a common sense "look before you leap" philosophy has been used to set the bar of scientific proof to any new product so high as to be unattainable. And this impossible burden of proof on producers has been used by the European Union to justify banning imports and requiring labeling of genetically modified foods.
Now, every country should be cautious when it comes to food safety. But the precautionary principle is designed to give anybody who raises any possibility of threat or harm "no matter how far-fetched" an effective veto on new products or technology. It is, in short, a license to do nothing. U.S. negotiators should either change it, or reject it.
---
2. Coordinated on-slaught on ‘globalization’ critics?
by Chakravarthi Raghavan
Geneva, 19 July 2001 - The world’s ‘neo-liberal establishment’, promoting under the slogan of ‘globalization’ a transnational corporate global governance system and attempting to enforce it on the governments and peoples of the world, in particular of the developing world, by a set of norms, principles and rules of the game in the economic, political and social space of countries, appears to be engaged in a coordinated attempt to denigrate and discredit civil society movements across the world opposing such policies.
On the one hand there is an attempt at international, inter-governmental levels, to promote a single view and in effect monopolise the ‘information’ base in economic and development policy discourse (as the World Bank is attempting through its socalled Global Development Gateway, GDG, project and initiative), and on the other divide and split the growing mass movements of opposition by associating them with ‘anarchists’.
Government leaders of the powerful and rich countries, the media promoting corporate interests and ideologies, and academics and others - benefiting from the current system - are joining in.
Within the international system, the voices of dissent and critiques, are being sought to be isolated and silenced - by transfers of international professionals to other jobs, and bringing in more pliant people as new recruits or by promotions, mediocre and pliant professionals to senior staff positions.
The IMF, the World Bank and the OECD, with enormous resources (compared to the UN system and developing countries) have long been able to monopolise economic research activities and agenda setting; and the Bank and the OECD since early 1990s, have moved to set policies in the social, health and other fields.
For a while, both their resources and the quality of their professional staff enabled them to dominate the discourse, drowning out the political economists in the UN system.
But more recently, with civil society movements now professionally better qualified and better informed than in the past and doing their own research and presenting position papers challenging the establishment views, and using the relatively more democratic horizontal communications of the internet, to present their views bypassing the established corporate media, the Bank appears to be attempting to re-establish its claims to knowledge and research monopoly.
The GDG initiative and other such efforts has now been challenged in the ‘hotline’ complaint to the Bank’s Oversight committee. (see separate story, ‘Development: Fraud, misuse of funds charge over Bank’s Internet project’).
When in 1946, the United Nations debated the idea of having a public information office, it was quite a controversial a move (for those times), and there were extensive discussions involving the member-governments, the media and others.
The UN General Assembly fifth committee (budget and administrative committee) in ultimately recommending the establishment of the unit and its being made part of the UN budget, laid out some ground rules. Subsequently, from time to time, one or the other parts of it have been modified, but the 1946 policy decision and guidelines still lay down the legislative view, about the proper role of public information activities (of the UN and its specialized agencies too) in any democratic polity.
The World Trade Organization secretariat produces every week-day a ‘journal’ of press clippings - mostly of news and views promoting its line, but occasionally from the established media a dissenting view - and distributes it to the delegations and others, thus subtly trying to influence their thinking.
The secretariat has now been ‘cleared’ by its Budget Committee, and its WTO General Council, to accept funding from a German foundation (the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, close to the ruling social democrats) for a WTO training course for journalists to be run by the WTO media office. As set out to the WTO’s Budget Committee report, the 2-1/2 day seminars are designed to familiarise journalists with current WTO issues and build their capacity to write on WTO topics.
Frank Vogl of the Transparency International, in a comment (cited in the hotline complaint against the Bank management) on the ‘journalist training’ activities of aid agencies, bilateral and multilateral, and agencies ‘owned’ by governments, says: “There are good reasons not to support state-owned media...it is inappropriate for state-run agencies, including the World Bank, which is totally publicly owned, to engage in media training programs...”
While the Bank in a very major way through the Gateway initiative, and the WTO and others through other ways of ‘managing information’, are trying to influence policies and thinking of the developing country governments and the public, in the direction of their own neo-liberal worldview and promotion of global corporate interests, there is also a simultaneous campaign to denigrate critics of these policies - a campaign that has the ‘smell’ of a coordinated one, with a ‘leader’ setting the one and others following and imitating.
The campaign ranges from attempts of newspaper columnists like Flora Lewis (in the International Herald Tribune , 6 July), to dub critics and protests against globalization as ‘anarchists’ and ‘terrorists’, and accusing named (Third World Network and Focus-on-Global-South), and other unnamed civil society organizations as activist centres behind the violent terrorist campaigns. These ‘activist centres’ (which are doing no more than providing, via websites or list-servers, alternative information and critiques of economic theories and false claims being used to force neo-liberal policies on the developing world) are accused of being behind the anti-globalization protestors.
The way this is all being done is reminiscent of the Mccarthyist style campaigns of the late 1950s which sought to discredit critics by dubbing them communists, and silencing most of them.
Flora Lewis in her column cited Canadian academic Sylvia Ostrey as the author of the study that has identified the groups behind the anti-globalization protestors moving from site to site.
Ostrey, a moderator in a panel on civil society at the recent WTO-organized NGO symposium (6-7 July), was confronted by several of the NGOs, and appears to have attempted to distance herself from the Flora Lewis column, implying that though she had talked with her ‘friend’, Flora Lewis, the opinions attributed in the column to Ostrey were not what she had said. The NGOs reportedly told her that this was not enough, and she had to write to the IHT to counter the views attributed to her.
But so far there has been no clarification in the IHT.
At the closing plenary session of the WTO symposium, Ostrey also made a public declaration clarifying that she had dinner with Flora Lewis in Paris and that Lewis had taken Ostry’s discussion on issue of NGOs and “made this into an article in the IHT that bore no resemblance to my academic piece. I will write to Flora. It is slightly misleading, in the portions where she allude or drew from my piece.”
Ostrey is not a detached academic; she is a neo-liberal exponent, a former senior Canadian trade official during the Uruguay Round negotiations, and a former chief economist of the Paris-based OECD secretariat. Prior to and after Seattle, she issued a questionnaire, using her academic credentials to seek information from NGOs about their funding and activities. But several did not respond, and some did. The study, cited by Flora Lewis, is presumably one outcome.
In all these protests and disturbances - Seattle, Washington DC, Prague, Gothenburg etc - the western police and security apparatus, with all its sophistications and information-sharing, and the linkages and cooperation among their intelligence agencies, have not apprehended any of the ‘violent anarchists’ and interrogated them to find out their links and connections. This has engendered the suspicion that some of the protestors are agent provocateurs, trying to discredit the growing mass movements against the state of affairs.
Such agent provocateur attempts are known, even in modern history - from the Reichstag fire used by Hitler to establish a dictatorship, to the Bologna station bomb explosion in the 70s that enabled the Italian and other European security apparatuses to come down heavily against leftwing protests etc.
And the ‘establishment’ is also demanding the other NGOs to repudiate street protests and condemn them, and disassociate from organizations involved in these mass protests, with the bait that if they do so they may come and ‘dialogue’ with the secretariat officials.
And at the symposium, Mr. Moore also wanted to set a code of conduct for the NGOs. Several leading activist grass-roots groups scorned his contemptuous view of the NGOs.
Still relevant to those in power, and the establishments close to them, demanding such repudiations, and attempting to split the opposition groups, is the answer that Gandhi gave in 1940 in India in relation to the Polish resistance to Hitler’s occupation.
In 1940-41, before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Gandhi in his weekly paper, Harijan, had praised the Polish resistance to Hitler and the occupation. A German prisoner of war interned in a camp in west India wrote to Gandhi questioning how, Gandhi, an apostle of Non-violence, could condone the violence of the Polish resistance, of those who stealthily crept behind isolated German soldiers and killing them. Gandhi replied that while he himself would have acted in open non-violent resistance, keeping quiet and accepting the occupation would have been cowardice. And, in the face of the violence that Hitler represented, the Polish resistance was ‘almost non-violent’.
Gandhi repeated this view, while writing to the British Government from jail in 1942-43, when that government blamed him for the violent outbreaks that erupted in August 1942, when Gandhi and his associates were jailed even when they were seeking negotiations with the government, with the police arresting Gandhi and others in a midnight swoop, suppressing publication of news and views, and acting with ‘leonine violence’ as Gandhi called it, on protests in order to suppress all dissent and demands for freedom in India. -- SUNS4940
The above article first appeared in the South-North Development Monitor (SUNS) of which Chakravarthi Raghavan is the Chief Editor.
© 2001, SUNS - All rights reserved. May not be reproduced, reprinted or posted to any system or service without specific permission from SUNS. This limitation includes incorporation into a database, distribution via Usenet News, bulletin board systems, mailing lists, print media or broadcast.
---
3. Wolves in Black Bloc Clothing: Italian security forces create their own Brown-Shirt Bloc
by Erin George
August 9, 2001
July 19-22, Genoa Italy
A ring of steel enclosed 4.5 square kilometres around Ducale Palace. This was the "red zone." Plastic bullets, truncheons, gloved fists, water canons, tear gas canisters and live ammunition met the 300,000 protesters. It was the police and Italy's Carabinieri (paramilitary) in Genoa who instigated the violence during the demonstrations against the Group of Eight (G8).
The most frightening and sinister tactic employed by Italian security forces was the creation of their very own Brown-Shirt Bloc. Italian security forces recruited Nazis to bolster the police numbers and to infiltrate the Black Bloc anarchist groups.
The Italian establishment newspaper La Repubblica interviewed Liam "Doggy" Stevens from Birmingham, one of the so-called Black Bloc anarchists. He told the paper "I'm a Nazi, not an anarchist, I don't care about the G8 or anti-globalization bullshit. The Italian brothers invited me. They told me we wouldn't have troubles with the police - they would allow us to do all we wanted."
An anonymous Italian police officer told the same newspaper that security forces had employed right-wing fascist thugs. Superiors told officers that they could act with impunity during the demonstrations. When he expressed concerns that their actions were violating the constitution he was told by fellow police, "We don't have anything to be worried about, we're covered."
The actions of the supposed Black Bloc in Genoa make this scenario entirely plausible. In previous demonstrations such as Seattle and Quebec City, the Black Bloc targeted politically strategic hits - Shell gas stations, national banks and corporate media vehicles.
In Genoa there was precious little logic to the destruction. There, the so-called Black Bloc went through the streets unscathed. They crashed the Genoa Social Forum (GSF) convergence centre, the Peace Carnival, the White Overalls direct-action contingent and Saturday's massive march. Italian police and Carabinieri followed closely behind. The authorities used the presence of their Brown-Shirt Bloc as an excuse to attack remaining demonstrators. These agitators, dressed like Black Bloc members, "escaped" each time.
The police's fascist thugs infiltrated and impersonated the Black Bloc with ease because the group's members are masked. This gave security forces and G8 leaders the media visuals they needed to do two things: attack the credibility of the movement, and the excuse to physically attack any demonstrator, pacifist or otherwise.
The police brutality did not end after the attack on Saturday's 300,000-strong march. Out for revenge, the Italian security forces went after the school where the GSF headquarters and Indy Media Centre were located.
The stories of brutality on the evening of Saturday July 21 and the morning of Sunday, July 22 are horrific. Police stole or destroyed film, videotapes, statements and computers. They smashed the evidence of their brutal conduct throughout the weekend. The GSF legal centre was destroyed and the head lawyer taken into custody. The most chilling stories are of the beatings that took place in the building next door, where 200 demonstrators were sleeping. Victims reported smashed teeth, broken bones, cracked skulls, splintered ribs and punctured lungs.
Norman Blair and his friend Dan McQuillan were beaten ruthlessly by Italian police that night. Blair was quoted in the Observer: "You could feel the hatred and the venom in them. The blood was coming out of Dan in big dollops, like jelly. It was just horrible."
Mark Covell, a British journalist covering the demonstrations, was also attacked by police that evening. "I heard my ribs break, like snapping match sticks. I thought, my God, this is it; I'm going to die. The last thing I heard was a lot of screaming. Then I lost consciousness," Covell told the Observer. His shattered ribs punctured his left lung> He lost ten teeth.
Ninety-two people were arrested and charged with the same offences that night. Most of them had been sleeping in what was thought to be a GSF safe space when the attack occurred. Dozens of people were carried out of the school on stretchers, many unconscious. Later, they too told stories similar to Covell's and Blair's.
The walls, floors and stairwells of the school were covered in blood. The attack was carried out in full view of politicians, journalists and lawyers. Coupled with the level of the brutality, this fact makes a strong case that the plan was executed with the knowledge and blessing of Italian higher-ups.
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's new Prime Minister, campaigned on a right-wing platform of law and order. His coalition government includes open Nazis and the post-fascist National Alliance party. The actions of the police, Carabinieri and their Brown-Shirt Bloc make it apparent that security forces were operating with a sense of impunity.
But the police brutality against the G8 demonstrations has not gone unanswered. GSF organizers originally expected 120 000 participants in Saturday's march. In response to the brutal murder of Carlo Giuliani, over 300,000 arrived. Two days later, a quarter of a million people marched in demonstrations across Italy denouncing the police brutality.
In the wake of these massive demonstrations and international outrage denouncing the police brutality against G8 demonstrators, three Italian police chiefs have been removed from their current positions.
On Thursday, August 2, it was announced that anti-terrorism chief Arnoldo La Barbera, deputy chief of G8 security Ansoino Andreassi and Genoa police superintendent Francocesco Colucci would be disciplined and reassigned. Italian Interior Minister Claudio Scajola, responsible for Italy's police forces, made the announcement after surviving a vote of non-confidence in parliament the day before.
Eight separate investigations into police conduct during the G8 summit are now underway.
A version of this article originally appeared in the Socialist Worker on August 1. Sources include: first-hand observation, eyewitness accounts in Genoa, indymedia and the globalise resistance listserv. Erin George is a recent graduate of the Ryerson School of Journalism, and former Ontario Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students. She is a member of Toronto Mobilization for Global Justice. At CFS and Mob4Glob, she was involved in educating and organizing for the Quebec City demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas.