Anti-globalisation activists on Monday sought to set up alternatives to the current world economic order to benefit the poor as their annual meeting was marred by the arrest of a South African judge on rape charges.
More than 100 000 people are taking part in the six-day World Social Forum (WSF) to build a common front against everything from the United States occupation of Iraq to gender inequality.
Joseph Stiglitz, an arch-critic of the World Bank where he was chief economist from 1997 to 2000, said international trade is tearing down social protections in the rush to privatisation.
”Economic policy cannot be delegated to the technocrats of international financial institutions,” said Stiglitz, an American who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001.
”The essence of economic globalisation is that it should bring job security. If there was such as commitment, developing countries could have opened markets by explicitly tying market access to job opportunities,” he said.
”It would have created right grounds for globalisation,” he said.
Outside the auditorium where Stiglitz spoke, activists from dozens of groups aired their grievances with colourful demonstrations, including sex workers who chanted slogans demanding an end to violence against women.
But off the forum grounds in industrial north Mumbai, a South African judge attending the conference was arrested after a fellow delegate claimed he raped her, police said.
Seeraj Desai, a 53-year-old senior judge in the Cape High Court, was remanded in police custody until Friday, police said.
A woman, also South African, in a statement to police accused Desai of raping her early on Sunday in the upscale Taj President hotel after she went to his room to discuss the day’s programme at the World Social Forum.
”The incident has saddened and shocked us and we are doing everything to see that the person concerned is not hurt further and everything is done to take care of her,” said forum spokesperson Gautam Mody.
”The WSF is committed to fight such patriarchy,” he said.
Iraq has dominated the debates and rallies of the WSF as activists carried on their protests on Monday, with South Korean students and trade unionists marching through the dusty roads of the exhibition ground chanting slogans against their country’s proposed troop deployment to Iraq.
But the forum, where more than half of the delegates are from India, also tried to shift the focus to Hinduism’s social hierarchy under which 138-million people belong to the lowest caste, the Dalits.
Hundreds of Dalits and Adivasis, who are descendants of Indians from before the Aryan migration 3 500 years ago, led processions through the forum demanding more social protection and greater access to agriculture.
To dramatise the need for fair trade, a coalition of activists left the forum at a wooded exhibition grounds and headed into Mumbai to Dharavi, considered Asia’s biggest slum with an estimated population of one million.
Standing next to the makeshift tin-roofed homes and open sewers of Dharavi, more than 100 activists symbolically launched a free-trade banner depicting a globe made of entwined human figures, which will be carried around the world.
”To overcome poverty we must have free international trade rules. At the moment the rules are not fair,” said Christine Gent, speaking on behalf of 3 000 groups that are part of the free-trade initiative, including Britain’s Oxfam.
”International trade far too often allows the strong to exploit the weak and the rich to become richer against the poor,” she said.
The WSF was held between 2001 and 2003 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to build on the movement that emerged during occasionally violent protests during World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle in 1999. — Sapa-AFP
SA judge on rape charge in Mumbai