Reflections on WTO - part two
by Paul Hawken
The sun broke through the gauzy clouds. It was a beautiful day. Over cell
phones, we could hear the cheers coming from the labor rally at the
football stadium. The air was still and quiet. We waited. At 10 a.m. the
police fired the first seven canisters of tear gas into the crowd. The
whitish clouds wafted slowly down the street. The seated protestors were
overwhelmed, yet most did not budge. Police poured over them. Then came the
truncheons, and the rubber bullets. I was standing with a couple hundred
people who had ringed the hotel, arms locked. We watched as long as we
could until the tear gas slowly envelopeed us. We were several hundre feet
from Sgt. Goldstein's 40-foot "cooperation" zone. Police pushed and
truncheoned their way through and behind us. We had covered our faces with
rags and cloth, snatching glimpses of the people being clubbed in the
street before shutting our eyes. The gas was a fog through which people
moved in slow, strange dances of shock and pain and resistance. Tear gas is
a misnomer. Think about feeling asphyxiated and blinded. Breathing becomes
labored. Vision is blurred. The mind is disoriented. The nose and throat
burn. It's not a gas, it's a drug. Gas-masked police hit, pushed, and
speared with the butt ends of their batons. We then sat down, hunched over,
and locked arms more tightly. By then, the tear gas was so strong our
eyes couldn't open. One by one, our heads were jerked back from the rear,
and pepper was sprayed directly into each eye. It was very professional.
Like hair spray from a stylist. Sssst. Sssst.
Pepper spray is derived from cayenne peppers. It is food-grade, pure enough
to be used in salsa. The spray used in Seattle is the strongest available,
containing 10 percent to 15 percent Oleoresin Capsicum, with a 1.5 to 2.0
million Scoville heat unit rating. One to three Scoville units are when
your tongue can first detect hotness. (The jalapeao pepper is rated between
2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units. The habanero, usually considered the hottest
pepper in the world, is rated around 300,000 Scoville units.) This
description was written by a police officer who sells pepper spray on his
website. It is about his first experience being sprayed during a training
exercise:
"The pepper spray stream then hit my eyes. It then felt as if two red-hot
pieces of steel were grinding into my eyes, as if someone was blowing a
red-hot cutting torch into my face. I then fell to the ground just like
all the others and started to rub my eyes even though I knew better not too.
The heat from the pepper spray was overwhelming. I could not resist
trying to rub it off of my face. The pepper spray caused my eyes to shut very
quickly. The only way I could open them was by prying them open with my
fingers. Everything that we had been taught about pepper spray had turned
out to be true. And everything that our instructor had told us that we
would do, even though we knew not to do it, we still did. Pepper spray
turned out to be more than I had bargained for."
The Seattle Police had made a decision not to arrest people. Throughout the
day, the affinity groups created through Direct Action stayed together.
Tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray were used so much that by
late afternoon, supplies ran low. What seemed like an afternoon lull or
standoff was because police had used up all their stores. Officers combed
surrounding counties for tear gas, sprays, concussion grenades, and
munitions. As police restocked, the word came down from the White House to
secure downtown Seattle or the WTO meeting would be called off. By late
afternoon, the Mayor and Chief announced a 7 p.m. curfew, "no protest"
zones, and declared the city under civil emergency. The police were
fatigued and frustrated. Over the next seven hours and into the night, the
police turned downtown Seattle into Beirut.
That morning, it was the police commanders that were out of control,
ordering the gassing and pepper spraying and shooting of people protesting
non-violently. By evening, it was the individual police who were out of
control. Anger erupted, protestors were kneed and kicked in the groin, and
police used their thumbs to grind the eyes of pepper-spray victims. A few
demonstrators danced on burning dumpsters that were ignited by pyrotechnic
tear-gas grenades (the same ones used in Waco). Taunting, jeering,
protestors were defiant. Tear gas canisters were being thrown back as fast
as they were launched. Drum corps marched using empty 5-gallon water
bottles for instruments. Despite their steadily dwindling number, maybe
1,500 by evening, a hardy number of protestors held their ground, seated in
front of heavily armed police, hands raised in peace signs, submitting to
tear gas, pepper spray, and riot batons. As they retreated to
the medics, new groups replaced them. Every channel covered the police
riots live. On TV, the police looked absurd, frantic, and mean.
No one could believe what they were seeing. Passing Metro buses filled with
passengers were gassed. Police were pepper spraying residents and
bystanders. The Mayor went on TV that night to say, that as a protestor
from the '60s, he never could have imagined what he was going to do next:
Call in the National Guard. During that day, the anarchist black blocs
were in full view. Numbering about one hundred, they could have been
arrested at any time but the police were so weighed down by their own
equipment, they literally couldn't run. Both the police and the Direct
Action Network had mutually apprised each other for months prior to the WTO
about the anarchists' intentions. The Eugene Police had volunteered
information and specific techniques to handle the black blocs, but had been
rebuffed by the Seattle Police. It was widely known they would be there,
and that they had property damage in mind. To the credit of the Mayor, the
Police Chief, and the Seattle press, distinctions were consistently made
between the protestors and the anarchists (later joined by local vandals as
the night wore on).
But the anarchists were not primitivists, nor were they from Eugene. They
were well organized, and they also had a plan. The black blocs came with
tools (crowbars, hammers, acid-filled eggs) and hit lists. They knew they
were going after Fidelity Investments but not Charles Schwab. Starbucks but
not Tully's. The GAP but not REI. Fidelity Investments because they are
large investors in Occidental Petroleum, the oil company most responsible
for the violence against the U'wa tribe in Columbia. Starbuck's because of
their non-support of fair-traded coffee. The GAP because of the Fisher
family's purchase of Northern California forests. They targeted
multinational corporations whom they see as benefiting from repression,
exploitation of workers, and low wages. According to one anarchist group,
the ACME collective: "Most of us have been studying the effects of the
global economy, genetic engineering, resource extraction, transportation,
labor practices, elimination of indigenous autonomy, animal rights and
human rights and we've been doing activism on these issues for many years.
We are neither ill-informed nor inexperienced." They don't believe we live
in a democracy, do believe that property damage (windows and tagging
primarily) is a legitimate form of protest, and that it is not violent
unless it harms or causes pain to a person.
For the black blocs, breaking windows is intended to break the spells cast
by corporate hegemony, an attempt to shatter the smooth exterior façade
that covers corporate crime and violence. That's what they did. And what
the media did is what I just did in the last two paragraphs: Report on the
desires and recount the property damage caused by a tiny sliver of the
40,000 marchers and demonstrators.
It's not inapt to compare the carefully considered lawlessness of the
anarchists with the equally carefully considered flouting of other laws by
the WTO. When the "The Final Act Embodying the Results of the Uruguay Round
of Multilateral Trade Negotiations" was enacted April 15th, 1994 in
Marrakech, it was recorded as a 550-page agreement that was then sent to
Congress for passage. Ralph Nader offered to donate $10,000 to any charity
of a congressman's choice if any of them signed an affidavit saying they
had read it and could answer several questions about it. Only one
congressman -- Sen. Hank Brown, a Colorado Republican -- took him up on it.
After reading the document, Brown changed his opinion and voted against the
Agreement. There were no public hearings, dialogue, or education. What
passed is an Agreement that gives the WTO the ability to overrule prior
U.S. conventions, acts, treaties, and agreements.
The WTO directly violates "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights"
adopted by member nations of the United Nations, not to mention Agenda 21,
the Convention on Biodiversity, and others. Most of the delegates to
Marrakech, even the heads of country delegations, were not included or
made aware of the WTO statutes that were drafted by sub-groups of
bureaucrats and lawyers, some of whom represented transnational
corporations. The police mandate to clear downtown was achieved by 9 p.m.
Tuesday night. But police, some who were fresh recruits form outlying
towns, didn't want to stop there. They chased demonstrators into
neighborhoods where the distinctions between protestors and citizens
vanished. The police began attacking bystanders, witnesses, residents, and
commuters. They had completely lost control. When President Clinton sped
from Boeing airfield to the Westin at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, his limousines
entered a police-ringed city of broken glass, helicopters, and boarded
windows. He was too late. The mandate for the WTO had vanished sometime
that afternoon.
______________________
Over the next few days, a surprised press corps went to work and spun wwebs
They created myths, told fables. They vented thinly veiled anger in
columns, and pointed guilt-mongering fingers at brash, spoiled white kids
who did not understand the issues. Supposedly, anarchists led by
anarcho-primitive John Zerzan from Eugene ran rampant. Misguided
demonstrators held self-canceling views. Protestors were against trade.
Patricia King, one of two Newsweek reporters in Seattle, called me from her
hotel room at the Four Seasons and wanted to know if this was the '60s
redux. No, I told her. The '60s were primarily an American event; the
protests against the WTO are international. Who are the leaders? She wanted
to know. There are no leaders in the traditional sense. But there are
thought leaders, I said. Who are they? she wanted to know. I began to name
some, including their writings, area of focus, and organizational
affiliations: Martin Khor and Vandana Shiva of the Third World Network,
Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South, Maude Barlow of the Council of
Canadians, Tony Clarke of Polaris Institute, Jerry Mander of the IFG, Susan
George of the Transnational Institute, David Korten of the People-Centered
Development Forum, John Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies, Lori
Wallach of Public Citizen of the International Society for Ecology and
Culture, Mark Ritchie of the Institute For Agriculture and Trade Policy,
Anuradha Mittal of Institute for Food & Development Policy, Helena
Norberg-Hodge of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, Owens
Wiwa of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, Chakravarthi
Raghavan of the Third World Network in Geneva, Debra Harry of the
Indigenous Peoples Coalition Against Biopiracy, Jose Bove of the
Confederation Paysanne Europ'enne, Tetteh Hormoku of the Third World
Network in Africa, Randy Hayes of Rainforest Action Network.
Stop, stop, she said. I can't use these names in my article. Why not?
Because Americans have never heard of them. Instead, Newsweek editors put
the picture of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynksi, in the article because
He had, at one time, purchased some of John Zerzan's writings.
Between 40,000 and 60,000 people came to Seattle to demonstrate. What a
majority of media projected onto the marchers and activists, in an
often-contradictory manner, was that the protesters are afraid of a world
without walls; that they want the WTO to have even more rules; that they
blame the WTO for the world's problems; that they are opposed to global
integration; that they have been duped by Pat Buchanan; that they are
against trade; that they are ignorant and insensitive to the world's poor;
that they want to tell other people how to live Ö the list is long and
tendentious. Some of the mainstream media also assigned blame to the
protesters for the meeting's outcome. But ultimately, it was not on the
streets that the WTO broke down. It was inside. It was a heated and rancorous
Ministerial, and the meeting ended in a stalemate, with African, Caribbean,
and some Asian countries refusing to support a draft agenda that had been
negotiated behind closed doors without their participation. With that much
Contention inside and out, one can rightly ask whether the correct question
is being posed. The question, as propounded by corporations, is how to make
trade rules more uniform. The proper question, it seems to me, is how do we
make trade rules more differentiated so that different cultures, cities,
peoples, places, and countries benefit the most.
-end of part two -
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