[E-rundbrief] Info 22 - WTO - Cancun report from actions 10.9.

Fr Sep 12 22:46:26 CEST 2003

E-Rundbrief - Info 22

Bad Ischl, 12.9.2003

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
www.begegnungszentrum.at

=============================================================

cancun reports & pictures:
www.nadir.org/cancun
www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/cancun/action/cancun

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [caravan99] The fence at Kilometre Zero - Cancun report from
Wednesday's actions From:    "Katharine Ainger"
Date:    Thu, September 11, 2003 10:52 pm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

11 September

The fence at Kilometre Zero

'Soon after the Uruguay Round Agreement [of the WTO] was settled, Korean
fellow farmers and myself realized that our destinies were out of our
hands. We were utterly powerless. We could do nothing but look at the
waves that destroyed our lovely rural communities, settlements hundreds of
years old. To make myself brave, I have tried to search out the real
reasons for and the major forces of those waves. Reaching my conclusion
at the front gate of the WTO, I am crying out my words to you that have
been boiling for so long inside my body.'

These are the words of Lee Kyung-Hae, of the Korean Farmers' League, in
March 2003, on hunger strike at the gates of the WTO headquarters in
Geneva, Switzerland as the Committee on Agriculture was drawing up its
agenda this spring.

Yesterday in Cancún after hanging a sign that read 'WTO kills farmers' on
the security fence keeping ten thousand protesters from reaching the
Convention Centre. Climbing up to the top of it and facing the direction
of the WTO he cried out, drew out a Swiss Army Knife and stabbing himself
in the heart, fell backwards into the arms of the crowd.

Mr. Lee, who was 56 years old with a wife and two children, had spent a
lifetime campaigning for farmer's rights. He suffered increasingly as the
situation of farmers  10 per cent of the South Korean population  had
worsened. 'What would your emotional reaction be if your salary was
suddenly cut in half, without you knowing the reason?' Lee had written
during his March vigil. As elsewhere in the world, overproduction and
cheap imports after Korean agriculture was liberalized resulted in massive
price drops.

He described abandoned, decaying villages of rural Korea: 'Some farmers
just gave up farming and migrated to the urban slums. Others became
bankrupted through debt. Some fortunate people continued  but not for
much longer, I suspect. As for me, I could do nothing but look around
their vacant and crumbling houses. I would check them, sometimes, hoping
that they had come back. Once I ran to a house where a farmer had
abandoned his life by drinking toxic chemicals because of his
uncontrollable debts. I could do nothing but listen to the screams of his
wife. If you were me, how would you feel?'

Later, the Korean group described the wave of suicides that had gone
through the farming community, and that Lee had said before he died that
he did it because the WTO was killing farmers around the world. None had
anticipated that Lee would take his own life, and the group were shocked
and grieving.

He was rushed to the General Hospital where he died three hours later from
puncture wounds to the heart and lungs.

Dusk fell over the vigil held by the Korean activist delegation outside
the Hospital. Silently, indigenous peasant women from Chiapas wearing
their bright red, pink, blue and orange dresses joined them, carrying
candles with quiet dignity.

***

No-one had expected the day to end this way.

It had begun with the Farmer and Indigenous Forum's Declaration at the Via
Campesina encampment. This global alliance of small and family farmers,
peasants, landless and indigenous people, women and rural labourers, has a
combined membership of over 100 million - the vast majority from poor
countries. In a stadium filled with campesinos wearing their trademark
green t-shirts and caps they called for food sovereignty, a ban on
genetically modified foods, and for food and agricultural issues be
removed from the remit of the WTO. From their point of view, food is a
human right, not a commodity, and its production is fundamental to all
human existence. This does not mean that they are 'anti-trade' but that a
country needs to support its own food needs and production first.

The gathering swelled until it numbered almost 10,000. Peasant women
wearing white dresses decorated with bright floral patterns had brought
the village to the city: dried fish were strung on lines between trees;
cobs of smoked maize were piled in sacks. Tiny children wore green
headscarves.

A gang of kids wore dolphins made out of foam as hats in protest at the
WTO ruling in favour of a Mexican trade complaint against rules on
dolphin-friendly tuna fishing. The dolphins and the fishworkers unions
uniting on the march was Cancún's answer to Seattle's teamsters and
turtles, when unionists and environmentalists came together on the
streets.

An indigenous movement from the state of Oaxaca, CIPO-RFM, arrived with
intricate, intensely coloured murals of their farms painted on sheets.
Mexican indigenous call themselves people of maize¹ and were the
originators of corn as a crop. CIPO-RFM explained: our ancient varieties
are being destroyed by GM corn coming in from the US, cheaper than we can
produce.¹ Last year university researchers discovered that between 20 and
60 per cent of traditional maize varieties of crops in CIPO-RFM¹s
community are contaminated with modified genes from imported US corn, and
for which Monsanto owns the patent.

As one Mexican farmer said, 'the protest would have been ten times bigger
if our farmers could have afforded to come to Cancún'. Those who could not
lend their presence lent their support from afar. Recorded messages from
the Zapatistas Comandancia rang around the encampment. Comandante David of
the EZLN said, 'the land is ours, it belongs to the peasants and the
indigenous peoples, and we should take it back and make it produce for
all, not just for a handful of the wealthy who wouldn't even recognize the
colour of the soil if you placed it before them.'

Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos said: 'This is not the first
time nor the last that those who think they own the planet have to hide
behind their high walls and pathetic security forces to make their plans.
Just as in any war, the high command of this army of the transnationals,
which seeks to conquer the world in the only way that it can be conquered
- by destroying it - meets under a security system which is matched in
size only by their fear.'

***

Joined by Seattle's marching band the Infernal Noise Brigade, students
from Mexico City, assorted anarchists and activists banging oil drums
lodged in stolen Wal-Mart carts, the march headed towards that high wall
protecting the luxury hotel zone. One group carried a puppet of Mayan God
Kaluka, a feathered dragon invoked against the WTO's intellectual property
rights regime. Another wheeled Chac, a stunning 12 foot high Mayan God,
his arms raised towards the heavens, invoked against the privatization of
water.

Most spectacular of all were the 200 members of KOPA, a coalition of 40
South Korean social movements who walked, banged traditional drums, and
sang together. Their procession was a mock Korean-style funeral march for
the WTO, replete with multicoloured coffin carried on the shoulders of six
and followed by people dressed as priests.

We arrived at the heavily policed security fence blocking access to the
causeway leading towards the Convention Centre. Some tied banners to it,
and others scaled it. With the Koreans in the lead, the crowd began to
push sections of the fence over. Then Koreans set fire to the coffin and
threw it at the barrier. This was the moment when Lee fell from the fence
 at the time the nature of his injury was not clear to the crowd, and he
was quickly taken away in an ambulance.

Then as the Infernal Noise Brigade's drums beat a driving rhythm, the
crowd lifted up the fence bodily and toppled it. The heat was intense and
people began to suffer from heatstroke. From out of nowhere, a dark grey
cloud opened up right over our heads and showered the protesters with
cooling rain. John Ross, veteran chronicler of the Zapatista rebellion
emerged out of the crowd, grinned with broken teeth and shamanic stare,
yelled 'It's Chac  the God of Rain!'  and dissolved once more into the
crowd.

A group of boys at the front, reluctant to push through the line of riot
police, began to throw stones and sticks instead. The campesinos drew
back, some of them hit by stones later blamed on provocateurs that had
apparently been thrown from too far back to have been intended for police.
The crowd, now fatally divided in tactics, began to lose momentum. Several
hours passed in this manner. And then the news spread from person to
person, that the Korean man was dying.

***

And this was how the protest ended. The Koreans sat facing a line of riot
police who had filled the space where the fence had been torn down,
singing a song from the Guangzhou massacre of 1980 which recalled the
faces of the dead looking back at those still struggling. Giant letters
spelling out 'NO WTO' in golden corn lay at the police's feet. Above them
the gaudy banner welcoming trade delegates to Cancún had been half pulled
down, revealing a sophisticated culture jam: behind it on the billboard
was a picture of the real Cancún  impoverished litter pickers combing the
beach.

The intersection where Lee died is known as Kilometre Zero. Today the
Koreans returned to camp there until the WTO stops the meeting out of
respect, and called for the Korean delegation to pull out of the meeting
immediately.

Via Campesina announced: 'We do not want any more deaths. We do not want
people to die of hunger. We do not want our land to die At great cost we
understand this sacrifice of life, this immolation committed by our friend
Lee Kyung Hae has left us speechless and heartbroken. We do not want this
death to be in vain; we want a solution to the despair in which a large
number of farmers are living because of these international treaties.'

Though both the official Korean trade delegation and WTO Director General
Supachai Panitchpakdi expressed sadness at Lee's death, there is no sign
that the demands will be met. KOPA remain steadfast: 'He didn't kill
himself. The WTO killed him,' they said.

KOPA's website: http://antiwto.jinbo.net

Indymedia Cancun: http://cancun.mediosindependientes.org

Notes from Nowhere editorial collective's new book about social movements
We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism is out
now, published by Verso.

www.WeAreEverywhere.org

new address: caravan99 at lists.riseup.net

=================================================

Matthias Reichl
Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
Wolfgangerstr.26
A-4820 Bad Ischl
Tel. +43-6132-24590
e-mail: mareichl at ping.at
http://www.begegnungszentrum.at