The Last Demo Circus of the Year - 03 December 1999

In a guide book written so long ago as 1941, before the United States found itself in the Second World War, I read this, which is not meaning to be poetical but to describe precisely and literally the overview of a city - the city being Seattle, then and now the largest city of the Pacific North West.

It was here described as one of the most important import/export cities of the United States, having a junction of four railroad systems with the East and having the short great circle route to the Orient.

And I should say that the emergence of Seattle as the builder of the Jumbo Jet fortified its position as now the export/import capital of the United States.

Here's the description -

"The city is impressive on a clear day, when the Olympic mountains with their serrated snow laden ridges can be seen to the west and the Cascades - the blue green Cascades - way off in the distance are visible in the east, with the lonely snowy cone of Mount Rainier looming above all the other peaks of the range.

"A city built on seven hills, a city of mountains and many lakes in which, at night, the myriad lights of the city are reflected."

Sounds today like a great city for tourism and so it has become - second now only to San Francisco as a Western pleasure haven.

By today I should have said during the past few years, today or the other day, it was not the safest city in the United States to stroll in or go sightseeing.

Last Wednesday the front page of the New York Times carried a four-column colour photo that looked like one of the bloodiest days in the recent history of Kosovo - terrified people crouching before or alongside armed robots - that's what they seemed to be - men with goggled protective masks pointing barrels into the air, the whole frightened scene billowing with clouds of smoke and the hullabaloo of shouts and obscenities punctuated by hacking coughs from tear gas.

I doubt if any old resident of that prosperous and beautiful city can remember when the National Guard was called out to save the city from an engulfing riot, or even the city was put under curfew.

"What?" cried one, who has known the city for 60 odd years, "what is going on here?"

Well simply put Seattle was chosen, I don't know how soon or late, as the appropriate place to invite the delegates of 135 nations to sit down at a convention of the World Trade Organisation to begin again to put together some basic rules that might bring order, sense and discipline on an event in history that has overwhelmed us like an unforeseen hurricane.

Simply the fact of globalisation - a clumsy word for an immense radical turn in the whole business of international trade. What, in shorter words, could be the - should be - the ground rules for promoting free trade among as many nations as possible instead of between one or two and two or three?

It couldn't be put more simply than that but also no other common phrase in the language can excite more passions in more different people than the phrase "free trade".

And what happened in Seattle this week was a public relations disaster that nobody, in or out of Washington, had anticipated.

Many of the foreign delegates had a rough time getting to their hotels or didn't make it at all or got trapped in them - what with angry crowds and a strike of taxi drivers in support of any one or two of about 500 protesting groups.

If there were 135 delegations there were in all, at last count, something like 60,000 protestors - I say "in all" because the number of separate protest groups has been uncountable.

If they have one thing in common it's a view of the World Trade Organisation that none of the delegates shares - it's the view of the WTO as the servant or running dog of every big company, corporation, that does an international business.

Also the belief that any resolutions or rules that the WTO passes are aimed at undermining the health, environmental and labour protections around the world.

Well that's almost as crude a definition as one of the slogans being waved in the turbulent streets - "Capital Kills".

There are, of course, green groups from the Sierra Club down to people who want, like Pol Pot, to abolish cities altogether but of course in a more humane way.

There are anti-China groups on China's violation of human rights.

There are passionate large bands of paraders who proclaimed their loathing of child labour anywhere on Earth.

Others specified the crimes of companies who make shoes or shirts in Korea, Thailand, Malaysia.

And since the millennium approaches - the fact that it's a year from next January makes no difference to us who are going to celebrate it anyway in a month's time - since we've all decided that the millennium is on us many groups believe also that the end of the world is at hand and they were there.

They thought they might as well get in their final kick in the last demo circus of the year.

So we have also in the words of a distinguished foreign affairs specialist who was there - "We had a Noah's Ark of Flat Earth advocates, protectionist trade unions, and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix."

Now a week ago when some of these people began to slouch into Seattle we saw them dressed in funny or lurid costumes, waving defiant placards, and it seemed we were in for a jokey demonstration like some of the fringe groups that protest almost every parade these days.

We assumed that they would dissolve in the general laughter or be quietly diverted to a side street - this happens every year at the Saint Patrick's Day parade in New York where there are always gay protesters, anti-gay protesters, and there are still in New York people who don't like the Irish on principle.

But on Saint Patrick's Day they have the sense to stay mum and just glower. Otherwise, as a cheerful cop once said to me - "Liable to get your head broke."

However the scene in Seattle this week was more than the balmy little yuppy circus we'd expected.

The big surprise was the cumulative bulk - the size of the protesting groups - the elaborately printed slogans of many groups, the well-staged attacks on chosen victims, the big nationally or internationally famous department stores.

It became suspiciously clear that much of the violent protests must have been planned well ahead of time.

One militant, in fact, said - "We'd laid all this out months ago on the internet." Which would explain why protesters came from near and far and why the militants created a civil disturbance far larger than their numbers.

But now apart from all the loonies left, right, centre, off the wall and from outer space - which allowed the Europeans, especially, to get in their favourite anti-American digs - there were solid dogmatic bodies of men and women who were there to proclaim very valid missions.

To demand that the WTO face and try to resolve substantive and nagging issues that divide nation and nation, continent and continent, First World interests and Third World concerns.

And there are, as you'd expect, issues so rooted in national interest that the chances of a resolution that satisfies the majority of WTO now seem remote -

The American plea to Europe to abandon subsidies to farmers which make the export of America's abundant produce difficult.

The driving complaint of the main American industrial union that humane conditions of labour must be set for those poor countries in which rich countries can manufacture necessary clothes at a third of the price Americans would have to pay if they were made here.

How the world's environment can be protected without incidentally throwing millions back into poverty, by drastically restricting their daily work on trees or fish or whatever.

Or how about the coca plant?

These great questions are the ones that the best brains in the WTO must confront before such sincere but comparatively frivolous issues as the preservation of the spotted owl or a campaign, say, to maintain the mahogany forests of Malaysia - even if it sends the people who earn good money making furniture back to earning a starvation pittance in the fields.

And how about the coca fields of Peru and Columbia? Are you against the American drug trade? Of course, but you must then find another crop to provide the livelihood for the otherwise jobless quarter million harvesters.

What was painfully plain when the bruised delegates of 135 nations eagerly left for home was that the World Trade Organisation must mend its procedures.

It must put up with the horrors and inconvenience of today's fact that diplomacy, which used to achieve great things and much mischief by being conducted in secret, has now to advertise every grievance and conflict in front of a mischievous press. Its discussions and fights nevertheless must be more open.

What was also plain but not noticeably clear to the protesters was that globalisation, whether it's a good or bad thing in itself, is not something that can be deplored and abolished - it's here, like the nuclear bomb, something that good men and true have been trying to abolish or neutralise for half a century.

Last year 7% of American families did their Christmas shopping over the internet. This year 20%. Next year, perhaps, 40%.

The internet is becoming the world's shopping mall, supermarket, stock exchange. And with that in mind globalisation can no more be abolished than the internet can ever be anything but at once a boon and a curse - no more than the bomb can be put back in the bottle.

To abandon or abolish the World Trade Organisation would be like saying - "Let's abolish government. Let's march with that small proud bunch of Seattle protesters who carried a flaming banner - 'Anarchy is triumphant'."

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