San Francisco Bay Guardian
December 8, 1999
By Daniel Zoll

On Dec. 5 the New York Times announced that "there were no victors in the globalization battle of Seattle."

Try telling that to scores of Bay Area protesters who returned home late last week after achieving the impossible: shutting down the WTO ministerial meeting and turning the global trading system's corporate-driven assault on workers and the environment into an international front-page story. After those victories, the collapse of the trade talks late Friday night was just icing on the cake.

"Anyone who cares about social and economic justice, who cares about workers' rights internationally, who cares about the freedom of the third world from recolonization -- we are all celebrating this victory," Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland-based Institute for Food and Development Policy told the Bay Guardian.

The collapse of the talks was a coup for Bay Area activists, who were instrumental in organizing the relentless week of actions in Seattle. In the face of tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, mass arrests, and often-brutal tactics by Seattle robocobs, activists continued to get their message out through the week.

"It was our goal to shut down the meeting, and we achieved that goal," Kelly Quirke, executive director of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, told us inside the Seattle Convention Center last week. "The people who turned out in the streets, from the environmental community to labor to the human rights community, not only sent a message but were able to derail the WTO agenda."

Even as security tightened throughout the week, Bay Area groups managed to shake up the official proceedings and make their voices heard. Medea Benjamin of San Francisco's Global Exchange almost succeeded in replacing U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as the keynote speaker at the event's opening ceremony Nov. 30. Protesters had managed to delay the opening ceremony at the city's Paramount Theater by trapping Albright and many trade delegates in their hotels. As the audience waited for the ceremony to start, Benjamin spotted an opportunity.

She jumped up on the Paramount's stage and grabbed the mic, and her face appeared on the theater's massive video monitor. "Since we're off to a slow start today, we thought we'd take the opportunity to start a dialogue that should have begun years ago," Benjamin told the crown before police yanked her off the stage and dragged her out of the theater. "Where's the transparency, where's the democracy?" she yelled to the television cameras as police wrestled her to the ground and put her in plastic wrist cuffs. She was later released into the crowd of protesters.

Bay Area activists again infiltrated the official proceedings Dec. 3 to protest U.S. plans for a WTO "global free logging agreement" that they say would increase global wood consumption. A coalition of groups including Rainforest Action Network, Global Exchange, and Pacific Environment and Resources Center stormed into the convention center, unfolding banners that read "Protect Forest, Clearcut the WTO" and "No Globalization Without Representation." The news-starved international press corps descended on them immediately.

"The world's forests are being threatened by what the governments and corporations are trying to do with the free logging agreement. President Clinton is a clear and present danger to the world's forests. We've got to stop this insanity. We've got to stop the WTO," RAN's Randy Hayes yelled before the group's members were dragged out by police. They were detained and later released.

Another victory for demonstrators was their success in making an issue of the WTO's secrecy and lack of accountability. The Geneva-based WTO's decisions are made in private by an unelected, unaccountable panel of trade bureaucrats. Ordinarily it receives little scrutiny.

This time, thanks to the efforts of the protesters, the world was listening.

Daniel Zoll, a former Bay Guardian reporter, is staff writer at the International Forum on Globalization.