DAVOS SWITZERLAND
Class struggle comes to the mountain top
By Leslie
Feinberg
The determined and developing anti-capitalist movement that
first emerged at the Battle of Seattle in 1999 appears
irrepressible. Recent protests in and around Davos,
Switzerland, prove it.
The world's leading tycoons, corporate executives and
political leaders hoped this year's World Economic Forum would
avoid protests like those that rocked the event last year.
Davos--the highest city in Europe--is a tactical nightmare
for protesters. One single road leads to the posh, picturesque
ski resort perched atop the Swiss Alps.
Police cut off access to it with a roadblock. All incoming
vehicles were inspected.
Immigration officials at Switzer land's borders and airports
were armed with a list of activists to be barred from entering
the country. Police officials announced that 104 from that list
had been refused entry; another 14 were deported after they
were inside Switzerland.
Police and soldiers reportedly roamed through trains headed
toward Davos. They stopped, searched and detained people
wearing jeans, a young woman with dreadlocks and males with
long hair.
Pamphlets, megaphones and computers were reportedly
confiscated, mug shots snapped.
Authorities in Davos and nearby cantons halted all train
service on Jan. 27, the day of the slated protest. Early on
Jan. 26, Swiss cops had used big steel gates to block the roads
near the Davos Dorf railway station.
Swiss authorities denied permits for any Davos
demonstrations. On Jan. 26 four members of Friends of the Earth
International dressed as tycoons were arrested and whisked away
merely for handing out anti-globalization leaflets in town.
Some 3,000 police and army troops were deployed at an
estimated cost of $5.5 million. Cops were armed with riot gear
and shields. Water cannons and helicopters sat readied.
Police prepared to spray tons of liquid cow manure mixed
with freezing water on demonstrators.
Beefed-up security forces guarded entrances to the upscale
hotels. The Congress Center--site of the five-day WEF--was as
tightly guarded as a fortress, and encircled with coils of
barbed wire. WEF participants wore computer-coded badges to
track their access.
Everything was in place to suppress the activists' right to
denounce the WEF for what it is: a forum to promote globalized
corporate economic interests at the expense of the world's
impoverished and working people.
Protests erupt
But all the king's horses and men--and a heavy
snowstorm--could not stop anti-capitalist activists from making
their voices heard.
Protests erupted in Davos and in towns where protesters were
stranded.
Hundreds managed to make their way into Davos through the
supposedly airtight police cordon. Some got in disguised as
skiers on vacation.
Demonstrators tried to march on the WEF meeting. They
managed to get within 500 yards of the Congress Center. Many
held signs read: "Justice, not profits!"
Cops dragged steel barriers from the train station to
surround the protest. They blasted activists with water cannons
in freezing temperatures. Protesters, some with snowballs,
fought back against police.
Many demonstrators never made it to Davos. In a Jan. 27
report, Reuters quoted a police spokesperson who said hundreds
of people had been turned back, "creating a traffic jam at the
bottom of the road leading up to Davos." Students and
journalists also complained of being barred entry by cops.
Landquart is a city in the flatlands below Davos where rail
passengers transfer to the train to Davos. There, police fired
teargas into the crowd of hundreds of protesters barred from
travel to Davos. Some reports said police used rubber
bullets.
Activists blocked train tracks. Others held a sit-down
strike on a local highway.
The same day, demonstrators fought pitched battles with
police 90 miles away in Zurich. Cops fired tear gas and water
cannons into the crowd to disperse activists trying to reach
Davos.
Police, who officially estimated the demonstration at 1,000,
reported 121 arrests--mostly Swiss and German activists.
Protesters fought back in this heart of the Swiss financial
capital. Stones reportedly injured two police officers. One
soldier was knocked to the ground and disarmed by
activists.
Demonstrators tried to take over Zurich's main railway
station. Hundreds of railway passengers were trapped as police
filled the station with teargas.
Activists then took to the streets of the nearby
Bahnhofstrasse, one of the world's most opulent shopping
districts. They reportedly set fire to cars, smashed windows of
exclusive stores and spray-painted political slogans on
buildings.
This is what capitalist democracy looks like
The next day, the Associated Press reported, "Swiss Sunday
newspapers largely blamed the authorities." And the Swiss Trade
Union Federation charged authorities with "violating basic
principles of democracy."
Inside the WEF, at a late-night soiree on Jan. 27, the tony
crowd in black tie nervously sipped Moet-Chandon Champagne,
nibbled sushi and watched tango dan cers and synchronized
swimmers.
The real topic of the WEF, according to an indymedia.org
report, was "widening the corporate social agenda." The power
players included Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, Goldman Sachs
Managing Director Abby Joseph Cohen and Accel Partners managing
partner Jim Breyer.
Discussions included whether the U.S. economy is headed for
a soft or a hard landing. The Bush-Pentagon "National Missile
Defense" system was a point of controversy in hallways. So were
Bush's anticipated positions on trade, his attitude to Europe
and Asia, and his reputation as an executioner of
prisoners.
Representatives of developing countries were invited to
discuss a subject near and dear to the hearts of imperialist
bankers and industrialists: how to best privatize state-owned
factories.
WEF organizers tried to mute what they termed "globalization
backlash" by inviting some 40 non-governmental agencies and 36
organizations like Greenpeace and Amnesty International this
year. U.S. Sen. John Kerry tried to take the steam out of
scheduled protests by suggesting a multi-billion-dollar
environmental fund.
Lip service was paid to bridging the divide between the
imperialist Goliath and the countries it has kept
technologically underdeveloped.
"Touchy-feely" Davos--that's how one senior World Bank
official described this year's WEF. But few were taken in.
An "anti-Davos" forum was held concurrently in Porto Alegre,
Brazil. This "World Social Forum" was organized by the Public
Media Center, a U.S. research organization, and joined by the
Institute for Policy Studies and the Green Party.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, a Davos participant, sent a
sympathetic message to the WSF. The French sent two government
ministers to Porto Alegre and two others to Davos.
On the opening day of the World Social Forum, some 10,000
protesters marched in Porto Alegre. One contingent of students
carried a banner reading "Scrap Plan Colombia, Yankees out of
Latin America" to denounce U.S. intervention against the
Colombian popular insurgencies.
A counter-WEF event was also held just a few hundred yards
away from the Davos proceedings. "Public Eye on Davos,"
sponsored by the World Development Movement, was created by
those who eschewed the protests at the barricades.
However, many who planned to participate never got through
the police checkpoints. Swiss police deported one speaker
scheduled to deliver a keynote address to the event, according
to organizers.
Many who addressed the Public Eye forum stressed that
corporations left to their own designs harm the environment and
human rights. Speakers called for government regulation to
police global corporations.
Douglas McLarren, of the worldwide BGO Friends of the Earth,
said that he and other members of non-governmental
organizations had drafted a report spelling out requirements
for corporate accountability. As if to illustrate the
limitations of this idea that governments will advance the
interests of the people against the corporations, copies of
that report never arrived in Davos.
Swiss authorities confiscated them.
Jessica Woodroffe of the World Development Movement, an NGO
based in England, said the transnational corporations at the
WEF across the road were "making a mockery of democracy and
plotting with governments to figure out rules to regulate
themselves."
But riot-clad cops and army troops, bales of barbed wire,
and fumes of teargas and manure wafting through the air is what
democracy looks like--democracy of, by and for the wealthy and
powerful.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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