Live8...Make Poverty History...G8 Summit: Alternative Voices
George Galloway Has the Last WordThe morning after Live 8, George Galloway is summing up how many on the alternative side of the protest movement feel about the event.
He asks, rather sardonically, if we should not now refer to Sir Bob as Lord Bob and discloses he had difficulty keeping down his breakfast when he saw the photographs of Tony Blair and Geldof at the MTV interview with "Bob resting his head on Tony's shoulder like Cherie."
Blair is the target of much of much of his speech. He accuses him of a "grotesquely cynical manoeuvre" in placing himself at the forefront of the anti-poverty campaign, and says that if "Sir Bob and Sir Bono" really wanted to help, they would stand in Whitehall and call on poor countries to tear up the debts because they have already paid.
The Respect MP - who formed a new party when he was expelled from Labour - even questions the prime minister's concern for Africa. "It's no accident that Blair has chosen Africa, where there is no ideological opposition," he says.
"He is not talking about poverty in the Muslim world, not talking about Latin America because people are rising in revolution. The people of Bolivia have given their answer to the G8." In Edinburgh's Usher Hall, if not Downing Street, Mr Galloway is a very popular speaker.
G8 Counter Summit
At yesterday's G8 Alternatives counter summit meetings it was apparent that the tone had changed, and the political debate was all to the left of "Sir Bob".
A lot of people heard the comments Geldof made on Saturday at the Live 8 event about the stars of the show being the G8 themselves, and no one here yesterday seemed very impressed.
Revolution groups met up yesterday morning at the campsite to decide which meetings we wanted to go to, both to hear the debates within the movement and to speak about our ideas and activities, including our workshop today.
Some of us, including me, went to the anti-war meeting at Usher Hall, where Palestinian student activist Hisham Ghenayem said that expecting the G8 to make world poverty history is like expecting tobacco manufacturers to set up hospitals to treat lung cancer.
Other Revolution members went to the People and Planet and War on Want counter conference in what used to be the Scottish parliament, where audiences of over 500 - mainly young - turned up to hear speakers from across the world, including Trevor Ngwane, who campaigned against privatisation in South Africa, and a woman activist against government and corporate sponsored death squads in Colombia.
Yesterday afternoon we met up in Bristo Square, where 10 police officers were keeping a close eye on the seemingly harmless activities of some young skateboarders, and then went to our meeting, which, fittingly, was about youth oppression.
There was some criticism from the floor about the five speakers and the chair all being male, which was a fair point.
It prompted me to attempt to overcome my fear of public speaking to point out that Revolution are organising a meeting on the very subject of women's oppression and resistance today, which had given a number of our female speakers enough to prepare for already.
The subject of yesterday's meeting was how youth organisations should work together to fight the systematic oppression of young people, but this brought up discussions about the Make Poverty History campaign and how to work alongside people you don't agree with on some pretty fundamental points (like how it is possible to make poverty history, and whether the world needs more or less help from the G8).
We've exercised a number of our political skills over the past two days. First, organising the logistics of getting 100 Revolution members from the campsite into town, all over Edinburgh, and then back together again.
Then, getting involved in debates in meetings and at our stalls, and making contact with people who are interested in our organisation. We're flagging a bit, but I'm hoping that adrenaline and enthusiasm will get us through to Wednesday, and beyond ...
Corporate Dreams, Global Nightmares
Walden Bello, the director of the Focus on the Global South, a diffident, shyly-spoken and bespectacled man, is fast becoming one of the stars of the "fringe" here at the counter-conferences to the Gleaneagles summit.
His modest demeanour belies a radical mind and a calm but provocative way with words – which has seen him receive death threats from the Communist party in the Phillipines this year, where he is a professor of public administration and sociology.
He ended this morning’s session of the “Corporate Dreams, Global Nightmares” event with a rousing call for mass civil disruption of the next World Trade Organisation in Hong Kong in December, to a rapturous ovation.
He told the audience of around 400 activists: “We must be militant, not mellow. We need to lay bodies on the line to stop this monster. The World Trade Organisation is like a vampire – its gets back up again and again, until you finally drive a stake through its heart."
Turning his fire on the British government, he warned the crowd: "Never underestimate the Blair administration’s ability to put a spin on things.”
Professor Bello called the agreement on debt relief at the G7 finance ministers’ meeting in London last month “a real putsch” for not mentioning the terms of conditionality attached, for not mentioning it only applied to 18 of the world’s poorest nations, and for not mentioning trade justice at all.
Paying tribute to the suicide of the South Korean farmer Lee Kyoung Hae at the fifth ministerial round of WTO talks at Cancun, Mexico in 2003 as “electrying the civil society mobilisations”, he called for the WTO to be “derailed and destroyed” rather than reformed – although when asked by a questioner at the end of the talks what would replace it, no clear consensus emerged beyond an entity with “no central body.”
All posts from Guardian G8 Newsblog