[asia-apec 302] FOCUS-on-APEC#9 Part 3

[gonzalo]

REGIONAL ROUNDUP

The Manila People's Forum: An Exciting, Exhilarating Process

by Aileen Kwa*

After almost a year of preparations, the Manila People's Forum on 
APEC (MPFA) was held Nov. 21-23 at the Manila Mid-Town 
Hotel.  Over 500 people attended the meeting, about 250 of whom 
were foreign delegates from about 28 countries.  The conference 
was preceded by four "pre-summit" meetings on labor, 
environment, governance, and social and economic issues. 

The MPFA was the climax of a highly exciting drama that began 
long before the third week of November.  The key acts in this 
drama included:

o The leaking to the press in early September by MPFA of the 
highly confidential "Individual Action Plans" detailing the economic 
liberalization measures that the 18 member governments of APEC 
were promising to implement, although these had not been 
approved by their citizens or parliamentary bodies.  Australia and 
the US criticized the Philippine government for the leak, and 
President Fidel Ramos, in turn, blamed Dr. Walden Bello, 
chairperson of the MPFA's International Convenors' Committee 
and co-director of Focus, whom he characterized as a "person well 
known for his extremist views."

o The Philippine government's banning in mid-October of Jose 
Ramos-Horta, special representative of the East Timor 
independence movement and Nobel Prize winner, who had been 
invited to be a guest speaker at the MPFA.  The Philippine 
government's move was obviously taken to please President 
Suharto of Indonesia, and in the ensuring controversy, the MPFA 
was able to claim the moral high ground with its position that 
economic issues could not be divorced from the progress of human 
and democratic rights in the Asia-Pacific region.

o The national debate on APEC and trade liberalization, which 
raged in the print media and in television from mid-November on.  
MPFA representatives appeared  in television talk shows to argue 
the case against free trade.  However, an MPFA challenge to 
Philippine, US, and APEC officials to hold a formal public debate 
was not taken up.

o The "great debate" on whether or not "to engage APEC" that 
took place on the second day of the conference, where four 
speakers--Jane Kelsey of New Zealand, Lyuba Zarsky of the 
United States, and Horacio Morales, Jr. and Nicky Perlas of the 
Philippines
--eloquently and passionately argued for their respective positions.

o The "People's Caravan" from Manila to Subic Bay, site of the 
APEC leaders' summit.  Most of the members of the MPFA 
caravan were not able to reach Subic owing to a government 
blockade of the roads leading to the free port.  However, an 
advance party that included Sara Larrain of Chile and Lori Wallach 
of the United States was able to penetrate the screen and deliver 
the MPFA's "Manila Declaration" and "Manila Action Agenda" to 
a cabinet-level Philippine government team at the gates of Subic.

The MPFA was a very successful effort, judged from its goal of 
providing a platform where NGO's and people's organizations 
could discuss problems ignored or denied by the official APEC 
process and present their ideas on an alternative framework for 
peoples' cooperation across the Asia-Pacific region.

More than in previous APEC summits, the coverage of the parallel 
conference by the media was much more extensive in Manila.  At 
first, this was due to the Ramos-Horta affair, but the press soon 
moved to cover the substantive issues of trade and investment 
liberalization.  Coverage by CNN, National Public Radio (US), and 
other international media allowed the MPFA to state its case 
before an international audience, while in the Philippines local 
media devoted considerable attention to the MPFA's analysis of 
the likely impact of trade liberalization in the Philippines.

The MPFA critique, widely aired in the press, in fact placed the 
host government on the defensive since the latter had done very 
little work to justify the merits of trade liberalization to the 
Filipino people but relied instead on an advertising campaign with 
slick images but little substance.

The one drawback of the parallel conference was that it was unable 
to draw all of the Philippines' diverse NGO and political 
community under one roof.  Three other parallel conferences were 
held, though the MPFA was by far the largest, most diverse, and 
most international in participation.  There was another 
distinguishing characteristic of the MPFA, in contrast to the other 
conferences, and this was its focus on regional, Asia-Pacific issues 
rather than on national, Philippine-specific issues.  Even where 
Philippine issues were discussed, there was always an effort to 
place them in a regional context.

To both the local and international press, it appeared that the 
MPFA had the most complex or nuanced position towards APEC.  
As International Convenors' Committee Chairperson Bello put it in 
his speech at the opening session on Nov. 21:
"A nuanced position is inevitable given the diversity of groups 
represented at the MPFA.  In the public discussions leading up to 
this meeting, what I have stated--and this is a personal 
interpretation--is that the MPFA is not necessarily against APEC.  
What unites all the diverse forces within the MPFA is opposition 
to the US-led effort to turn APEC into a free trade area.

"Were APEC simply to remain a loose consultative body for 
technical economic cooperation, some members of the MPFA 
would probably be able to live with it.  It is, however, a different 
question when we talk about turning APEC into a mechanism for 
true regional cooperation.

"Here most MPFA members feel that APEC has several built-in 
disadvantages:
o APEC has much too narrow a focus on trade, specifically on 
"freeing trade."
o APEC is a club limited to business and government elites, and is, 
in fact, even more backward than the World Bank and the World 
Trade Organization, which have established mechanisms to consult, 
at least form-wise, non-governmental organizations;
o Decisionmaking in APEC is non-transparent and non-democratic, 
with this being justified by the APEC bureaucrats on the 
"principle" that APEC is an association of economies--the 
implication here being that economic decisions, such as decisions to 
lilberalize trade, are not matters of democratic consultation.

"For these reasons, to achieve genuine regional cooperation, we 
must look elsewhere."

*Aileen Kwa is a research associate of Focus on the Global South. 
She is also currently pursuing her Phd in Development Studies at 
the University of Auckland. 

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