[asia-apec 1156] Re: APEC

[Gatt Watchdog]

Article by Aziz Choudry, GATT Watchdog
February 1999

>From Ottawa To Wellington: APEC, Co-option, Control and
Colonization

"OC is designed to work on principles of pain compliance and temporary visual
impairment....If subject exhibits symptoms or complains of severe after
effects after one (1) hour provide medical attention".  (RCMP training
overhead on the use of oleoresin capsicum (OC) - pepper spray).

This is not a story about pepperspray. That wasn't the only obstacle to
seeing what really happened in Vancouver around the 1997 APEC Summit. Tucked
away behind the never ending story of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission,
soundbytes and images of security overkill are the games which the Canadian
state has been playing to try to co-opt "civil society" (whoever that
overused
phrase refers to) into legitimising both APEC's trade and investment
liberalisation agenda and the myths which Ottawa wants the rest of the world
to believe about Canada.

Pain compliance and visual impairment are nothing new in colonial settler
states like Canada.  They are fundamental to maintaining the continued
occupation of unceded indigenous territories by the Canadian state. And
fundamental to providing the false sense of stability and security necessary
to maintain a market-driven economy.

It is no coincidence that the countries which have led the charge within APEC
for further, faster, more comprehensive liberalisation - Canada, New Zealand,
the USA, and Australia - are the same ones which continue to deny Indigenous
Peoples' rights to decolonisation and self-determination, while disguising
this fact with mythical notions that governments in these countries are
inherently humanitarian, democratic and forward-thinking.  The
commodification
of peoples, knowledge, and nature itself that underpins the APEC and WTO
agendas are sourced in the same unbalanced, short-sighted, arrogant and
greed-driven worldview which characterises the coloniser's mindset.

Understand how these "democratic" governments can sanction ongoing assaults
on
indigenous lands and resources and it's not hard to see why, at an
international level they are forcefully following down the same free market
path.  Understand what Canada is based on and it's easy to see the clampdown
at UBC in a context which puts it a world away from the view that such events
are aberrations in "civilised" Canada.

Documents produced for the Public Complaints Commission (PCC) by DFAIT, the
PMO, and other government agencies tell a sordid tale of Ottawa's good cop
bad cop dual strategy to try to control debate and set the parameters for
discussions about APEC by appearing to support "civil society" initiatives on
globalisation while funding the largest security operation in Canadian
history.

In today's deregulated global economy, like everything else, dissent seems to
be a commodity to be manufactured, manipulated, packaged, bought and
sold in
the marketplace.  The stakes are high in the battle to win hearts and minds
to
the brave new world of globalisation. With cracks in the global trade,
investment and financial framework widening almost daily, public relations -
"communications strategy" has become increasingly vital in this war.

Manufacturing consent and managing dissent are intimately related.  The state
sets up bodies like the RCMP Public Complaints Commission to act as a safety
valve, restore public faith in the Police, and further obscure the roots and
nature of injustice. Aiyanas Ormond of APEC Alert says the PCC allows the
venting of steam "in a way that is socially affirming but does not challenge
power in any meaningful way".  Not unlike government-funded "civil society"
meetings on APEC....

In 1996 just prior to the Manila APEC Summit the Ramos Government in the
Philippines orchestrated the Asia-Pacific Sustainable Development Initiative
conference, including several pro-engagement, pro-government NGOs precisely
so it could loudly proclaim to have consulted with the "overwhelming
majority"
of people's organisations, and was a "government that listens to its people".
It could then label the meetings to expose APEC's corporate agenda and
discuss genuine alternatives as the work of subversives, troublemakers and
radicals.

Federal and BC provincial funding for the 1997 Peoples' Summit on APEC - the
acceptable face of "opposition" to APEC  - was clearly designed to blunt
criticism of the APEC process.  Some of it was stage-managed by
Canadian-government funded organisations like the International Centre for
Human Rights and Democratic Development, who sought a seat at the APEC table
for "civil society" - i.e. those NGO and union bureaucrats who believe that
APEC can somehow have a caring human face.

The $100,000 which Ottawa put into the Peoples' Summit for administrative
expenses was just part of the same gameplan which spawned the security
overkill at UBC. The NDP provincial government had its own political reasons
for supporting the Summit. Ironically, while such a government-supported
event would be rightly considered extremely suspect by western NGOs and unions
were it held in Jakarta, Manila, or Beijing, the same view did not appear to
apply to taking money from Ottawa and Victoria.

What better way to control dissent?  Corral the critics in a lavish venue
some distance away from the official event (now ironically the site of the
PCC hearings). Minimise the risks of political embarrassment to Ottawa and
other APEC "economies". Engage people in an "NGO Olympics" which looks good
but challenges little. Identifying and throwing money at the "constructive
elements" within "civil society" and surveillance, violent arrests and pepper
spraying are two sides of a coin.

Environmental activist/author Andrew Rowell writes: "Dialogue is the most
important tactic that companies are using to overcome objections to their
operations.  It is a typical divide and rule tactic.  One PR guru has
outlined a three step divide and conquer strategy on how corporations can
defeat public interest activists who apparently fall into four distinct
categories: "radicals", "opportunists", "idealists" and "realists".  The goal
is to isolate the radicals, "cultivate" the idealists and "educate" them into
becoming realists, then co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry."


Ottawa must consult the same guru. According to DFAIT, some NGOs in the
Peoples Summit were "engaged in constructive discussion on how to broaden
APEC's work to include views of civil society". "There was no doubt that
Canada wanted to work with civil society organizations (CSOs) and to try to
broaden APEC's discussion to include views from NGOs, academic and other
component [sic]of the civil society," it said.  But others were "involved in
a less constructive process that could undermined (sic) both the efforts of
Canada to engage civil society and efforts of the latter to have its voice
heard by APEC". Ottawa "was conducting ongoing discussions with constructive
elements among the organizers, which we hoped would be helpful to vent steam,"
Deputy Trade Minister Len Edwards told Indonesian officials in September 1997.

New Zealand trade unionist, Robert Reid says trying to get a seat at the APEC
table for "civil society" "will be as successful as urging a tiger to become
a vegetarian.  For those organising at the grassroots...exploitation,
discrimination and repression in the workplace are the natural consequences of
globalisation, not an unfortunate by-product that can be fixed with a social
contract." Most Asia-Pacific NGOs which met in Osaka at the 1995 NGO Forum on
APEC opposed any engagement with APEC, arguing that would help legitimise the
forum as a powerful and permanent feature of the regional landscape.

If you can co-opt you can set the agenda.  If you cannot, then people might
set their own.  And apparently, that's a problem, to be avoided at all costs.

So it was no coincidence that while there was a strong focus on denouncing
"human rights violations" in various Asian countries at the Peoples Summit,
few voices were raised pointing out the links between the impact of
globalisation on peoples in the South and domestic concerns such as the impact
of NAFTA and market policies on Canadian (and other Northern) workers, and the
continued colonisation of indigenous lands, lives and resources within the
unceded territories claimed by Canada.


The doomsday scenario of a world under corporate rule, of transnational
plunder, environmental and social disaster which many NGOs and people's
organisations which oppose APEC and free trade warn of has long been everyday
reality for the Indigenous Peoples of North America.  But while many in the
Peoples Summit identified the corporate sector as the driving force behind
APEC, struggles like that of the Lubicon Cree in Northern Alberta against gas,
oil, and timber transnationals which have been invading their unceded
territory with the complicity of the Canadian state barely rated a mention.
Nor did the fact that the same "liberal democratic" government which claimed
it could influence Asian trading partners with Canadian values by engaging
them through APEC sent more armed forces against the Mohawk people in the 1990
standoff near Oka, Quebec than it sent to the Gulf War, or that the Feds and
BC's NDP government sanctioned a similar massive military operation only a few
hours drive from Vancouver at Gustafsen Lake in 1995, against a small group of
Indigenous Peoples defending sacred lands.


Less than a year later, Ottawa was at it again over APEC.  The Canadian
International Development Agency (CIDA) gave $60,000 to support an
international conference on the engagement of civil society in the APEC
process, last October in Malaysia.  Its focus was on reconciling "Civil
society" with APEC, and moving towards a "deeper and more formal process of
engagement between civil society and APEC governments." Then it put $25, 000
into the Asia Pacific Peoples Assembly held parallel to APEC 1998 in Kuala
Lumpur, and another $25,000 to a meeting of the International Monitoring Group
on Trade and Media (also in Kuala Lumpur around the same time).

At the past two APEC Summits, held while the "Asian" economic crisis deepened
and broadened, Ministerial Meeting joint statements have only just stopped
short of tacit acknowledgement that APEC's credibility is on the line.  It
faces a crisis of legitimacy as the economic agenda which underpins it is
questioned, and countries become ambivalent about further trade and
investment liberalisation.  The solution? More PR.  In Vancouver ministers
endorsed a public relations campaign because "support among the people of the
region for continuing trade and investment liberalisation is essential".

Last May, the Singapore-based APEC Secretariat called for proposals from
communications consultants to help raise "understanding and support for
liberalisation".  In Kuala Lumpur, rather than addressing the economic crisis
and reexamining the market model of economic development, APEC "ministers
tasked officials to develop effective communication strategies to build
community understanding for liberalisation"  The quest is on to find new ways
to sell the message that APEC is good for us all.

Now it's 1999.  The Public Complaints Commission hearings are on again.
Halfway across the world, this year's APEC host, the New Zealand government,
is using similar strategies to try to sell APEC and build the meetings into a
platform to promote its own extremist model of a free market economy
internationally: "Through APEC we are able to encourage regional colleagues
to follow the type of reforms undertaken in New Zealand," opined the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

 "[E]nsuring constructive participation by NGOs in the APEC process will be a
 critical part of the overall strategy of communicating the what, why and how
 of APEC to the New Zealand community.  It would also serve to demonstrate to
 the international community New Zealand's ability to accommodate debate and
 dissent among a variety of NGOs"  Its strategy of constructive engagement
 "will require engaging effectively with responsive groups and helping to
 meet, as far as possible, their own objectives of being seen to influence to
 outcomes", and "involves building broad public support for APEC and actively
 managing the risk of disruption".

Like Ottawa before it, Wellington will decide who to foster token "dialogue"
with, and about what, and define what constitutes "acceptable" dissent.
Keeping the focus away from the substance of APEC's economic agenda, domestic
injustices and encouraging organisations to expend energy on lobbying to
reform a process which has always been and will always be dominated by big
business and private sector free marketeers is part of that strategy.  The
more people it can get to participate in its activities, the more support it
will claim for APEC's free market goals.  And the easier it will be to
marginalise those strongly critical of APEC and the package of economic
reforms it promotes - which we are already grimly familiar with here in
Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Meanwhile, at home and abroad, the Canadian government continues to talk of
the need to involve "civil society" and pursue environmentally sustainable
goals within APEC.  But the crackdown at UBC shows the true face of the
neoliberal agenda. As always, the police, army and intelligence agencies
provide the muscle for the free market economy.  Human rights abuses have
become synonymous with the hosting of APEC Summits around the region.
Security operations and the sanitised, embarrassment-free cocoon woven around
such meetings aim to iron out the rough spots that the government/corporate
good news outreach campaign couldn't quite reach.

It's time some hard questions were asked about the agendas of "democratic"
governments which promote "constructive engagement" and "dialogue" with
non-governmental organisations about issues like APEC.  And it's time to be
asking the organisations which buy into this cosmetic process just who they
claim to represent, and whose bidding they are really doing.

(Article may be reproduced with permission of the author)