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Protesters gather for World Bank meetings |
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April 13, 2000
WASHINGTON, APR 12 (AP) - Protesters with grievances against global capitalism are turning their attacks on one of the top priorities of the Clinton administration, granting China permanent normal trade relations.
The AFL-CIO labor federation, which is leading the charge against the China legislation, was hoping to attract 10,000 demonstrators to the U.S. Capitol Wednesday for a rally aimed at showing labor's strong opposition to the measure.
"We will tell members of Congress: 'No blank check for China,' a country that has violated every trade agreement it has signed with the United States in the past 10 years and continues its repudiation of human rights in China," said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.
However, business groups lobbying heavily in support of permanent trade relations, were mounting a counteroffensive with newspaper and radio ads hoping to sway lawmakers to their view that the United States will benefit from greatly increased access to China's huge market if Congress scraps its annual review of China's trade privileges.
"Our ads point out the truth about trade with China. Free trade will bring greater opportunity for American workers and farmers," said U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue.
The China protest was one of a weeklong series of events anti-globalization forces are staging around the spring meetings of the 182-nation International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The IMF preliminary sessions were to get under way Wednesday with release of the institution's updated world economic outlook.
Acting IMF Managing Director Stanley Fischer told reporters last week that the outlook would depict a world economy that looks "much stronger than we would have dared predict" a year ago, as many countries were struggling to pull out of the 1997-98 global currency crisis.
Fischer said IMF would predict in its new forecast that global output will rise by more than 4 percent this year.
The protest activities are being coordinated by a coalition called the Mobilization for Global Justice, composed of many of the same groups that successfully disrupted meetings last December of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, forcing authorities to declare a state of emergency and call out the National Guard.
The protest groups are hoping to use human chains and other tactics employed in Seattle to block intersections on Sunday and keep finance ministers from attending the opening IMF sessions.
But District of Columbia Police, backed up by federal authorities, have studied tapes of the Seattle demonstrations and hope to avoid the mistakes of authorities there.
Police on Tuesday kept a watchful eye as several dozen demonstrators marched from the U.S. Capitol to the World Bank in an "Economic Way of Cross" to demand debt relief for the world's poorest countries.
The demonstrators carried white crosses with the names of countries and the amounts of their foreign debt burden.
Both the IMF and World Bank, under pressure from the United States and other rich donor countries, have instituted programs to forgive a greater portion of the debt of the world's 40 poorest nations, but the demonstrators contend that the effort has so far provided too little in the way of debt relief.
A separate small band of protesters marched from the residence of the Colombian ambassador to the United States to a local office of the giant mutual fund company Fidelity Investments to protest international support for Colombia as the country's president, Andres Pastrana, arrived in Washington for an official visit.
The protesters targeted Fidelity because of its ownership of stock in Occidental Petroleum, which is locked in a standoff with a native Indian tribe in Colombia over oil drilling rights.
Police said there were no arrests made at either protest. Seven demonstrators had been arrested on Monday outside of the World Bank building. Police said five were blocking traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue and two others were arrested trying to scale the building to drape a protest banner.
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