Resistance / FACTS

This facts spread appeared as a photo-spread
in the magazine, but unfortunately due to licencing
limitations we could not reproduce the majority
of the photo's on this website. Sorry!

 INDONESIA: Shouting slogans against the IMF and globalization, young Indonesians pour onto the streets of Jakarta, 18 April 2001. Police break up the demonstration with teargas and batons.

Photo: Julio Etchart / Still Pictures

 GHANA: Two woman from Jubilee South, a network of Southern groups campaigning for the non-payment of illegitimate debt, an end to repayment conditionalities, and recognition of the social, historical and ecological debts due to the peoples of the South.

 BRAZIL: The Landless Movement occupy a piece of land. They have taken part in mobilizations from Seattle to Quebec to Genoa.

SOUTH KOREA: A giant statue made of old US bomb casings burns as 20,000 workers and students protest globalization at the ASEM free-trade meetings in Seoul, October 2000.

AUSTRALIA: Anti-capitalist demonstrator outside the stock exchange, May Day 2001.

INDIA: One hundred thousand farmers converge on New Delhi, September 1998 to demand India’s withdrawal from the World Trade Organization.

ECUADOR: Huípala, the flag of diversity, is carried aloft by indigenous women after the IMF ‘dollarizes’ the economy, January 2000.

THAILAND: Nike’s brand becomes a scythe of death in the hands of protesting sweatshop workers.

1998 November: Paris – a ragtag band of 500 international activists defeats the MAI, sending a wakeup call to business élites. The Financial Times complains that it is now ‘harder for negotiators to do deals behind closed doors and submit them for rubber-stamping by parliaments’, and warns of the dangers of the ‘sandal wearing hordes’. The RAND Institute – a strategic defence think tank – has long been watching the Zapatistas’ use of the Internet to spread information, and coins the phrase ‘netwar’. Now it sees the same tactics employed to defeat the MAI. The victory gives the NGOs a taste of blood, and leaves a global network of connected campaigners primed for the next battle – against the launching of a new trade round at the WTO in Seattle 1999.

1999 18 June: A global day of action for the G8 summit in Cologne, where debt protesters surround the summit. In Britain 10,000 protesters occupy the City of London in a ‘Carnival Against Capital’. On the same day 50 stock exchanges around the world, from Tel Aviv to Mexico, are also targeted. Most dramatically, for the first time the Ijaw, the Ogoni, and other indigenous groups from Nigeria work together to welcome back Ken Saro Wiwa’s brother from exile and hold a ‘carnival of the oppressed’, occupying the Shell buildings for most of the day. 450 Indian farmers go on a month-long protest tour around Europe. In France they destroy a GM test site with French farmers, including José Bové.