[Kabar-indonesia] 5 Articles: Singapore Protesters - Forum in Batam called a 'success'

[Joyo at aol.com]

5 Articles:

- Singapore protesters distribute flyers  after police
  prevent free speech march

- ST: Forum in Batam called a 'success'

- ST: Protests give relevance to world  meetings [By
  Thang D. Nguyen]

- IPS: Transparency Begins at Home, WB-IMF Told

- ST: Activists shooting themselves in the  foot [By
  Andy Ho]

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Singapore protesters distribute flyers after police
prevent free speech march

By GILLIAN WONG Associated Press Writer

SINGAPORE, September 18 (AP) - A small group of
Singaporean activists who have camped out for two days
and nights next to a busy intersection distributed
flyers promoting free speech Monday, surrounded by
police who have barred them from holding a protest
march.

The activists -- who have numbered between six and 10
-- have been squatting at a park in central Singapore
since Saturday. Police have prevented them from
marching to Parliament and the convention center where
the International Monetary Fund and World Bank
meetings are being held.

The protest has highlighted Singapore's stringent
curbs on dissent even as it is hoping to showcase
itself to thousands of international visitors as a
model of clean and efficient governance with a
prosperous, open economy.

Singapore's security measures were criticized last
week by the World Bank and IMF after authorities said
the country would bar more than two dozen activists
from attending the meetings even though they were
accredited by the two Washington-based institutions.

Singapore later allowed most of the 27 blacklisted
activists to enter the country, though campaigners
said the move came too late.

Authorities have also banned outdoor demonstrations on
concerns that large street crowds could be exploited
by terrorists t to launch attacks. They have provided
a small, cordoned-off area for protests inside the
convention hall where the IMF-World Bank meetings are
being held.

A few international activist groups have demonstrated
in the 8-meter by 8-meter (25 by 25 foot) area.

Public protests are rare in Singapore as outdoor
gatherings of more than four people require a police
permit. Singapore warned earlier this year it would
use severe punishments such as caning on protesters
who commit violent acts during the IMF-World Bank
meetings.

On Monday, the Singaporean protesters who have camped
out for two days -- led by opposition Singapore
Democratic Party secretary-general Chee Soon Juan --
handed out flyers calling for greater freedom of
speech and assembly in the city-state.

Police allowed the group to leave the park
individually and walk to Raffles Place, at the heart
of Singapore's business district, to distribute flyers
-- after they promised not to resume their march.

"We are protesting against the denial of the rights of
Singaporeans to freedom of speech and peaceful
assembly. These rights are crucial in helping to
protect our interests," said Chee.

The demonstrators then returned to the park, where
they have been sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes
or on the bare pavement, taking shelter in telephone
booths when it rains. Their friends and families have
brought them food, drink and fresh clothing.

Police have accompanied Chee, as well as his sister
Chee Siok Chin, a senior member of the opposition
party, on visits to the public lavatory in the park.
At least five police video cameras are constantly
recording the protesters and anyone who talks to them.

Chee said the protesters will remain at the park until
Tuesday, when Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong makes a
speech to the IMF-World Bank delegates.

Back at the convention center, a separate group of
activists held a protest Monday within the designated
demonstration space, calling on the two
Washington-based institutions to reduce conditions
tied to relief for poor countries.

Twelve protesters with blue strings tied around their
bodies shouted, "Cut the strings," and "Stop hurting
poor people."

"As part of their aid and debt relief, the World Bank
and IMF insist that countries satisfy all sorts of
economic conditions, such as forced privatization,
trade liberalization, fiscal reforms, and we think
these should not be imposed by unelected bureaucrats
in Washington," said Trisha Rogers, director of
Jubilee Debt Campaign, a U.K.-based coalition of
activist groups working for the cancellation of poor
countries' debts.

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The Straits Times (Singapore) 
Monday, September 18, 2006

Forum in Batam called a 'success'

THE alternative International People's Forum for civil
society groups drew to a close yesterday, amid
tightened security by the Indonesian authorities.

Police said they had deployed about 800 officers
across Batam and hundreds were stationed in and around
the sprawling Batam Haj Centre where the seminars and
workshops took place.

'We feel we are being watched the whole time and it
feels very uncomfortable,' said one participant.

Yesterday, about a dozen activists staged a silent
sit-in, wearing masks which said, 'Police do not
enter'.

About 600 representatives of more than 100 groups
called for a major overhaul of International Monetary
Fund and World Bank policies.

Organisers yesterday declared the forum a success.

International coordinator Lidy Nacpil of the Jubilee
South group said: 'We were able to discuss issues,
touch base with each other and come up with ideas for
working together.'

DEVI ASMARANI & TRACY SUA

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The Straits Times (Singapore) 
Monday, September 18, 2006

Protests give relevance to world meetings

Thang D. Nguyen, For The Straits Times

IN JAKARTA - LIKE other global economic organisations
or business alliances such as the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) and the World Economic Forum (WEF),
the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund
and World Bank attract large demonstrations from
anti-globalisation organisations and activists.

The latter see global financial institutions, trade
agreements and corporations as undermining the
environment, labour rights and even national
sovereignty, especially of Third World countries.

In addition to organising protests at conferences of
international economic institutions around the world,
anti-globalisation activists also hold their own
forums as a counterbalance.

The World Social Forum (WSF), for instance, is held in
Porto Alegre, Brazil, and other places around the
world at the same time as the WEF holds its annual
meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

While they share a similar conference structure -
complete with plenary sessions, workshops, cultural
events and sometimes even the same speakers - the WEF
and WSF are antithetical in every sense of the word.

The WEF's participants are mostly CEOs and senior
executives who come to town in suits, stay and dine in
five-star hotels and pay a handsome fee to network
with the world's shakers and movers.

At the WSF, participants are often unkempt-looking
activists with backpacks who have paid no fee to
attend and who rub shoulders with Brazilian landless
peasants, Colombian trade unionists, Indian dalit
(formerly 'untouchables') or African debt-relief
campaigners.

Whereas the WEF gets thorough and respectful coverage
in the media, the WSF is mostly invisible.

The spectacular turnout in Mumbai for the WSF last
year of around 100,000 people from more than 100
countries, as well as the presence of heavyweight
political and academic figures was, for the
conservative Wall Street Journal (WSJ), not newsworthy
enough even for an acknowledgement of the event's
existence.

By contrast, coverage for the Davos event was
plentiful: The WSJ reported on the World Economic
Forum three times, while The New York Times ran six
stories on the summit, wrote Mr Vince Medeiros, who
studied the media coverage of the two events last
year.

And while participants at meetings such as the WEF are
welcomed by their national or local hosts,
anti-globalisation activists are not.

The reason is that the former bring with them revenue,
business and prestige, while the latter too often
cause violence and may even damage public
infrastructure.

For instance, the Group of Eight Summit protest in
Genoa, Italy, from July 18 to 22, 2001, was one of the
bloodiest protests in Western Europe's recent history.
Several hundred people were injured and one died.

This is perhaps why Singapore is not allowing
demonstrations outside the venue of the ongoing
IMF-World Bank meetings.

Instead, the Singapore Government-appointed organising
committee for the event has provided demonstrators
with a 10m by 14m space inside the lobby of the Suntec
City Convention Centre, where the meetings are being
held. Demonstrators will also have to abide by set of
rules if they wish to protest inside the venue.

Given these factors, participants at the IMF-World
Bank meetings can rest assured that there will be no
noise and disturbance from the demonstrators.

However, why should the protesters want to demonstrate
if they can only be seen but not heard?

For this reason, anti-globalisation activists and
other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have
decided to hold their demonstrations and social forums
in parallel with the IMF-World Bank meeting on the
Indonesian island of Batam instead.

The Batam authorities initially did not allow these
events to take place, but later gave them the
go-ahead.

While Indonesia is in no position to compete with
Singapore economically, the decision to allow
anti-IMF-World Bank events to take place in Batam
reflects a respect for freedom of expression befitting
the world's third-largest democracy.

More importantly, the fact that activists and NGOs can
demonstrate against meetings of global economic
institutions show that these organisations are still
relevant.

Indeed, the day that anti-globalisation activists stop
following and protesting against meetings of the IMF
and World Bank as well as of their fellow
organisations around the world, is the day that they
no longer matter.

The writer was regional manager for Asia at the World
Economic Forum.

He is now a Jakarta-based columnist.

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Inter Press Service 
September 17, 2006

Transparency Begins at Home, WB-IMF Told

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BATAM, Indonesia - Civil society organisations
gathered on this island, ahead of the annual meeting
of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) in neighbouring Singapore, have launched a
'global charter' demanding transparency from the
finance institutions.

This initiative, which argues that the public's right
to information has greater weight than the WB-IMF's
willingness to be transparent, marks a new direction
that non governmental organisations (NGOs) are taking
from their usual mission -- targeting governments that
deny the right to freedom of opinion and information
to their citizens.

''Taking on the Bank and other international financial
institutions is our new rallying cry. We have expanded
our mission,'' Toby Mandel, law programme director at
'Article 19', the international media rights watchdog,
told IPS in an interview shortly after the launch on
Sunday.

''The charter aims to pry open the highly secretive
practices of the WB-IMF. These public bodies must be
as open as the governments they are calling upon to be
transparent.''

Countries such as India, Mexico and South Africa have
a better structure of openness and have national laws
concerning the right to information that make it
easier for citizens to secure documents than at the
Bank, he added. ''We should get information not when
they (WB-IMF) want to release it, but when we, the
people, want it.''

''The right to access information held by public
bodies is a fundamental human right,'' states the
'Transparency Charter for International Financial
Institutions: Claiming our Right to Know' in its
preamble. ''A two-way flow of information provides a
foundation for healthy policy development,
decision-making and project delivery.''

The charter has set out nine principles to compel the
financial powerhouses to fall in line with the United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which
guarantees the right to ''seek, receive and impart
information and ideas''. Among them are the public's
right to access information held by the IFIs,
''regardless of who produced the document and whether
the information relates to a public or private
actor''.

The second principle stresses that IFIs should
automatically disclose ''a wide range of information
about their structures, finances, policies and
procedures''. The third principle calls on the IFIs to
be completely transparent and offer ''access to
decision-making'', which even means public access to
draft documents.

And to strengthen the public stake in this issue, the
sixth principle calls for the creation of an
''independent and authoritative body'' to review
requests for information that the IFIs deny. ''Anyone
who believes that an international financial
institution has failed to respect its access to
information policy, including through a refusal to
provide information in response to a request, has the
right to have the matter reviewed.''

The charter is the work of the Global Transparency
Initiative, a coalition of eight
freedom-of-information (FoI) groups, including Article
19, the Washington D.C-based Bank Information Centre
(BIC), the Manila-based Access to Information Network,
the London-based Brettons Woods Project and the Cape
Town-based Institute for Democracy in South Africa. It
comes two years after the FoI groups rallied under
this new banner to bring the financial institutions
under their critical gaze.

The launch of this charter also marks a vote of no
confidence in the Bank's existing ''disclosure
policy'', which was initiated in 1994 to make some of
its records accessible to people. ''Compared to 15
years ago, the Bank is disclosing more information
now. But there is no right for the people to demand
the Bank to disclose the information they need,'' said
Jennifer Kalafut, of BIC, at the launch of the
charter.

''Do they disclose reports and performance audits?
No,'' she revealed.

''Are the board of directors open about the decisions
that are made? No.''

''The World Bank should change to accept transparency
as a right,'' she added. ''The problem is that they
are stuck with a paradigm that they are the ones to
choose what information must be released.''

Activists and researchers meeting here for the
three-day International People's Forum (IPF) are
throwing their weight behind the charter.

Those that IPS spoke with welcomed this initiative as
part of an on-going global drive to force WB-IMF to be
more open and transparent at a time when these
institutions are demanding that national government
address corruption and ensure transparent functioning.

''This (charter) will help us audit any World Bank and
ADB (Asian Development Bank) projects in Bangladesh,''
said Reza Chowdhury, secretary of Campaign for Good
Governance, a network of 700 grass roots groups, based
in Dhaka. ''This also exposes the Bank, which is
currently pushing a new programme to fight corruption.
If it does not recognise the public's right to
information of its records, it will be difficult for
the Bank to lecture to governments.''

According to Stephen Mandel, senior researcher at the
New Economics Foundation, a London-based think tank,
''the Bank refuses to reveal how decisions are made
and the voting records of the board of directors,
which is useful in holding the executive directors in
each country accountable''.

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The Straits Times (Singapore) 
Monday, September 18, 2006

Activists shooting themselves in the foot

Andy Ho, Senior Writer

Civil society groups distract attention from critical
issues

ANTI-GLOBALISATION activists are hurting their own
cause.

By boycotting the discussions civil society
organisations (CSOs) were scheduled to have with
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank
officials, they have diverted world media attention
away from a closer examination of what should have
been the important issues.

These include the World Bank's controversial
anti-corruption plan that could lead to cutbacks in
lending to the poorest countries, thus hurting the
poorest, and the push to restructure voting rights
within the IMF to more accurately reflect a country's
economic importance.

And there are many more issues: how globalisation will
impact on the environment; how rising income
inequalities can best be dealt with; how poor
countries can learn to ride the growth wave and not be
left behind.

Many CSOs were indeed founded with the noble aims of
tackling variations of these issues. They set out to
ameliorate the adverse effects globalisation does have
on some communities. Oxfam, for instance, is a
respected non-governmental organisation which has done
excellent work in many famine-stricken countries.
Alas, it chose yesterday to cancel its forum, out of
solidarity with other CSOs.

Over the past few days, many CSOs which signed up to
come to Singapore ostensibly to discuss
development-related issues have chosen instead to
focus on what is surely a matter outside their raison
d'etre: Singapore's tough stance on protests, and
restrictions on the entry of a small number of
activists.

As if permission to enter any and all countries were
an inalienable right enshrined in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.

A total of 164 CSOs chose to boycott the meetings
altogether. Perhaps getting away from the conference
table is more satisfying for those whose game is
disruption.

Who knows, perhaps certain activists even remember
with fondness those halcyon days, such as Seattle
1999, when violent protests brought the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) meeting to a standstill, and Prague
2000, when demonstrations caused the IMF and World
Bank to end their meetings prematurely.

Just last year, protesters disrupted the WTO meeting
in Hong Kong.

Indeed, some of those veterans had reportedly
threatened 'vigorous action' in Singapore. It makes
you wonder: How genuine were they when they said they
wanted to 'engage' the IMF and the World Bank?

Some CSOs no doubt joined the boycott merely in a show
of solidarity, not because of a strong sense of
grievance.

This means, however, though they spent a whole year
preparing their research papers to table at the
scheduled meetings, they have caused their own efforts
to come to naught.

Of course, some involved in the boycott are not even
accredited for the meetings, showing perhaps a desire
to stir the pot. Why else would boycott organisers
reject Singapore's offer to admit 22 of 27 delegates
originally blacklisted after the World Bank decided to
vouch for them?

Accredited CSOs which sincerely made the trip here to
engage the IMF and World Bank in dialogue must do some
self-examination to see if they are playing into the
hands of doctrinaire anti-globalists, thereby letting
their own constituents down by neglecting to do what
they came here for in the first place.

Indeed, they can have no cause for complaint if they
came for genuine dialogue and not to grandstand.
Singapore has gone out of its way to facilitate.

Part of the convention centre has been set aside
specially for CSOs to work. The CSO centre is fully
equipped with telecommunication facilities,
photocopiers, conference rooms and breakout rooms for
small group discussions.

It is in a convenient location, not tucked away in
some remote spot.

Indeed, some activists even say it's the best they
have come across at such multilateral conferences so
far.

Bona fide CSOs should play ball according to
Singapore's rules - criticise Singapore's actions if
they must, but do so at the site at the Suntec City
convention centre designated for peaceful
demonstrations.

Unless there is something about trashing property and
breaking bones that makes a protest more meaningful in
some manner that escapes the rest of us who are not as
eager and ready to, at the drop of a hat, pour into
the streets with pitchforks and knives.

Some CSOs have cited the 'draconian security measures'
the Government has put in place as a reason why they
held their International People's Forum on nearby
Batam.

It would be mind-boggling if they sincerely cannot
grasp the fact that we have genuine security concerns.

In 2001, Singapore foiled plots the terrorist
organisation Jemaah Islamiah (JI) had hatched to
attack Western targets such as embassies and hotels.
Linked to Al-Qaeda, JI has carried out several deadly
bombings in neighbouring Indonesia.

It should not take much for our guests to understand
why the Government is trying to minimise the
opportunities for JI and other terrorist groups to
exploit the situation.

It is not for fun that Singapore has deployed a
security force of 10,000 to protect the 16,000
delegates.

One suicide bomber who succeeds will not just kill the
innocent but also blow to smithereens our reputation
as a safe and secure place - the very reason Singapore
offered to host the meetings in the first place.

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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