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Prague Protesters Bone Up Before Globalization Talks
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Prague Protesters Bone Up Before Globalization Talks
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by Tony Wesolowsky
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Protesters from East and West share the same antipathy for globalization, and Prague will serve as an international stage on which to air their grievances against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, when they meet there next week.
Activists plan to deploy what are becoming common weapons in the demo arsenal - from street theater and puppet shows to a counter-summit - in a bid to recapture that esprit de corps of Seattle.
At 21, Alice Dvorska has clashed with skinheads at May Day rallies in the Czech capital and crusaded against nuclear power for years now. But what she's seeing, at a special action camp at a sheep farm outside Prague, is unlike anything she's witnessed before.
Tree-climbing, stilt-walking and street-theater lessons are all part of the curriculum here, most of it imported by Americans.
"We're learning a lot, especially the creative approaches; a Czech demonstration used to be where you'd go with a few banners and that was it," Dvorska said.
More seasoned Western demonstrators say their colleagues from the East bring a rich history of underground art activism that has developed out of years of oppression under communism. "The Czechs have a really long history of radicalism," explains Megan Mullen, of Olympia, Wash., who had her protest epiphany last year in Seattle.
To Czech officials, that conjures images of the Battle in Seattle, and they don't want to see their charming city turn into a charred battlefield. The fear of mayhem has cast a pall of angst over Prague, stirred up by an obliging local press that has hammered home the theme of violence in the run-up to the event.
Last spring, World Bank president James Wolfensohn warned that he was "very afraid for Prague." City dwellers are heeding warnings to leave town. Travel agents are reportedly doing a brisk business. Schools will shut down for the meetings. McDonald's, a favorite target for rogue elements in the anti-globalist crowd, has ordered backup glass for their 24 franchises in the city.
For officials in the Czech Republic, it wasn't supposed to be this way. The World Bank and IMF meeting was to mark the final coming out for the former East Bloc state. It is the first time the powerful multilateral institutions are holding a meeting of this scale in the former communist world. About 18,000 government officials, private bankers and journalists are scheduled to attend. Topics up for discussion include drafting a new program to relieve Third World debt, creating a new strategy for the much-maligned IMF, and thinking up a new blueprint to fight world poverty.
The government has spent $60 million to spruce up the communist-era Palace of Culture, where party aparatchiks once met to give dull speeches with Marx, Engels and Lenin staring down from big red banners urging the proletariat to unite. But that's all been swept away.
What they can't make go away are the tens of thousands of demonstrators expected to pour into the city. About 11,000 riot-trained police will be deployed with 1,600 on standby. The FBI and the police department of Washington (the site of an April IMF-World Bank confab), have consulted with the Czechs. For the police, this is an opportunity to prove they've reformed from the repressive days of the past when they crushed protesters in 1968 during the Soviet invasion and in 1989 when Czechoslovakia threw off communist rule.
The city has not exactly rolled out the red carpet, but it hasn't shut the door on the protesters either. They're renting out an enormous shell of a stadium that will serve as a hostel for protesters. The country's president, Václav Havel, who used to swig beers and talk politics with Frank Zappa, has invited some of the anti-globalists up to his residence, "The Castle," for a forum on globalization with the bureaucrats from the IMF and World Bank, "to convince the hard-core opponents of dialogue of the need to talk should be our challenge."
That might be a mighty challenge, indeed. Dvorska and others at the action camp aren't preparing for talks. Should be an interesting few days in Prague.
Tony Wesolowksy is an independent journalist living in Prague.
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