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<! same title as the article, then...!> Global Policy Forum - Globalization Globalization Fight Goes On
AFP
as Capitalism Crowns Lies in Ruins
September 14, 2001
New York's World Trade Centre was a strident symbol of all they loved to hate, but even with the Twin Towers reduced to rubble, anti-globalisation protesters have vowed to continue their fight against what they call the rampant march of world capitalism.
"There's no question of a let up" in the fight against the "excess of the capitalist system," France's veteran protester Jose Bove told AFP, bucking an unprecedented wave of solidarity with the United States, reeling from Tuesday's terror attacks.
With the 110-floors of the Twin Towers reduced to a down-town New York pile of debris, a vast coffin of shattered glass and twisted metal, Bove insists that his fight is not with the US people, but with what critics call the faceless institutions behind global capitalism.
"The fight against transnational corporations is not tied to states... there are multinationals in Japan and in Europe as in the United States," the firebrand leftwinger insists, casting aside appeals from the French left to hold off the debate while the world mourns.
"You can't reduce it to a question of anti-Americanism," he emphasised.
Amid a global outpouring of emotion after Tuesday's attacks in New York and Washington in which around 5,000 people are thought to have been killed, countries around the world have condemned the attacks as senseless carnage and many have appealed for a common front in support of Washington.
"They ask us to put the debate on hold and then they announce that the stock markets are reopening," Bove said, clearly seeing the two as incompatible, and stressing that his battle is with the "dominant economic system" and not the US people.
It is the global economic institutions, and particularly the World Trade Organisation -- a favourite target of anti-capitalist protesters -- who need to ease off, Bove suggests, "to put their talks on ice to reflect on their policies and on worldwide social inequality."
Bernard Cassen, head of anti-globalisation group Attac-France said his movement supported the US victims "but not the US government. Good is not on Washington's side," he added.
Attac "has no intention of letting up in the fight against the dictatorship of the financial markets in which US organisations are above all implicated," Cassen railed.
Those who campaign for the global economic system to have its wings clipped, who push for a more equitable distribution of wealth and income in a quest for "globalisation with a human face" were outraged this week by a radio caller who linked Tuesday's attacks to the anti-globalisation movement.
"I find it shocking that the neo-liberal diehards get mixed up and create a climate of suspicion, saying that the anti-globalisation lobby have caused these acts," Bove said, adding "it's intellectually criminal."
Others from the network of forces who oppose the status-quo of open-market Washington consensus economic development painted Tuesday's attacks in the light of growing inequality between developing and developed nations.
"The worsening inequality between North and South... (creates) despair which is the breeding ground for barbarous acts," Francine Bavay, from the Greens told AFP.
Cassen said the attacks "are not disconnected from the last 30 years which have seen the ravages of globalisation, or from the virulent hostility of people who reject what the International Monetary Fund and international courts make them suffer."
But Bavay pointed to a new direction in counter free-market politics, to an "emerging social movement fighting for a human alternative to globalisation, claiming greater democracy and justice in international proceedings."
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