Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 17:06:06 +0300
From: "ECOTERRA Intl."
To: "Engl.Speaking Media & Networks"
Subject: Massive Pullout from World Summit

- please feel free to distribute widely -

Drawbacks and Shortcomings
- Massive Pullout from World Summit -

Many groups from around the world say NO to their earlier
planned participation at the World Summit for Sustainable
Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg later this year.

Feature by John Bamau
14. May 2002
(first published in WTN, reprinting and translated publishing free, if author and source are cited)

The mainstream Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and especially those ones, who cover for the United Nations as "representing the people", gear up for the Development Summit. Some like the Global Youth Forum are even paid by the United Nations (UN) to do so and others are paid to (moderately please!) "protest". The world wonders what actually is going on, since more and more voices are heard, which call the Global Summit of this decade a non-starter.

The UN-selected groups as well as some continent-hopping professional protesters will most likely still go and sit or fight with participating governments at this summit in South Africa, but many hundreds if not already thousands of civil society organizations and individuals have terminated their plans and stepped off the road to Johannesburg. The
number of resisters is growing every day. A total flop of the whole conference is immanent and after the rather failed preparation conference more likely than ever.

"Let these major forces, these players and shakers do it to each other, but for us people there are more important things to be done on the ground!" says Maria Delgado from Peru and Prof. Tsuma Hamisi in Kenya adds: "Even if I would be paid to participate, I will not go, because I do not want to be part of another scam just fooling the world - Rio was enough. In those days in Rio we still thought that concerned people of this world could make a change through such a conference with the so called "world leaders", but today we know that positive change only is brought by peoples' hard and determined work on the ground."

"Look at the deforestation issue in Kenya", he explains, "also our President was present in Rio in '92 and pledged to do everything for the benefit of the environment. Ten years later many more thousand hectares
of forests have been cleared in our country and are destroyed with governmental consent. It is only now in the last months that the people were able to effectively stop the destruction by joining together and becoming active themselves, by suing the government and its accomplices
in big business and by remaining steadfast. It is us, the people, who achieved just last week a court order halting the Kenyan Government's plans to excise some 70,000 hectares of forests, including forest areas which are the homeland of the aboriginal Ogiek people. We work hard to
stop the Government to misuse the forest land as their chips in the upcoming election-roulette."

"Nobody will assist us anyway to travel to Jo'burg", says someone from
UK, who names himself only "Bud" and who is with EarthFirst!, the more
radical environmental group. "We ourselves surely will not be assisted
to participate and we don't want to be supported neither by Governments
or the streamlined and "fine" accredited NGOs, nor by the political mob,
who is paid to just disturb the show and thereby provide for the
necessary "threat" to gear up funding for the "security-forces".
EarthFirst! is independent and we have a clear view and a clear agenda
concerning the protection of the natural environment. Therefore, instead
of wasting thousands of Dollars for air polluting travels by plane and
for staying in one of those shaggy, but expensive places of an urban
ghetto, we save our money and spirit for real, positive and pro-active
work on the front lines of nature destruction. We don't want to be part
of a conference for which moneys are stolen from the people in order to
host an event, which only serves to cover the global deals and misdeads
of the military-industrial complex and their bootlicking governments."

"We are sad", is the view of Aisha Saidi from Bangladesh, "because we
worked so hard to make a significant contribution at the World Summit
2002 especially for the betterment of underprivileged women in
development, but we realize now that we will not have the slightest
chance to get even heard at the summit, whose agenda and time-tables
have been structured in a way that any synergetic interaction of
concerned citizens, groups or indigenous peoples is impossible.
Everything is pre-set for a big show by the global rulers and nothing is
left for the people to decide and implement. We therefore cancelled our
bookings and continue working on our issues at home."

"I see much clearer now" says Sem Anvat, a local leader from West Papua.
"When I was invited by an international NGO to participate together with
them at that conference in South Africa, I was excited to be able to let
the world know about the struggle of my people against the mining and
timber industries, against the greed of the churches and against a
colonial government. But then I learned which role I was supposed to
play to get the ticket - and now I say: "Sorry, but that is nothing for
me, because I do not want to lie to myself and others! I will stay where
I am and continue our true and honest fight without being influenced and
pacified by such meaningless favours."

"Such summits are the top of today's pseudo-democracy, which can be
pictured by eight hungry wolves and one sheep sitting around a fireplace
while voting "democratically" what they will have for dinner!", says
Kersten Kiefer with a sad smile in Germany. Dr. Kiefer, who holds a PhD
in psychology and works within a virtual university programme together
with scholars and students in developing countries, continues: "The
safeguarding of interests prior to and within such processes and the
total majority of the taker-societies - together with their stirrup
holders in the so called third world - is always secured long before any
such event happens and is paid for. I received the invitation to the
summit, but I have given up since long to participate in such
megalomaniac conferences, where you are invited to serve as mere props
or scapegoat, while only the players in the background really have their
fun." And she wonders: "Who actually knows or is aware of the "World
Scientists' Warning To Humanity", issued 10 years ago, just after Rio,
by the vast majority of the living laureates of the Nobel Prize in the
sciences as well as by more than 1500 leading scientists from all
continents? It can be found easily on the internet, it's still standing
there and is still valid. But today's actual reality is already worst
than then and the prospects for the future of humanity and its natural
environment have become much more bleak."

"The summit will just be another public relations gimmick by and for
those who continued to collect our knowledge and vision over the last
thirty years since Stockholm [the first global summit] in order to
produce them as their own bright ideas and to feed them back to us,
while secretly putting the strategic countermeasures in place against
those of our demands, which don't fit into their money oriented
concepts", Claude Dechamps, an obviously frustrated board member of a
community based organization in the south of France wrote in her latest
newsletter." And: "The UN, who even flies now selected "slum-dwellers"
from the fifferent slums of the world to Nairobi to pose at the ongoing
UN Global Cities conference has lost any credibility. It's high time
that the people withhold that part of their taxes, which their
governments dish out to the UN for staging such shows".

In a similar way a member of the San people in Botswana - a people who
just have been driven out again from their ancestral homeland of
tenthousand years, which is part of the Kalahari ecosystem - expresses
himself in an interview: "Here [in Botswana] we have a government, which
even dares to steal our waterpumps to get rid of us, and over there in
South Africa, where they actually hunted and killed us as vermin until
1920, they have now even taken our language [Khoisan] and our pictures
to mark their state symbol [The new SA state seal - the Coat of Arms].
This is to cover up that they continue to harrass, to persecute and to
oppress us, while they will never give back to us our lands and our
freedom. Nature anyway is destroyed there - and soon will be here.
Global Summit - what is it? - will it give back to us our land and our
dignity?"

"Who will benefit from the summit?", asks Patricia Hutton in an e-mail
from Canada and she continues: "I don't believe that anything good will
come out from a conference, organized, financed and steered by a cartel
of nation governments, which can not even agree to do something
effectively against the manmade changes of the world climate. Mrs.
Hutton, who worked over 15 years with a non-churchbased medical charity
in South-America, believes: "The poor people in the suburbs of
Johannesburg might get some bred crumbs from the table of dining and
wining "leaders", but their own way out of poverty will remain blocked
or at least unsecured and they will have to destroy their last own
natural resources, because their livelihood has been destroyed and their
resource base has been exploited by others." "Can the summit answer
questions like this one:", she closes and asks: "What is the world
community during the summit effectively going to discusss, to agree and
to do in order to for example stop the Sudanese Government in Khartoum
from driving ten-thousands of people from their rural homes, because the
Government wants to continue to dish the land out for oil-exploitation
to Canada, the US, Russia and Europe - in order to get the petro-dollars
and to buy arms? As long such problems can and will not be tackled and
can not be solved by such a conference, it is at its best an academic
excercise, but one for which we should neither spend money nor time.
Even postponing the conference is no solution!"

So far there was only one voice who claimed to be happy to participate
in August. An employee of one of the financially strongest conservation
organizations from the US stated: "Well, it's my job - I am paid to be
present and to lobby for our tasks. We actually preserve the last
wilderness areas by buying them. I am fully occupied to enlarge our
successful operations. I am looking forward to meet influential
likeminded people and to spent some interesting time in South Africa,
where we want to invest more."

That's what it is most likely all about: The so called stakeholders from
the front pages of the media want to continue to be the fat
"steak-holders"!, as one cartoonist termed it. But the time seems to be
near, when again the deprived "stick-holders" team up and provide some
serious lessons to those who divide the earth among themselves only and
to those, whose NGOs stand for: Nothing Goes On!

At the end of the last millennium the sentence "Imagine tomorrow war
would be declared - but nobody would engage himself!" - used to be an
epigram, sprayed among other graffiti along the Berlin Wall and
elsewhere. Today: "Imagine tomorrow there is a global conference - but
nobody joins it!", seems to become the slogan for the World Summit on
Development 2002. Some of the "Nobodies" - such they are at least in the
view of more than 6 billion people - might still meet each other in
Johannesburg, but the global bandwagon has left the people behind
again. What wonder that quiet many of the - presumed wiser - heads of
state themselves are reluctant to confirm their participation, even
after Klaus Toepfer, the UNEP boss, wrote personal letters to some, who
are considered to be important - like the German Chancellor Schrvder -
and urged them to come.

Still UN Secretary General Kofi Annan reiterates his Mantra of WEHAB
(Water and sanitation, Energy, Health, Agriculture, Biodiversity) as the
five areas where solutions are long overdue to be found. But only the
officials, who still pat on each others back, and those, who directly
are busy to make money with the conference event, or those who got the
expensive tickets for the preparation conference in Bali, an island
still unfree and occupied by Indonesia and its military, continue to
proclaim that the Global Summit will make the world a better place. For
them maybe yes, but if for the billions of impoverished people is not
only another question - it is at least already out of that specific
question, which is answered daily by the natural world itself: It just
disappears!

Nature and Humanity disappear with lightning speed, while "global
leaders" continue to meet and meet and meet and - if at all - today only
gather in extremely policed states.

---
John Bamau is a regular writer on environment and development issues
Copyright: WTN 2002 (reprinting and translated publishing free, if
author and source are cited).
------------------------------

Please read also:

Massive police presence planned for summit

April 19 2002

SATURDAY STAR

By Elijah Mhlanga

Protesters at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg later this year are likely to confront a massive police and
army presence.

This is central to the security plan drawn up by the Johannesburg World
Summit Company which next week will table the document at the
inter-ministerial session in parliament.

The summit, which opens on August 26 and concludes on September 4, will
bring together more than 130 heads of state from around the world.

More than 60 000 people are expected to attend events related to the
summit, such as the non-governmental conferences.

Gatherings of world leaders have in the past been marred by mass
protests which have turned violent resulting in deaths.

The justice, crime prevention cluster will scrutinise the plan to ensure
that the security strategy has provisions to handle crisis situations.
The cluster involves the safety and security, defence, finance and
intelligence departments.

Although the directors-general of the related departments have approved
the security plan for the summit the ministers have yet to scrutinise
the plan and approve it.

Based on the outcome of next week's meeting government would mobilise
state forces.

Resources would be combined to control the expected demonstrators from
anti-globalisation organisations, including anti-Aids groups and
environmentalists.

Source:
 http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=14&art_id=ct20020419172804301S630198
&set_id=1

----------------

CIVIL SOCIETY UPSET ABOUT SUMMIT PREPARATIONS
Civil society is particularly upset about the failure of PrepComm III.
Some NGOs were even thinking that in the end, it might be better to have

NO summit at all rather than a flawed one. Explore some of the NGO
positions at  http://www.worldsummit2002.org/guide/civilsociety.htm

----------------
JOHANNESBURG SUMMIT PREPARATIONS BOG DOWN

NEW YORK, New York April 8, 2002 (ENS) - World governments made little headway during two weeks of preparatory talks for this autumn's Johannesburg world sustainability summit that ended in New York on Friday, raising fears of damage to the whole process. Still, progress was made with the official launch of an international sustainability reporting system, the Global Reporting Initiative.

For full text and graphics visit:
 http://ens-news.com/ens/apr2002/2002L-04-08-03.html