August 24, 2002

You'll read about today's demonstration in tomorrow's newspapers. You can see it on the television in an hour or so. Or you could find out about it here first.

We're now getting thousands of visitors every day, all hearing about the site by word of mouth.

So if you're passing our url on, a thousand thank yous - and a thousand more if you've linked to our site...

But please, start hitting the comments - will you? We want to get a sense of who you all are and what you think. And, besides, we sweated blood getting that feature to work!

Today’s demonstration has lived up  to expectations of a tense confrontation between demonstrators and police.

Only a few minutes after the marchers had left Wits University, the police fired 4 or 5 stun grenades at the crowd, injuring at least two people. One, Karen Locq, a Canadian, is reported to have a nasty burn on her calf. The other, Dudu, a march organiser, is said to have dislocated a knee.

The crowd panicked and ran for the safety of the university – a few trapped cars reversing at high speeds up the road.

Soon, however, the crowd re-grouped and a tense stand-off resulted between 90 heavily armed police and a few hundred demonstrators.

A journalist, Rehad Desai, was arrested, after provoking police by filming right into the vehicles, even after being asked to desist.

"This is an illegal demonstration," said Commander Schutter, a police spokesman. "We are bringing trucks up as soon as possible and will then start arresting people."

Word of his statement filtered out to the crowd – though there was no formal announcement. Slowly they started to move back, leaving only a few stragglers to dance around a small paper fire. They too seem to have also dispersed, though this is unconfirmed.

"It was a tactical withdrawal," said a spokesperson for the demonstrators. "We had many international guests showing solidarity and we felt we had made our point. We are waiting for August 31, when the police can arrest as many people as they like."

"President Bush has been fully engaged and committed now for months to the summit," John Turner, the U.S. assistant secretary for international environmental affairs, has told Reuters today.

"But there is a need now for his leadership in the U.S. on security, international and domestic, and on the economy. He's really focused on those two issues,"

As WSSD stutters into action, the protestors hold the field.

So Daily Summit will continue to follow the activist agenda today – before bringing you news from the main summit tomorrow as UN high command hold their first press briefing.

If you read our posts from today and yesterday, you will see two main themes emerging.

First, those who said this conference was not a significant date in the anti-globalisation movement are quite mistaken.

Already the cycle of rallies, protests, and arrests is starting. The movement may be fractious – today they squabbled for an hour over whether to give a fairly innocuous press statement – but, in its own way, it is well-organised.

It also bumptious, excitable, confident, sophisticated, ruthless – and angry.

Arrests are good. Deportations are good. Want to stop an oil field? Send in 300 women to occupy the platforms (as has just happened in Nigeria). What chance the soldiers will shoot at them? And what consequences if they do?

Second, the movement currently has one target in its sites. Big, transnational businesses. The objective is clear – by whatever means, bring them low.

At a "teach-in" today at Witts University, a crowd of perhaps a thousand whooped, cheered, sang, ululated, groaned, and gasped as a parade of speakers spoke of the wickedness of big business.

The movement’s poster girl is Naomi Klein who said capitalism doesn’t just suppress its victims, it attempts to erase them.

"We have won the argument," she said. "They sound like us these days. But you only win the battle through argument. You win the war through mass struggle."

The movement’s chief martyr is Ken Saro-Wiwa – who was executed for his leadership of the Ogoni in their struggles against Shell and the Nigerian government.

His brother, Owens, now in exile in Canada, told the teach-in that “we need a global mechanism to hold corporations and individuals within corporations accountable.”

The international criminal court, he said, should not just be for dictators. Its power should be extended so that it could hold corporations accountable for their actions.

Finally, the movement does not forget the disaster at Bhopal, where many thousands died and many more have had their health wrecked by a chemical explosion. One of the survivors from Bhopal, speaking through a translator, shocked the crowd with her tale.

She called for a global fast on 27 August and for all those who are fasting to wear red armbands, so they can recognise each other.

In many rich countries, the left is often preachy and boring.

Well, this teach-in was often boring too. Every speaker ran over time, and as the programme ran later and later, the man next to me fell into a deep sleep.

But outside the main conference room, the movement’s vibrancy could not be suppressed. Lined on the steps of the university’s great hall, speakers announced plans for a march on Johannesburg’s prison to whoops of delight.

The crowd was dominated by its women – some as young as 14, but a surprising number in their 60s and 70s. Their voice was loud, rooted in the long tradition of struggle and protest against apartheid.

Naomi Klein told Daily Summit “success for us would be failure for this summit” (more from this interview soonish).

The protesters start their next illegal demonstration in just a few minutes. They will be calling for that failure. The South African police can ignore them. More likely, it will try to arrest them.

Either way, it seems, the protestors win.

South Africa's Saturday Star today leads with rumours that Robert Mugabe's war veterans may be coming to the summit to "infiltrate legal marches."

This seems certain to further direct the spotlight on Zimbabwe, after calls from the UK this week for Tony Blair to block summit business on Africa, as a protest against President Mugabe's human rights abuses.

The UN seems taken aback by the scale of opposition it is seeing to Type II partnerships (Mike Dorsey describes them as "partnerships with criminals" in a Daily Summit interview).

"Partnerships are not a substitute for government action or responsibilities," says Nitin Desai, Summit Secretary General. "Too often, international conferences end with just a document. Even when we have a strong document, we usually don't have a way to translate the words of the text into real action.

"The partnership initiatives provide us with an unprecedented opportunity to bring together the people who can bring clean water, electricity and health services to communities that lack them."

"I don't know why people think that partnerships are just about corporations," he adds. "They are not."

"Governments have colluded with corporations to offer partnerships for sustainable development. We refuse to even sit at the table with these corporate criminals," says Michael Dorsey, Director of the Sierra Club in an interview with Daily Summit.

Mr Dorsey accuses Clare Short of having "no sense of the absolute negative effects of globalisation on the world’s poor" and suggest that Colin Powell will be ineffective at the summit, because of elements in the White House who would like to see him relieved of his duties.

US NGOs, he reveals, now look to the EU for leadership, and admire their model of regulation and enforcement. The summit can still, he hopes, lead to a binding process for global corporate accountability.

Read the full interview here…

The hoodia cactus has traditionally been used to stave off hunger and thirst on long journeys.

Now the pharmaceutical industry wants to use it as a slimming aid, but there has been a wrangle over intellectual property between Pfizer, a South African and UK lab – and the San tribe who have long used the plant.

Over at Tech Central Station, Nick Schulz files a piece before boarding a plane for Joburg.

He's sceptical about the chances of Kyoto ratification without the US's involvement. However, the Europeans here seem pretty confident that ratification will eventually happen (though only six months ago they were hoping it would happen before the summit started).

Nick is also fretting about a World Environment Organisation (for him, the worst thing that could happen at the summit). Daily Summit had heard that this proposal wasn't seriously on the agenda, but we've scribbled a note to check it out...

NGOs have had a chance to lobby President Mbeki, according to the BBC's Alex Kirkby.

After the meeting, Tony Juniper of the Friends of the Earth urged Tony Blair to also spend his time at the meeting speaking with "campaigners who represent the interests of real people" rather than big business.

Nelson Mandela was arrested on the farm at Lilieslief, and spent the next 27 years in prison.

The farm played a central role in the struggle against apartheid, with senior members of the ANC masquerading as labourers and servants, before its betrayal to the South African police.

A few hours ago, Daily Summit listened to Dennis Brutus reminisce about his role in the resistance (he spent 18 months splitting stones with Mr Mandela). Mr Brutus claimed that the gains from that struggle had now largely been squandered.

"In a sad and ironic way, we are coming again to another vital point in the history of South Africa," he said. "We come here recognising our successes but, also, sadly our failures. It is almost as if we are going to have to make a new start in transforming South Africa after an abortive attempt at transformation."

"The perversion of that attempt has to be attributed to the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and now to a very significant degree to the United Nations, which has become perverted by the global corporate agenda."

"We have to make a new beginning. We have been given this marvellous opportunity that we didn’t ask for. South Africa is coming under the global spotlight. Johannesburg is coming under scrutiny."

"Right here, close by in Sandton, we are going to have an incredible concentration of wealth, power and corruption. And that is what we are going to have to challenge."

The Economist is quite warm to sustainable development these days, at least if it comes with a pro-free trade flavour.

"In many eyes," it writes, "the events of September 11th last year reinforced the perceived importance of making global economic development an inclusive process."

You can read its slightly lacklustre backgrounder here.

British NGOs do not come across as summit supporters, but, of course, they are aghast now the opposition Conservative Party is urging Tony Blair to block agreement on parts of the political declaration relating to Africa (see here for that story).