DAKAR, Feb 11 (TerraViva) – It started with a march through the streets of Dakar, grew with calls for a new global era and is ending with a challenge to activists to take the call for global change beyond the World Social Forum into the world.

Marching in the streets of Dakar. Credit: Abdullah Vawda/IPS

Addressing tens of thousands who marched through the Senegalese capital to mark the start of the Forum, Bolivian president Evo Morales called for a programme of social struggle to build a new world.

“There must be awareness and a mobilisation to put an end to capitalism and clear away invaders, neocolonialists and imperialists [...] I support the popular uprisings in Tunisia and in Egypt. These are signs of change,” said Morales.

It was a fitting coincidence that after thirty years in power in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak finally bowed to more than two weeks of mass protest and stepped down on the same day as the Forum drew to a conclusion.

The struggle in Egypt encapsulates many of the issues that were prominent in Dakar: deepening poverty made worse by the global financial crisis; religious conflict threatening a minority; issues of gender inequality bolstered by both culture and the law; and a people alienated from their democratic curtailment of individual rights and freedoms. All this in large measure thanks to billions of dollars of United States support for an oppressive security apparatus.

Former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told delegates liberal doctrines imposed on the world’s poorest countries no longer have a place in modern societies.

“In South America, but above all in the streets of Tunis and Cairo and many other African cities, a new hope is being born. Millions of people are rising up against the poverty to which they are subjected, against the domination of tyrants, against the submission of their countries to the policies of the big powers,” said Lula.

In its eleventh year, the Forum remains a space for open and honest debate. Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade did not hesitate to declare himself a supporter of the market economy which most here reject, and threw down a challenge to participants regarding their engagement with established global institutions such as the United Nations.

“If you who are here, if you had supported the idea, then Africa would already be on the Security Council. Since 2000, I have followed your movement and I still – excuse my frankness – ask myself this question: have you succeeded in changing the world at the global level?”

It’s a challenge that participants in the WSF take very seriously. Kenyan social justice activist Onyango Oloo was a key organiser of the 2007 edition of the Forum in Nairobi; he was unable to attend this year, but he suggested that the building of another world is already begun, away from the fleeting attention of the media.

The WSF is a place where those builders can meet each other directly. Organisers said 75,000 people from 132 countries attended, to share their experiences of injustice and resistance, to test each others’ analyses and return home newly-inspired.

For activist Beverley Keene, from Buenos Aires, holding the forum in Africa was important. “It’s our time to learn from each other and assess the impact that the financial crisis and the looting of the people’s minerals have on livelihoods.”

Lebanese participant Ounsi Daif said he had inspiring exchanges with people from Tunisia and Palestine as well as with students at the university that hosted the WSF. “I discovered the realities of West Africa, which I did not know. I discovered the inequalities, I discovered also the neo-liberal policies, I discovered a lot of things.”

Anietie Ewang, from the Niger Delta, said it had been an eye-opening experience for her. “An opportunity to re-strategise, to take the strategies of all the other participants that you’ve come to know about from their testimonies and go in and continue the fight with all the enthusiasm in the world.”

“The first and most important thing that one can learn from Tunisia is that when the people say no to oppression, then everything is possible,” said Tunisian Azza Chamkhi.

The wide-open optimism of Chamkhi’s statement captures both the broad appeal of the World Social Forum and what is frustrating about it.

“The WSF has a tendency to spin its own wheels, so to speak, because of the inherent limits of its slogan and motto,” says U.S. scholar Joel Kovel, a co-author of the Eco-socialist Manifesto. “’Another World is Possible’, repeated over and over, becomes discouraging because the shape of that other world is never really spelled out.”

Yet the people of Tunisia and Egypt – perhaps like South Africans, Iranians, Chileans, or African-Americans before them – find themselves on the threshold of a new world.

“The dictator is gone, but the dictatorship is still there,” said Chamkhi.

Thousands of activists are departing Dakar to pull it up, root and branch.

(END/2011)

Nnimmo Bassey

Nnimmo Bassey, the executive director of Friends of the Earth, hopes that this year’s World Social Forum will prove more than a talk shop.

“A great space for people to meet, for people to share ideas. Now we have to leave here with concrete ideas to take the struggle to the grassroots and amplify them. And globalise them,” he says.

“The harder we struggle, the quicker we’ll get the solution. We don’t have time to waste.”

The trade unionist says the continent’s workers faced serious problems long before the current world financial crisis and it is time for the continent to focus squarely on job creation.

DAKAR, Feb 9 (TerraViva) – One of Africa’s leading daughters and feminists, the Nigerian scholar Amina Mama says militarism is spreading, especially in countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia. She says war and conflict are especially affecting vulnerable women and children.Mama was speaking to IPS on the sidelines of the World Social Forum about militarism on the continent and feminist debates at this year’s forum.

Rape survivor in Malawi's Dzaleka camp for Congolese refugees: every month, seven to ten cases of gender-based violence are reported; few perpetrators are brought to justice. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

“Women and children have become the casualties of conflicts, whether you call it post-colonial conflict or not, I believe corporate interests have fueled the conflicts,” she said.

The human rights violations exacted upon women during conflict have been devastating. In a 1999 survey of Rwandan women as part of the Global Fund for Women’s (GFW) Militarism Initiative, 39 percent reported being raped during the 1994 genocide. Seventy-two percent said they knew someone who had been raped.

In a random sample of 388 Liberian refugee women living in camps in Sierra Leone, three-quarters reported being sexually abused before being displaced from their homes in Liberia. GFW found more than half had experienced sexual violence since being displaced.

Approximately 50,000 to 64,000 internally displaced women were targets of sexual violence during Sierra Leone’s protracted armed conflict.

Mama, who is the founding editor of Africa’s first continental feminist scholarly journal, ‘Feminist Africa’, currently chairs the board of the Global Fund for Women, which makes grants to women-led organisations around the world.

“There have been changes in the nature of conflict and war in certain parts of Africa,” she says, “These changes are leading to a particular [type of] policing, surveillance and violence against women. It’s been accumulating over time.

“Congo is an example, if you trace back the violence and rape, it started during the Belgian colonial period. This was their practice.

“And today men have absorbed that culture and misogyny of Western militarism that colonialism has taught them.”

Mama is currently working with African women activists in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia to develop to develop a clearer understanding of the impact of armed conflict on women and children.

(END/2011)

Gas flare at Rumuekpe, Rivers State. Credit: Israel Aloja / Environmental Rights Action Friends Of The Earth Nigeria

Speaking at a meeting organised by a group of Nigerian women’s environmental rights activists, Goodison Jim Dorgu, the Executive Director of the NGO Environmental Health and Safety Network, based in the oil-producing state of Bayelsa, said Nigerian civil society has come to the united conclusion that oil companies responsible for severe environmental degradation should leave without delay.

Other speakers outlined how the oil industry has provoked violence in the oil-rich Niger Delta, with women bearing the burnt of the assaults. Emem Okon, the head of the Women’s Development and Resource Centre in the city of Port Harcourt, alleged that the oil companies’ own security personnel have been involved in attacks on women. She also said the Nigerian army had committed grave violations of human rights.

“In Ogoniland, the government set up the Rivers State Internal Security Task Force, and what these soldiers did was to use women as a weapon of war. A lot of women were raped, a lot of young girls were taken into sexual slavery.”

The head of Friends of the Earth International, Nnimmo Bassey, said environmental justice for the Niger Delta will be a long struggle. “The regime of responsibility has been so well entrenched and there’s the military backing for what the oil companies are doing, the govenment is behind them,” he says.

“There are a lot of restrictions. A lot more work is still going to be done, but one day, when nobody expects it… the people will prevail.”

(END/2011)

Candido Grzybowski. Credit: Marcus Vinni/iBase

Sometimes described as one of the most influential intellectuals in Brazil, Candido Grzybowski is a philosopher and sociologist and has been the director of iBase, the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses since 1990.

“When we started in 2000, started discussions, it was in the main a reaction to the World Economic Forum, the Davos Forum,” Grzybowski says of the origins of the World Social Forum. “The owners of the world, the big companies with some governments and with a discourse of ‘no alternatives,’ globalisation, neo-liberalisation and so on.

“And for us it was a matter of saying, ‘We cannot continue only to say this is not the solution, we must try to build a thing independent of that, and to give an idea of not just an economic idea of the world we live in, of the planet we live in, of the society we live in, but a social idea of the economy, of power, of everything.

“So it was the social forum.”

Ebrima Sillah reports from Dakar.

Tens of thousands of activists and campaigners have started arriving in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in the World Social Forum. Dakar’s traffic jams are always painful, but gridlocked commuters these days can amuse themselves studying the energetic forum participants arriving in grand style: long caravans of vehicles plastered with all kinds of messages and slogans.

They sing and dance in open trucks and wave warmly at pedestrians and those stuck in traffic, but behind the smiles and laughter are serious messages: demands for social justice and equity; calls for fairer trade; warnings about the effects of climate change. Campaigners have come to describe and discuss migration, human rights, good governance and much more.

The uprisings in North Africa are a lively topic of discussion, as civil society groups and NGOs organise sessions ahead of the forum to raise awareness of their particular issues.

ActionAid Zambia‘s Kotutu Chimuka is attending her first World Social Forum; land rights are uppermost in her mind.

Sipho Theys, from the South Africa-based Action Support Centre believes it’s essential activists leave Dakar with a definite plan of action.

Pumi Mtetwa, who works with the Equality Project in Johannesburg is going to the WSF to build alliances to fight against growing homophobia in Africa.