A-IMC Reporter mugged in Sydney - WTO mugs the world's poor
There is a popular fable amongst anti-corporate activists about the way a frog will happily sit in a pot of water while the temperature is slowly, gently raised until it boils it to death. This is usually compared to way the WTO agenda moves, reform by reform, until freedom and justice suffer a death of a thousand cuts.
This piece is dedicated to my fellow journalist Robert Fisk, who was badly beaten by an angry crowd in Afghanistan while reporting on the effects of the US military's bombing campaign there, and to all other reporters and activists beaten, tortured and killed seeking the truth. Compared to their ordeals, my experience is almost amusing and potentially instructive.
There is a popular fable amongst anti-corporate activists about the way a frog will happily sit in a pot of water while the temperature is slowly, gently raised until it boils it to death. This is usually compared to way the WTO agenda moves, reform by reform, until freedom and justice suffer a death of a thousand cuts. I can't help comparing this to the way I was led, step by innocent step, into an unsafe situation where I was fortunate to lose only my wallet.
There could have been no more ironic end to my week reporting on the protests against the WTO mini-ministerial meeting in Sydney. On Saturday afternoon, all the actions finished, volunteers from four of the Indymedia groups in the Pacific met to review our coverage and discuss the development of a continental IMC Oceania network. Only after they left did I remember the $200 I had for the Catalyst crew, for Aotearoa's bandwidth donation. I spent the evening relaxing and looking around Sydney with another group of activists, who I left at a punk gig in King's Cross, intending to head back to a friend's house on the South Coast for some sleep and not wanting to miss the last train.
I found the King's Cross station with little difficulty and quickly found myself chatting to a pleasant young Aboriginal couple. The young man introduced himself as Daniel or 'Chubby' and his girlfriend Kylie. Chubby, dressed in typical 'homey' style baseball cap and Nike shirt, was amusing, quirky and I happily flicked him $2 for a Coke. In a way, this was my first mistake. Breaking my own ongoing boycott against a major corporate to give my new friends a bottle of domestic solvent wasn't really as generous as offering them the water I had, although no doubt they would have seen it differently.
There is a parallel here with the way the WTO approaches potential participants in its schemes, offering snake oil solutions to problems usually of its corporate beneficiary's causing. Aziz Choudry's commented in his ZNet column on the correlation between declining health amongst certain pacific islanders and the importation of western junk 'foods' into their territories. Monsanto sells GE as a solution to world hunger. Free trade, says the WTO, is the solution to poverty. These are merely obvious examples.
However seeming to appreciate my gift and looking for an opportunity to reciprocate, Chubby observed that I was a kiwi and inquired as to whether I smoked cannabis? I indicated that I did and he insisted he could get me an excellent deal if I shouted them a smoke. I wasn't in the market, since I already had a small quantity and was flying back to Aotearoa the next day.
I was thinking about a smoke I had with a busker at Sydney station and Kylie's comment "Go on, have a smoke with some aboriginies" struck a chord of white-lefty guilt. So I asked if there was a convenient place for us to have a smoke. Now if cannabis was legal this whole situation would have been prevented, as we could have simply smoked a bowl there and then and parted ways, but as it was there were no suitable hidy holes. They said they were getting off at Redfern and that I could get a connecting train to my destination from there. This is where I made my second mistake. Although I had been using Redfern station to change trains for the last couple of days, I was by no means sure I could connect to the South Coast from there and I should have insisted they get off at my destination - Sydney Central Station - if they wanted to share my gear.
In the same way the purpose of the week's WTO 'mini-ministerial' was to convince government's of the poorer countries that corporate invasion of their territories is a viable a way to reach their goal of improving their people's standards of living. Just as viable as the tried-and-true 'protectionist' methods that have worked so well for the industrialized nations now reforming and pushing their corporate claws outwards.
On the train, they asked to see the weed I had. I made my third mistake when I brought out the little bag on the train, instead of making an excuse about cameras and guard patrols. I intended to let them look but they practically snatched it out of my hand and were fairly reticent about returning it. At this point I began to worry, but I had already passed my stop. We got off at Redfern Station and started looking for a quiet corner to have a smoke, when I realised the bag was no longer in my pocket. I had checked the pocket after Chubby put it back in and was sure it was there. So although it should have been obvious to me that he had practiced some sort of sleight of hand, my fourth mistake my to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it had dropped out on the train.
Many countries, including Aotearoa, which have made huge strides down the 'free trade' road have also found that its hard to turn back to safety once the reform process is begun and the economists are busy tearing open the social fabric of the country and redesigning it to suit their ideology. Having committed themselves, all they can do is carry on and have faith that the reformers know what they're doing and have everyone's best interests at heart.
At this point I should have made my excuses about going back to look for it and hopped the next train to anywhere. Instead my fifth mistake was to let them convince me to pop around the corner with them to buy some more weed, have a smoke with them and then they would put me on a train to my destination. Once again, if cannabis were legal I could have headed for the nearest cafe and safely purchased some more weed, allowing me an excuse to part company with these two along the way.
Instead, after following them down what I later discovered to be Eversleigh St, we arrived at a corrugated iron shack with a barred door. This they told me was the 'shop' and I was to give Chubby $20 and wait outside. This I did and after a while he returned and asked me to follow him around the corner. Perhaps at this point I should have simply accepted the loss of $20 and high-tailed it back to the train station. But by this stage I was well and truly in their territory and may well have been chased, beaten senseless and lost my bag containing cameras, passport, address book and other indespensible items as well as my wallet.
He explained that the 'sticks' were $25. I didn't have $5 so they suggested I give them $50 and they would bring me change. I grabbed my $20 note back of Chubby and was just about to make a break for it when he snatched my wallet out of my hand, breaking the chain that attached it to my belt and sprinted off. After recovering from the suddeness of it all I chased him for a while but he was fast and he knew the territory. At one point I fell over and found I'd lost him. I decided at that point to beat a hasty retreat to the train station while I still had my health and the rest of my property.
For me as a kiwi, this seems to be the political situation in my homeland. The effects of 'rogernomics' have shown to all but the most ardent ideologues that 'free trade' is anything but free, that 'globalization' means the freedom of capital to flow and the imprisonment of people behind national borders in order to produce it and that 'privatization' means handing over the countries collective assets to a bunch of crooks who quickly sell up and use the proceeds to move overseas. The big socio-economic question now is - where to next?
My final comparison here is between the differing reactions of the police. When I reported my 'mugging' the police were sympathetic and explained that I had been led into a part of town well-known for its seedy characters. When I was part of a huge crowd trying to draw attention to the theiving of the WTO, the Police attacked and arrested me.
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