G7 adopts mantra of protesters
PARIS: The Group of Seven summit has for the first time co-opted the message of its protesters: capitalism has led to damaging inequalities and environmental degradation that has harmed the global economy and a handful of rich countries can’t be the only ones making decisions for the world.
Thousands of people camped outside the French coastal resort of Biarritz for G7 protests are, to say the least, a little sceptical of the new messengers and their motives.
Since the 1999 World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit left Seattle a smoky battleground between police and demonstrators, protesters at international summits have used a range of tactics, from rhetorical to anarchic, to fight global capitalism.
“Everything that we said back then came true,” said Medea Benjamin, an activist and founder of CodePink, which seized the WTO stage in 1999 before that summit fell apart over trade disagreements.
More than 13 000 police are protecting this year’s gathering, which is hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, a former banker, and will include US President Donald Trump and other G7 leaders.
France’s interior minister specifically cited the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” as the model to be avoided at all costs.
“The first threat is, as we know, the risk of outbreaks (of violence).
“Violent individuals, not to be confused with peaceful protesters, try at each international summit to provoke riots and to hinder the smooth functioning of the meetings,” Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said this week. He cited protests in Prague in 2000; Genoa, Italy, in 2001; Rostock, Germany, in 2007; and London in 2009.
What has changed is that the message of the 1999 protest is also the message of the summit itself: “that the fruits of globalisation are not being equally distributed,” said Tristen Naylor, deputy director of the G20 Research Group.
“We find ourselves in this really peculiar moment where the grievances of those inside the summit room and those outside are aligned.”
For the activists pitching tents in an overgrown field outside the glitzy centre of Biarritz, that alignment is a mirage. Yesterday, they staged a protest outside a McDonald’s, holding aloft a white banner describing the global chain as a “social insecurity zone”.
Benjamin, who has more than two decades of protest experience, will not be at this year’s event. But she doesn’t believe the people inside the G7 negotiating rooms are the ones to solve the world’s problems, since she believes they themselves created many of the challenges the world now faces. |