Agence France Presse | By SHAUN TANDON | January 16, 2004
Low-caste Hindus who marched across India and Japanese pacifists sailing a "peace boat" converged on Bombay Friday for a six-day anti-globalisation convention where opposition to the US occupation of Iraq was topping a litany of causes.
Tens of thousands of activists were to take part in hundreds of separate sessions and protests at the World Social Forum, which will end just as the rival World Economic Forum of business and political leaders opens Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland.
Tibetan monks and Indian prostitutes were among the dozens of groups vying for space as a wooded exhibition ground off a Bombay highway turned into a carnival of impromptu rallies, concerts and theatre.
But the most dominant theme was anger at US President George W. Bush, whose picture in various forms of defacement was plastered across the sprawling venue.
British Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, who was due to speak at the forum's opening later Friday, said the convention, which was held in the three past years in Brazil, would take to task US President George W. Bush and his administration's invasion of Iraq.
"Of course that will be the focus," Corbyn told AFP. "If we don't oppose war, we will soon be in another war."
Others due at the forum's inaugural include Iranian human rights activist and 2003 Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella and Palestinian civil society campaigner Mustafa Bargouti.
Jose Bove, the radical French sheep farmer who became an anti-globalisation emblem when he helped destroy an under-construction McDonald's in 1999, was mobbed by well-wishers as he emerged Friday at an activist "solidarity tent."
Smoking his trademark pipe, Bove vowed to use his time in India to ally with the Dalits, the 138 million people who belong to the lowest caste, although he acknowledged he would make only a small dent on Hinduism's centuries-old social hierarchy.
"We are powerless," Bove said. "But we are here to express our solidarity and to show our concern."
More than 1,500 Dalits, who took part in a month-long procession of rallies from four corners of India, danced and sang as they entered the main gates of the forum, with many wearing yellow headbands reading, "Dalits will make another world possible."
"The rally is just the starting point of our transformation," said Paul Divakar, head of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights. "There is anger in the community for the humiliation that we have suffered."
A number of Dalits have risen to prominent positions, most notably K.R. Narayanan, ceremonial president of India from 1997 to 2002 and a speaker at the World Social Forum. But by the estimate of US-based Human Rights Watch, Dalits are still the victims of 100,000 crimes a year.
More than 78,000 people had registered to attend the World Social Forum before Thursday, when another 22,000 signed up on the last day, forum spokesman Gautam Mody said. But he said it was unclear whether everyone who registered would take part.
Among those attending the conference were 70 Japanese peace activists, including a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, arriving in a "peace boat" which docked on the Bombay harbour front.
The annual forum was launched in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to unite the movement that emerged during the sometimes violent protests during World Trade Organisation negotiations in 1999 in Seattle.
Last year organisers decided to shift the forum to Asia to broaden support in the continent that is home to half the world's population and gaping inequality.
As if to illustrate the point, just outside the venue women in crumpled saris and visibly malnourished children washed clothes and themselves in an open gutter in the highway.
On one side they faced a set of newly built high-rise apartments. On the other was a wall with the spray-painted slogan of the World Social Forum: "Another World is Possible."Agence France Presse:
