Anti-APEC groups gear up for protest

Anti-APEC groups gear up for protest

By Katherine Espina

MANILA (Reuter): A security crackdown by the Philippine government has made opponents of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit more determined than ever that the world hears their views during this month's meeting in Manila.

"Efforts of (the) government to thwart our plans to launch anti-APEC activities with the arrest of Filemon Lagman, have only spurred us to redouble our efforts," Renato Constantino, national chairman of the Sanlakas leftist group, told Reuters.

The Philippine government's obsession with security for the Nov. 25 APEC summit has triggered unpopular measures, including the arrest of Lagman and a ban on the entry of East Timorese independence leader and Nobel Peace laureate Jose Ramos Horta.

President Fidel Ramos and other officials say last week's detention of Lagman, one of the country's most powerful leftist leaders, was not connected with APEC but was the result of fresh evidence in a 1992 murder investigation.

"Few Filipinos, including those who applaud the move, believe them," the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper said in an editorial.

Sanlakas is one of four groups planning counter-conferences and other protest actions during the summit and the APEC ministerial meeting that precedes it on Nov. 22-23. Sanlakas said it expects some 6,000 participants at its conference.

"They are selling APEC like it's the panacea to all our problems. At our forum, we will discuss the effects of globalization on the working people and come up with recommendations to defend ourselves," said Constantino.

Leftist groups say the APEC goal of full trade and investment liberalization would only benefit industrial countries like the United States and Japan, and widen disparities between them and less advanced economies.

Anti-APEC groups are not going to just talk, however. Two are planning protest motorcades comprising several hundred cars driving from Manila to the summit venue at Subic, some 80 km (50 miles) north of the capital.

There are also plans to try to stage a protest march to the gates of Subic itself and to form local fishermen's boats into a protest flotilla and sail into Subic, a former U.S. naval base. Political analysts said the most influential, and most moderate, of the four anti-APEC groups is the Caucus of Development Non- Government Organizations (Code-NGO).

Code-NGO has discussed its view with the government on APEC and some of its recommendations have been incorporated into the Philippines' Individual Action Plan (IAP).

"We were able to introduce language and concepts into the Philippines' action plan," Danilo Songco, national coordinator of Code-NGO, said in an interview.

"The most notable is that government has agreed to our proposal of deleting a uniform five percent tariff by the year 2004," he said.

The Philippines has instead opted for a target of three to ten percent by that date.

Each of APEC's member economies has had to submit an IAP, detailing how it plans to reach the grouping's goal of lowering all trade barriers by 2020.

Some 5,000 organizations and cooperatives are expected at Code NGO's two-day conference on Nov. 20-21, Songco said.

One of the most vocal anti-APEC groups is the Manila People's Forum, whose invitation to Nobel peace prize laureate Jose Ramos- Horta was thwarted by the government.

"We are not out to embarrass the government. We are pushing through with the forum where we hope to ventilate the opinions of those negatively affected by APEC," Walden Bello, chairman of the international conveners' committee of the Manila Peoples' Forum on APEC (MPFA), told Reuters.

Bello said their Nov. 21-24 counter-summit will have 250 foreign delegates and about the same number of local participants.

The People's Forum is organizing one of the Subic motorcades. A fourth group, the leftist Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan, or New Patriotic Alliance) in alliance with the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU, or May the First Movement), says up to 20,000 people are expected to take part in its motorcade to Subic on Nov. 24. An estimated 200,000 people are expected to join a nationwide protest planned for the same day.

Bayan secretary-general Nathaniel Santiago said the group will also hold a "peoples' conference" on Nov. 21-23.

Political analyst Alex Magno believes that, apart from Code- NGO, most of the protests will deviate from the issues on APEC.

"Most of these radicals just want media attention and will engage in these protests to inflate their political influence," said Magno, a political science professor at the state-run University of the Philippines.