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.