At 8:45 a.m. last Tuesday several Oberlin students were sitting with visiting Zimbabwean activist Jonah Gokova discussing American foreign policy, drinking coffee and planning for the massive Sept. 30 anti-globalization summit that was to take place outside the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, D.C. The prior evening, Gokova had given a talk on America’s impact on the global south and the need to protest exploitative economic policies. Later that morning, the World Trade Center collapsed.

“I wonder where Mr. Gokova is now. That morning, after breakfast, he was boarding a plane. I wonder what he is thinking about all this,” senior Adrianne Koteen said. Koteen had attended Gokova’s talk and decided to say goodbye to the visiting activist before the rigmarole of classes began that day.

Monday evening, a large sector of Oberlin students had been drawn to Gokova’s first-hand account of the debilitating policies which the IMF and World Bank have thrust on third world nations such as Zimbabwe.

But in the week following the terrorist attacks on America, issues such as globalization that were previously on the political forefront have been put on the backburner; summits, hearings and bills “indefinitely postponed” to make room for new questions of national identity, security and full out war.

This past Friday President Bush decided to cancel the latest round of globalization talks. Long scheduled for Sept. 30, the summit of world leaders was expected to run in the tradition of meetings that took place in Seattle, Quebec, Genoa and D.C. Increased security concerns stemming from Tuesday’s terror attack led the city of Washington, D.C., President Bush and the IMF to decide on postponing the meeting.
So while the IMF will not be protested this month, activists now debate the strategy of keeping Sept. 30 as the date to protest unjust foreign policies and war. “There is no question that whatever happened Tuesday was evil, but it did have a root cause; America’s advancing power at the expense of people in the global south and the Middle East. I think at this point it is time to turn anti-globalization protest into a new constructive phase. The whole tone can be changed from one of conflict to peace building. This is a real opportunity for movement,” junior Jason Johnston said.

Even before the violence of Tuesday, security-related worries had dominated talk of the meetings. While each of the previous meetings attracted huge amounts of protest, the intensity and size of the peacefully-intended demonstrations had grown with each round and violence escalated. At the last meeting in Genoa, Italian police killed a protester. In D.C., a two-mile section of the city was in the process of being cordoned off for the summit and police had been counting on colleagues, including a sizable number from New York city, to assist with the expected influx of 100,000 protesters.
Officials have not yet decided whether to reschedule meetings or possibly hold them under different auspices such as a computerized hookup. “I think it is too early to predict what will happen Sept. 30, everything has been postponed. The IMF summit has been cancelled. It would be unfortunate if more hate, more hostility came out of this. We still don’t really know who did this, their motives, but at the same time I think the people that would have been protesting the IMF are the same people who are now organizing vigils and mourning. It’s not that we don’t, and all these issues don’t, have common ground,” senior Katherine Blauvelt said.

As Gokova noted in his Monday night talk, police had already begun to make their presence known to anti-globalization activists. “When I was in D.C. a convergence center was raided. People were making puppets and other peaceful protest materials when police came in and said there were drugs. There were no drugs. I was actually surprised to see this happening in a democracy such as America,” he said.

From Gokova’s civilian perspective, public protest is a necessary counterbalance to the fenced off, closed meetings that decide budgets, importation laws and labor conditions of entire nations without involving the nation’s people. “The IMF does not go to Parliament, they go to technocrats, their first visit is with the Department of Finance. We have tried to make noise and protest when they come to our country. We ask them to come to our elected officials. It doesn’t work,” Gokova said.

Gokova emphasized the need for communication between civil society, elected officials and economic bodies such as the World Bank and IMF that lend funds to needy nations and then impose highly directive debt-repayment plans and conditions on their governments. “For us the protest didn’t start in Seattle. We have always protested local manifestations of the globalization process, for instance food riots. What are called food riots really are demonstrations. They are quite violent; buildings burning, people shot, and for that reason I have heard people say not to encourage people to go to the streets. They say protests go against what we want to achieve but I see the programs that we protest as inherently violent. People walking down the streets and smelling bread but not being able to buy it. Mothers watching their children suffer from diarrhea and dying of curable disease. That is violence,” he said.

“I think Mr. Gokova would still want the globalization protest to happen but not with its normal structure. The ideologies of the protest would need to be critically examined to reflect current events in the country,” Koteen said.