Contrary to what some would like to believe, the World Social Forum process is alive and kicking and as strong as never before. From Feb. 6 to 11, 2011 the most recent WSF was held in Dakar, Senegal.
The opening march gathered over 75,000 people representing local and international movements and organizations. Over 130 countries were represented. Caravans from many African countries arrived by road. The forum provided space to over 3,000 self-organized activities and more than 40 peoples assemblies.
The ongoing Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions provided the background to the forum's activities, giving a charged political environment to the entire process. As the final declaration of the People's Social Movements stated:
"We affirm our support for and our active solidarity with the people of Tunisia, Egypt and the Arab world who have risen up to demand a true democracy and build the peoples power. Their struggles are lighting the path to another world, free from oppression and exploitation."
Dakar was the venue to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the World Social Forum, the first being held in Porto Alegre in Brazil in 2001. "Since that time, we have built a common history of work which led to some progress, particularly in Latin America, where we have been able to intervene in neoliberal alliances and to create several alternatives for just development that truly honor nature".
The social forum process is growing. In 2010 alone there were 19 national forums, five regional forums and 31 thematic forums all over the world involving an impressive number of organizations, networks and tens of thousands of people. Without falling into simplistic causality it is worthwhile noting that 10 social forums were held in the Arab world in 2010, the last being in Egypt!
One of the fundamental objective of the WSF process is to facilitate exchange of experience and promote formation of new strategic alliances. In Dakar, the self-organized activities for two days was followed by a two-day people's convergence assemblies. These thematic assemblies gave space to the gathered social movements to plan their actions in the coming months and years.
Advertising
Assemblies on climate change, food sovereignty, migration and others resulted in convergence of strategies of the global social movements. In the convergence assembly organized by the groups working in defense of Palestinian human rights it was decided to hold a thematic World Social Forum in Solidarity with Palestine sometimes in 2012. Brazilian groups have even offered to host this event!
World Social Forum 2013 in Montreal?
In Dakar, at the International Council meeting after the end of the Forum, concrete proposals were put forward arguing that the next WSF should be held in a country from the North. It was argued that the countries from the North play a central role in developing conditions that push the world population towards poverty, war and climatic disasters. The social movements in the North are thus at the frontline and there is a need that the social movements of the South lend them support.
Social movements in Canada and Quebec have a long history of social and political mobilization. The anti-war movement of 2003 prevented the Canadian government to embark on the U.S. bandwagon in the invasion of Iraq. And then again in 2001 the mass mobilizations with support from all major trade unions marked the end of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.
With the ongoing onslaughts on the civil society organizations and human rights groups across Canada by the present Harper government there is an increase in alliance building between progressive organizations, community groups and trade unions. The opposition is growing against the exploitation of shale gas and tar sands, and an attempt is being made to bring all environment groups in Canada together on the same platform during a conference "Cochabamba +1" that is due to be held in Montreal from 15 to 17 April this year.
Canada's role in the occupation of Afghanistan, and its blind support to atrocities perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinian people have thrown immense challenges to the social movements in Canada. It is in this background that the Montreal/Quebec activists in the BDS campaign have decided to hold a BDS conference every year in October. With Quebec's largest teachers union FNEEQ having adopted the BDS call against Israeli apartheid, an education campaign has been started in colleges gathering support and public opinion in solidarity with Palestinian human rights.
In 2009, Montreal was the venue of the meeting of international council of the WSF. In a reception organized for the IC members the Mayor of Montreal extended his invitation to hold an eventual WSF in Montreal.
A 150-strong Quebec delegation has proposed Montreal as the venue of the next WSF in 2013. Apart from Canada, Spain is also on the list as potential hosts. The next International Council meeting will be held at the end of May this year in Paris in parallel with the G-8 and G-20 meetings where the final decision will be made.
Feroz Mehdi is the general secretary of Alternatives International and a member of international council of the World Social Forum.
The World Social Forum should not be held in Canada. Many activists are bound to be excluded from entry into the country by our highly politicized immigration system.
Declaration of the Assembly of Social Movements, WSF 2011:
We affirm our support for and our active solidarity with the people of Tunisia, Egypt and the Arab world who have risen up to demand a true democracy and build the people´s power. Their struggles are lighting the path to another world, free from oppression and exploitation.
We strongly affirm our support for the Ivory Coast, African and world peoples in their struggles for sovereign and participatory democracy. We defend the right to self-determination for all peoples.
Through the WSF process, the Social Movements Assembly is the place where we come together through our diversity, in order to forge common struggles and a collective agenda to fight against capitalism, patriarchy, racism and all forms of discrimination.
We are celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Social Forum, which was first held in Porto Alegre in 2001. Since that time, we have built a common history of work which led to some progress, particularly in Latin America, where we have been able to intervene in neoliberal alliances and to create several alternatives for just development that truly honor nature.
In these ten years, we have also witnessed the eruption of a systemic crisis that has expanded into a food crisis, an environmental crisis, and financial and economic crises, and has led to an increase in migrations and forced displacement, exploitation, debt levels and social inequities.
We denounce the part played by the main actors in the system (banks, transnational companies, the mass media, international institutions, ...) who, in their constant quest for maximum profits, continue with their interventionist politics of war, military occupation, so-called humanitarian missions, new military bases, plundering natural resources, exploitation of entire peoples, and ideological manipulation. We also denounce their attempts to co-opt our movements through their funding of social sectors that serve their interests, and we reject their methods of assistance which generate dependence.
Capitalism´s destructive force impacts every aspect of life itself, for all the peoples of the world. Yet each day we see new movements rise, struggling to reverse the ravages of colonialism and to achieve well-being and dignity for all. We declare that we, the people, will no longer bear the costs of their crisis and that, within capitalism, there is no escape from this crisis. This only reaffirms the need for us, as social movements, to come together to forge a common strategy to guide our struggles against capitalism.
We fight against transnational corporations because they support the capitalist system, privatize life, public services and common goods such as water, air, land, seeds and mineral resources. Transnational corporations promote wars through their contracts with private corporations and mercenaries ; their extractionist practices endanger life and nature, expropriating our land and developing genetically modified seeds and food, taking away the peoples' right to food and destroying biodiversity.
We demand that all people should enjoy full soverignty in choosing their way of life. We demand the implementation of policies to protect local production, to give dignity to agricultural work and to protect the ancestral values of life. We denounce neoliberal free-trade treaties and demand freedom of movement for all the human beings.
We will continue to mobilize to ask for the unconditional abolition of public debt in all the countries in the South. We also denounce, in the countries of the North, the use of public debt to impose to unfair policies that degrade the social welfare state.
When the G8 and G20 hold their meetings, let us mobilize across the world to tell them, No ! We are not commodities! We will not be traded ! We fight for climate justice and food sovereignty. Global climate change is a product of the capitalist system of production, distribution and consumption. Transnational corporations, international financial institutions and governments serving them do not want to reduce greenhouse gases. We denounce ¨green capitalism¨ and refuse false solutions to the climate crisis such as biofuels, genetically modified organisms and mechanisms of the carbon market like REDD, which ensnare impoverished peoples with false promises of progress while privatizing and commodifying the forests and territories where these peoples have been living for thousands of years."
We defend the food sovereignty and the agreement reached during the Peoples' Summit against Climate Change, held in Cochabamba, where true alternatives to face the climate crisis were built with the social movements and organisations from worldwide.
Let's mobilize, all of us, especially on the African continent, during the COP 17 in Durban in South Africa and in « Rio +20 » in 2012, to reassert the peoples' and nature's rights and block the illegitimate Cancun Agreement.
We support sustainable peasant agriculture ; it is the true solution to the food and climate crises and includes access to land for all who work on it. Because of this, we call for a mass mobilisation to stop the landgrab and support local peasants struggles. ´ We fight against violence against women, often conducted in militarily occupied territories, but also violence affecting women who are criminalized for taking part in social struggles. We fight against domestic and sexual violence perpetrated on women because they are considered objects or goods, because the sovereignty of their bodies and minds is not acknowledged. We fight against the trade in women, girls and boys. We call on everyone to mobilize together, everywhere in the world, against violence against women. We defend sexual diversity, the right to gender self-determination and we oppose all homophobia and sexist violence. We fight for peace and against war, colonialism, occupations and the militarization of our lands.
The imperialist powers use military bases to trigger conflicts, control and plunder natural resources, and support anti-democratic initiatives, as they did with the coup in Honduras and the military occupation of Haiti. They promote wars and conflicts as in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and many others.
We must intensify the fight against repression and the criminalisation of the people's struggles and strengthen the solidarity and initiatives between peoples, such as the Global Boycott Disinvestment and Sanctions Movement against Israel. Our struggle also aims at NATO and to ban all nuclear weapons.
Each of these struggles implies a battle of ideas in which we cannot progress without democraticizing communication. We affirm that it is possible to build another kind of globalization, made from and by the people, and with the essential participation of the youth, the women, the peasants and indigenous peoples.
The Assembly of the Social Movements calls the forces and popular actors from all countries to develop two major mobilisations, coordinated on the international level, to participate in the emancipation and selfdetermination of the people and strengthen the struggle against capitalism.
Inspired by the struggles of the peoples of Tunisia and Egypt, we call for March 20th to be made a day of international solidarity with the uprisings of the Arab and African people, whose every advance supports the struggles of all peoples: the resistance of the Palestinian and Saharian peoples ; European, Asian and African mobilisations against debt and structural adjusment plans ; and all the processes of change underway in Latin America.
We also call for a Global Day of Action Against Capitalism on October 12th, when we express in myriad ways our rejection of a system that is destroying everything in its path.
Social movements of the world, let us advance towards a global unity to shatter the capitalist system ! We shall prevail!