Clinton, Trade Ministers Try to Save Talks

Under the watchful eye of police and National Guard troops, President Clinton and hundreds of trade officials struggled Wednesday to salvage a summit meeting of the World Trade Organization whose mission remained under attack in the streets.

Clinton flew the free-trade flag at meetings with business leaders and took pains to praise the more than 30,000 people who demonstrated peacefully during Tuesday’s massive street demonstrations. But he condemned the minority whose violent rampage cost Seattle retailers an estimated $8 million in property damage and lost sales.

He also urged the besieged WTO trade ministers to listen to the legitimate concerns voiced in the streets, set aside their internal disputes and push hard to reach an agreement to launch a new trade round by the meeting’s close on Friday.

To demonstrate his conviction, the president also met privately with representatives of groups that harbor a variety of deeply seated objections to free trade, including leaders of the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and John Sweeny, head of the AFL-CIO.

“I strongly believe that if we want to get everybody together and move forward, we are going to have to listen to people who have legitimate economic concerns, legitimate environmental concerns, legitimate labor concerns,” Clinton told the delegates.

But confrontations between police and demonstrators continued throughout the day and into the evening.

The protesters, angry with the impact of international trade on the environment, working conditions and U.S. jobs, were met with a much more aggressive posture by officers and soldiers than was the case on Tuesday.

Whereas police appeared to lose control of the streets the previous day, prompting criticism in the community, the greater show of police force and smaller number of demonstrators Wednesday resulted in nearly 400 arrests.

Meanwhile, trade negotiators from 135 countries worked feverishly to make up for the time lost during Tuesday’s violent protests, which filled Seattle streets with tear gas, delayed the meeting’s scheduled opening and led Seattle Mayor Paul Schell and Washington Gov. Gary Locke to declare a state of emergency and call in the National Guard.

But it remained to be seen what effect the fierce protests of the previous day might have on the trade talks, which would be problematic even under normal circumstances because of deep divisions within the WTO.

Foreign officials, locked in their hotels for hours Tuesday, emerged shaken and angry. Reports circulated that some officials were leaving town because they feared for their safety. There were other unconfirmed reports of violent altercations between WTO delegates and protesters, including an attack on Chile’s trade minister.

“It’s very disturbing,” said a WTO delegate from Trinidad-Tobago.

One aspect of WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell’s job was taken care of: “My three years of working to raise the profile of the WTO has finally paid off in a big way,” he said ruefully.

But it wasn’t the sort of profile the WTO wanted. Its image Wednesday was not one of a global body breaking down barriers and improving life in the poorest of countries, but of an institution under siege from within--among warring countries--and from outside by unruly protesters.

Clinton arrived from Los Angeles just hours before dawn on Wednesday. After speaking around midday to several hundred Seattle-area residents, including farmers, assembled in a huge, dank warehouse at the Port of Seattle, the president addressed trade ministers convened for a WTO meeting that is to kick off the next round of global trade negotiations.

Although Clinton did not directly witness any destruction of property here, he did watch the televised reports after reaching his hotel suite around 2 a.m. He was “shocked” by the violence, according to White House press secretary Joe Lockhart.

“He had a real reaction, which you saw this morning,” Lockhart said. “He was particularly angry at the instances of individual violence and vandalism.”

In his public remarks, Clinton was careful to draw a distinction between the peaceful demonstrators and those who engaged in violence.

“We need to make a clear distinction between that which we condemn and that which we welcome,” Clinton said.

As the president’s motorcade traveled through downtown Seattle on Wednesday, few demonstrators could be seen by those in the entourage. Occasionally, though, a lone critic here or there flashed a raised middle finger at the presidential limousine as it sped past.

In his public remarks, Clinton acknowledged that the disputes over free trade are not easy--and indeed divide members of his own Democratic Party.

“So this will require some amount of imagination and trust and humility and flexibility,” the president said.

Clinton used his speech to Washington farmers to make a special appeal to Europeans, who are increasingly resisting the importation of genetically engineered foods from the United States.

“I want to say to the people of Europe and all around the world: I would never knowingly permit a single pound of any American food product to leave this country if I had a shred of evidence that it was unsafe, and neither would any farmer,” he said.

“But everybody must understand, we have nothing to hide and we are eating this food, too. Nobody is trying to do anything under the table, in secret, in an inappropriate way.”

While the president worked the crowds, WTO delegates inside the heavily guarded convention center continued their plenary sessions while smaller groups of negotiators tried to find ways to resolve thorny issues such as agricultural subsidies and the handling of genetically modified foods.

In spite of the mediating efforts of Singapore Trade Minister George Yeo, the U.S. and European Union were unable to work out a compromise on agriculture liberalization, with the U.S. still resisting efforts by the EU and Japan to include exceptions for protection of small farms and the environment.

One interested observer was Chinese Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng, who expressed his concerns over the noisy and occasionally violent protesters--some of them criticizing China’s expected admission into the WTO--in a meeting late Wednesday with U.S. Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas.).

Dreier, a strong free-trade proponent, said he assured Shi that the U.S. government was prepared to fight for China’s membership in the global trade body. The congressman conceded that the huge outpouring of support Tuesday in the labor rally, where union leaders vowed to oppose China’s WTO admittance, will make his battle tougher.

“But I said as long as the American people understand that improving the standards of living throughout the world will improve workers’ rights and human rights at home, they will be supportive of what we are trying to do,” Dreier said.

As tensions on the street escalated again Wednesday night, some supporters of WTO reform expressed concerns that the continued violence would lessen the credibility of the legitimate protesters.

Dan Esty, a former federal environmental official, said he talked Tuesday evening with a number of foreign WTO officials who were physically threatened and were “not amused at American democracy in action.”

“It’s very easy now to paint all environmentalists as crazies whose views are not worth paying attention to,” said the director of Yale University’s Center for Environmental Law and Policy.