Activists Bring Turtles’ Cause to WTO Fishbowl

It was one of the more bizarre spectacles in the annals of social protest: angry demonstrators, dressed as sea turtles, in tense face-offs with riot-clad police.

Who on Earth were they, and what were they so mad about?

The demonstrators who have turned the summit of the World Trade Organization upside down this week are an unlikely assortment of advocates and anarchists, international in scope, divided in aims. Their causes are as varied as food safety, affordable medicine, human rights, clean air, native cultures and the preservation of species, such as turtles, threatened by global commerce.

But they are united by a disgust with the WTO, which they see as the tyrannical symbol of a global economy that has shoved social priorities aside in a relentless quest for profits. Remarkably, a once-obscure bureaucracy based in Geneva has emerged as a new, popular villain, accused of hijacking powers from mere nations while pursuing its agenda in secret.

Charges that the WTO has become a sinister center of power arise from its authority to referee trade disputes between countries, powers that were endorsed by Congress in 1994. Three-judge panels in Geneva can impose financial sanctions against a losing country unless it agrees to change its policies. It is nearly impossible to overturn such rulings because it takes a consensus of the WTO’s 135 member countries.

Much of the outrage on the streets in Seattle is aimed at the WTO’s priorities, which, not surprisingly, are the promotion of trade. The United States has lost cases involving its protections for sea turtles and dolphins, and a clean-air regulation. Europe’s ban on hormone-fed beef, which it tried to justify on health grounds, also was ruled illegal.

So is the WTO an evil conspiracy, pulling the strings on the global economy? Most trade and legal experts dismiss the charge.

“There are no black helicopters in Geneva. There is no secret cabal,” said C. Christopher Parlin, an attorney who served as U.S. legal advisor during the Uruguay Round of trade talks. “It is a voluntary choice by most of the countries in the world to regulate the way they conduct trade.”

Indeed, there is no shortage of evidence that nations are free to go their own way if they oppose the WTO.

When Europe threatened to sue America in the WTO for its ban on companies doing business with Cuba, U.S. officials made clear their plans to boycott any proceedings. Europe backed off. Similarly, when the United States gained a favorable WTO ruling against Europe’s ban on hormone-fed beef, Europe simply chose to accept sanctions rather than change course.

To true believers in trade, the WTO is a professional group conducting an important if delicate task that the leading economies of the world, led by the United States, asked it to undertake.

“Countries have made obligations [to the trading system],” said Jeffrey Schott, a scholar at the Institute for International Economics in Washington. “If they want to violate those obligations, the WTO can’t do anything.”

Yet of all the causes in Seattle’s sea of protest, few illustrate the WTO’s potential to rile the public as clearly as the plight of the turtle.

In 1996, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Pakistan complained to the WTO about a U.S. law designed to protect the world’s seven species of sea turtles, which were rapidly approaching extinction. Their biggest threat was shrimp-trawling nets, and the United States said its trading partners had to equip all their shrimp fleets with devices to protect the turtles.

Two years later, the WTO agreed that the U.S. law was overly broad and amounted to an unfair trade barrier.

In response, U.S. officials altered the rules so that the turtle safety requirement could still be applied to individual shrimp boats that export to this country, but not to the trading nation’s entire fleet.

The case gained great notice for two reasons: It showed America’s willingness to cooperate with a WTO ruling, even when the ruling went against a popular national law, and wildlife advocates understood that the beleaguered sea turtle was a powerful symbol for their cause.

Months before the Seattle summit, the Humane Society made a strategic decision to highlight turtles in its bid to make a larger point that the WTO places no value on wildlife in its trade decisions.

“It just caught on like wildfire,” recalled Patricia Forkan, an executive with the U.S. Humane Society. “Suddenly we were reading in the press that there were going to be people with turtle outfits, and we hadn’t even made any yet.”

U.S. officials have steadfastly maintained that the protections for turtles remain adequate, but many critics disagree.

“The law is radically weakened,” complained Daniel A. Seligman, a trade analyst with the Sierra Club in Washington. “This is no spin. Anybody who works on the turtle issue sees it that way.”

Environmentalists were not the only ones shaken by the ruling, which dramatized how WTO panels may rule against health, safety and environmental policies if they are viewed as unfair barriers to trade. The sea turtle decision and U.S. response greatly alarmed an array of special-interest groups that view WTO powers as a threat to hard-won regulations and future gains in their various agendas.

Over and over, WTO critics raise a key point: Any domestic law or regulation that has the effect of keeping out imports raises the potential of a costly, troublesome trade dispute forcing nations to reconsider their own laws.

It is an argument that only the most devout free-traders dismiss and is viewed as gospel among many activists.

“This is the framework we’re living in now, and it exerts a chilling effect on advances in food safety regulation,” argues Bruce Silverglade, director of legal affairs for the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Activists of all stripes agree; they have been planning for months to make Seattle a defining moment in an emerging backlash against globalization. Many have worked tirelessly to establish alliances domestically and overseas, monitoring one another’s Web sites and communicating via e-mail in the months leading up to the protest.

They campaigned for sympathizers to come to Seattle. Tens of thousands heeded the call, creating a carnival of protest, replete with flash-bang grenades used by police to control crowds and a Halloween of costumes on shut-down streets.

Demonstrators showed up in Santa Claus outfits, marching against the backdrop of smashed holiday storefronts. Some climbed flagpoles to get attention. Some dressed up as dolphins, another animal seen as endangered by global commerce.

Seth Rick, a honeybee farmer from Humboldt County, rode to Seattle on a Greyhound bus to represent the concerns of small farmers. He says pesticide and fungicide poisoning in San Joaquin Valley almond trees killed his aviary.

“We marched with farmers from Japan, France, everywhere,” said Rick, who described himself as a third-generation pacifist and said he was tear-gassed twice. “Many of the marchers didn’t even know English. They were singing in Japanese. It was the most solidarity I’ve ever seen.”

Just as the overall protest encompassed a range of tactics and goals, so did the assorted group of turtles. The Humane Society group sported shells with waterproof paint, to protect against Seattle’s downpours. “Of course we couldn’t have turtles with umbrellas,” Forkan noted. These “official” turtles numbered only about 250, yet a look at the protests suggested there were many others, some wearing shells decorated with peace signs or other makeshift garb.

All were united in their antipathy of the WTO, and together the scrambling sea turtles created one of the odder images of the week here.

“Holes, holes,” fretted a turtle at one point, fearful that the line where he was stationed to block delegates from the convention center was getting perilously thin.

Another turtle looked up a steep hill for help and shouted: “We need reinforcements here!”

The response came in seconds: A new phalanx of turtles appeared on the hill, dashing to the front lines of the protest against globalization and the WTO.

Times staff writer Kim Murphy contributed to this story.

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CITIZEN INVOLVEMENT

Residents were caught in a standoff with police as protesters pushed beyond downtown. A18

* LABOR PROTECTIONS

Labor leaders said they want enforceable worker protections in any global-trade treaties. A19