Financial Leaders Move on AIDS, Debt Relief

As a thinning band of protesters brought parts of downtown Washington to a standstill, world financial officials Monday completed two turbulent days of meetings by approving a stepped-up campaign against AIDS and pledging to move forward with debt relief for the poorest countries.

Financial authorities completed their work behind closed doors while riot-clad police served as their guards on the streets for the second day, shutting down busy avenues and engaging in often tense standoffs with gleeful protesters.

Police occasionally fired pepper spray and clubbed demonstrators as they paraded through traffic and sat down in intersections. About 600 activists were arrested, pushing the total since Saturday to about 1,300.

Both the police and the protesters claimed victory, although the protesters failed in their goal of shutting down the regular spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Both sides will now apply lessons learned to the national political conventions this summer in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, the protesters’ next major targets.

“We didn’t lose the city,” said Washington Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey. Of the large police effort, which cost an estimated $5 million, he added: “So far as I’m concerned, it was worth it.”

Washington police could take credit for managing the protests more effectively than their counterparts in Seattle, where some of the same demonstrators--though in far larger numbers--turned parts of that city’s downtown into a war zone last December and seriously disrupted a world trade summit.

But the activists here could claim that they successfully called attention to their charge that the IMF and World Bank spread injustice in the global economy. “We have shined the light on these institutions as never before in this country,” said Robert Weissman, co-director of Essential Action, one of hundreds of groups in the protest coalition.

Beyond that, the critics of globalization polished their skills: using cell phones to maneuver large groups through city streets and around police; spreading their message over the Internet; and working through a decentralized command structure of small “affinity groups.”

Inside the World Bank and IMF, the protests were a source of mixed feelings, ranging from bewilderment to resentment to occasional agreement. But the leaders of those institutions--global lenders, with the World Bank focused more directly on the developing world--have been reluctant to concede much, especially to critics whose avowed goal is to shut them down.

“What I couldn’t understand is why you would have a group of people, many of whom . . . had very limited knowledge about what we were doing, complaining to us about our activities,” World Bank President James Wolfensohn told a closing news conference Monday.

Wolfensohn expressed frustration that even as the bank pushed forward with its initiative to combat AIDS in Third World countries, “We had today AIDS activists in town trying to stop [the] meeting.” But he acknowledged that the bank must not be getting its message across to the public.

Activists maintain that the World Bank and IMF attach punishing conditions to the aid they provide and promote projects that may profit corporate elites but harm local societies and the environment. At this year’s meetings, financial policymakers struggled to shape an agenda that would be palatable to even their critics.

Rich Countries Urged to Do More

In addition to the AIDS initiative, the World Bank called Monday on rich countries to do more to open up their markets to the exports from the have-nots and to improve strategies aimed at fighting poverty.

On Sunday, IMF delegates--accused by the protesters of rigging the global economy in favor of the privileged few--had affirmed their belief that “prosperity, to be sustained, has to be shared.”

“We must demonstrate more strongly than ever clear policy to enhance development and fight poverty,” said French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius.

Despite such sentiments, an enormous chasm continues to divide the vilified financial institutions from the activists on the street.

Within the IMF and World Bank, for example, eliminating the debt of the poorest nations is typically described as a desirable but also difficult task, one that requires satisfying bondholders and also raises concerns about whether other debtor nations would demand the same deal.

But on Washington’s streets Monday, the issue of debt forgiveness seemed far less thorny. As hundreds of protesters marched up 14th Street in a chilly downpour, they chanted: “We’re here! We’re wet! Let’s cancel the debt!”

Some of the day’s tensest moments unfolded at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and 20th Street, a block from the World Bank and IMF headquarters. A group of about 1,000 protesters massed there, inside a zone that had become a pedestrian mall because the police had prohibited cars and trucks. Police and activists, many wearing gas masks and bandannas, faced off.

When police thought demonstrators might charge, they let loose with a stream of pepper spray, hitting protesters at nearly point-blank range. One protester was lifted over the barricades by another, landed in the arms of police and was handcuffed. “Nonviolence!” the crowd chanted.

Several hundred protesters sat down in the middle of the intersection, and, periodically, a chant went up: “This is what democracy looks like.”

Then, after lengthy negotiations with senior police officials, more than 100 activists chose to be arrested. They peacefully walked in groups of five to 10 to waiting riot police, who arrested, handcuffed and frisked them before loading them into jail-bound yellow police buses.

As the numbers of waiting arrestees waned, Assistant Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer asked helpfully: “Are you all done? Do you have more?” When overeager demonstrators pressed forward and crowded the police, he added: “Step back so you don’t ruin it so close to the end.”

Chief Ramsey, carrying a riot baton in one hand and a red rose given him by a demonstrator in the other, defused tensions by telling police to lower their gas masks.

Police Are Quick With Pepper Spray

The police were not always so solicitous. Earlier, when a ragtag parade of protesters approached a closed-off intersection near the U.S. Treasury, police could be seen hooting, almost egging them on to a confrontation. The marchers did not take the bait.

Earlier yet, at a nearly deserted intersection, police let loose at least half a dozen canisters of pepper spray and, nightsticks swinging, waded into a small crowd of demonstrators who had surrounded a police car and sat down in front of a VIP bus heading in a protected convoy toward the meeting site.

The IMF and World Bank pushed their meeting schedule forward by two hours early in the day in an effort to beat the protesters to the punch. Convoys sped through the Washington streets at daybreak, with police aiming pepper spray canisters out the open windows at pedestrians and demonstrators.

The demonstrators briefly took over K Street, one of the major downtown thoroughfares, as commuters honked their horns. “Don’t go to work!” they shouted, until one demonstrator turned to her compatriots and said, “We need the working class.”

The working class on K Street consists mostly of lawyers and lobbyists.

Comedian-turned-activist Dick Gregory, observing Pennsylvania Avenue empty of its normal morning rush-hour traffic, said: “For all intents and purposes, they have locked this town down,” turning the IMF leaders into “a bunch of gangsters trying to hide.”

He credited the police for generally remaining calm. “If Spanish folk, black folk, had tried to do what went on [Sunday], they’d be dead,” he said of the mostly white crowd.

As Monday ended, police were not sure that the protest was quite over. Many of those who had been arrested were scheduled to be released today, and officials figured they might want to retaliate.

Times staff writers Mary Williams Walsh and Ricardo Alonzo-Zaldivar contributed to this report.