IMF, World Bank Face Off With Critics as Protesters Come to Prague

Czech and foreign anarchists, Communists and extreme right-wing groups staged protests here Saturday against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, marching through a city that otherwise was eerily quiet, with far fewer people and cars than usual.

But the main face-off of the day was a verbal one, hosted by President Vaclav Havel at Prague Castle, where the heads of the IMF and the World Bank, who are to begin a formal meeting here Tuesday, joined some of their fiercest critics for a panel discussion that resolved no issues but left each side crystal clear about the feelings of the other.

“My belief is that there is a great body of work that the bank does which is highly constructive, where a lot of people, including myself, spend our lives trying to deal with issues of poverty and issues of making the world a better place,” James D. Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, said after the discussion.

“Now, you can say we’re idiots and we don’t know what we’re doing, we don’t care, and we’ve got bad motives and we’re immoral,” he added. “But that’s not the way I see the team, and it’s certainly not the way I perceive myself.”

The scale of the street protests and the violence associated with them was much less than had been feared by police mindful of the rioting during a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle last year. The only serious trouble reported as of Saturday evening was an assault by self-described anarchists on a group of rightist skinheads at the main Prague train station, with some victims taken away by ambulance.

A much broader coalition of human rights, environmental and anti-globalization groups committed to nonviolence is planning major protests against Tuesday’s opening session of the annual three-day meeting of the IMF and the World Bank.

But there were indications that far fewer demonstrators might show up Tuesday than the 20,000 predicted by both protest organizers and Czech police. A special tent city set up in a sports stadium, with the capacity to house thousands of protesters to keep them from sleeping in city parks, still had only about 200 guests Saturday.

About 2,000 protesters took part in the demonstrations Saturday, which had been publicly announced as the day that radical left organizations would show their strength.

“I came here to fight the IMF because it’s an international organization for repression and international domination,” said Decaevel Gilles, 20, a French university student who attended a rally of several hundred people that drew members of Marxist organizations from across Europe.

“We are Trotskyite,” but others at the gathering were “Stalinist” or “socialist,” he said. Usually “Stalinists and Trotskyites fight,” he added, but in this case, “we want the same thing.”

“The police had no problems. They only monitored the protests--there was no collision,” Jiri Kolar, head of the Czech police, said Saturday evening. About 11,000 police, including reinforcements from provincial towns, have been mobilized in Prague, the capital, to provide security for the meetings.

Meanwhile, many banks here, which fear being targeted by protesters, have taken down identifying signs and boarded up their windows.

Part of Havel’s declared purpose in hosting Saturday’s forum was to provide a venue at which protesters could deliver their message through dialogue rather than in the streets.

Speakers on the panel included Walden Bello, a prominent Philippine activist; Katerina Liskova, a Czech university student who called for the IMF and the World Bank to be dismantled; and Ann Pettifor, a leader of the Jubilee 2000 movement, which is campaigning for cancellation of debts owed by poor countries to the IMF and the World Bank.

All three harshly criticized the two institutions and their leaders. Members of the audience, which included many representatives of nongovernmental organizations, also posed sharply critical questions to Wolfensohn and IMF head Horst Koehler.

In a reference to deposed Indonesian leader Suharto, Bello accused Wolfensohn of having helped to “legitimize Mr. Suharto’s dictatorship.”

“That is something that the people of the world will never forgive the World Bank for, particularly the people of Indonesia,” he said.

Pettifor said that if the IMF and World Bank refuse to write off the debts of the poorest countries, “then you will continue to be attacked in the way you’re going to be attacked this week.”

The two institutions already have launched a program to forgive debts of 20 of the world’s poorest countries, but there are conditions attached that many of these countries have not fulfilled. Officials of the institutions say that unless those terms are met, there is no assurance that the money saved will be used in ways that really help reduce poverty.

Wolfensohn charged that critics’ complaints make the World Bank’s work more difficult.

“Images that have been put to you today” are “simple, clear, aggressive and destructive,” he told the audience. “You should not regard us as a black and evil force. Maybe we’ve gotten things wrong. I’m sure we have in many cases. Our objectives are very similar to those of the people in the streets.”

Koehler declared: “I have a heart. But I also have to use my brain to find solutions.”

He stressed that one of the key steps that should be taken to ease poverty is for rich countries to open their markets more fully to products from poorer countries.

Financier George Soros, who also was on the panel, warned that much of the criticism of the IMF and the World Bank plays into the hands of conservatives who wish to slash funding for the two organizations and leave development even more dependent on the spread of global capitalism.

“It’s a very strange and tragic situation that people who want to alleviate poverty are lined up with those who want to rely only on market forces,” Soros said.

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