Trading blows at freedom's fortress

FRAN O'SULLIVAN watched the battles for the public mind on free trade, fought by spin doctors and police with tear gas.

WASHINGTON -The portable snow machines were fighting a losing battle.

As huge clouds of acrid tear gas wafted up the gentle inclines towards their hotels, gas mask-protected security men cranked the fans up another notch. They needn't have bothered.

The wind had shifted. The thick gas was no longer blowing back into the faces of the protesters. It was now permeating hotel lobbies. Seeping through the cracks and under the edges of closed doors to choke managers, summiteers, guests and television camera crews who moments before had run inside for shelter.

Welcome to the Battle of the Boulevard Rene-Levesque.

The anti-corporate protesters had failed to scuttle the Summit of the Americas.

Unlike the Seattle talks on a new negotiating round for the World Trade Organisation 18 months ago, police were prepared. But the message of just what they were protecting - and its fundamental importance to the economic health of much of the Americas - remains undersold.

Inside the fortress of old Quebec City, behind the historic fortifications and a 3m steel fence, President George W. Bush had just recommitted himself to free trade - US style.

Making a bottom-line case for the negotiations which would ultimately unite 34 Western Hemisphere nations in an enormous trade alliance from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, Mr Bush was not deterred by the action outside. "There are some in my country who want to shut down free trade.

"They are welcome to express their opinions. But it's not going to change my opinion about the benefits of free trade."

Mr Bush's strong leadership is essential if the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement is to be cemented on schedule in 2005.

If he cannot get domestic backing for the free-trade cause, other nations, such as Brazil and Venezuela, will not surrender their sovereignty.

The agenda will simply slide.

All the President's men - led by the impressive US Trade Representative Robert (Bob) Zoellick - have launched into the strange Kabuki dance that characterises the process of getting trade legislation through the US system.

Struggling to craft a convincing deal for Congress, Mr Zoellick is promoting a policy tool-box which recognises Democrat concerns that environmental and labour issues be factored into future free trade agreements, without including punitive sanctions - a move the Republicans say would open the doors to protectionism. Mr Zoellick instead talks the language of incentives.

The House voted down former President Bill Clinton's last attempt to gain fast-track negotiating authority for free-trade agreements.

Trade promotion authority - as the Bush regime euphemistically terms fast track - in essence gives the US President the power to make trade deals with other countries without the risk that Congress might alter agreements during the legislative phase.

They can vote the legislation up or down, but they cannot change it. The realpolitik is that as long as the trade promotion authority stays in limbo, so will all trade deals the US is pursuing.

Mr Bush's ability to strut the superpower walk is tightly constrained by the domestic political process, a factor being assessed almost daily by politicians from Singapore, through to Chile, Australia and New Zealand who wish to speedily unlock the full potential of the huge US market instead of waiting for the WTO negotiations to resume.

In New Zealand, free trade is attacked by organisations such as Gatt Watchdog as globalisation by stealth. But to the politicians beating a path to Mr Zoellick's door, free trade means giving their exporters the ability to increase sales and earn more foreign exchange.

Out on the streets of Quebec last weekend, the mythmakers - anti-corporate students, the Black Bloc (an extreme wing of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence), violent hooligans out for a day's destruction and even "wobblies" - were retailing their story.

The agreement being worked up at Quebec was claimed to be anti-democratic - and gullible networks soaked up the pictures of rioting protesters being prevented from scaling the metal perimeter wall by a fog of police tear gas.

Another more orderly demonstration by trade unions affiliated to their powerhouse umbrella organisation the AFL-CIO, students concerned at the potential privatisation of education, and environmentalists wanting to preserve wildlife out-numbered their violent counterparts by 25 to 1.

The Canadian Government assisted with a People's Summit for these civil society players, whose biggest victory was to pressure presidents and prime ministers into releasing the draft text of the proposed agreement, the first time draft texts have been released in an international trade negotiation.

The People's Summiteers are united in the belief that free-trade agreements make exports a priority at the expense of local communities and that economic and corporate power is being aggregated at the expense of popular sovereignty.

Under Council of Canadians chairwoman Maude Barlow, they ran a tight ship - but there were few network interviews.

Media and civil society groups overlooked the fact that Mr Bush must use the democratic process to gain authority for fast track.

The 34 leaders have endorsed moves to exclude any country from joining the Free Trade Area of the Americas if there is any "unconstitutional alteration or interruption of the democratic order of the state."

They have also rejected a one-size-fits-all approach to the FTAA and will allow countries to proceed at different paces according to their size and development.

Money is allocated to strengthening education and democracy and a strategy was launched to combat the drug trade.

Latin leaders have to sell their own domestic message: sovereignty is just as important to them as it is to Mr Bush and the House representatives.

They will proceed very carefully. They know they face a residue of anti-US sentiment and fears that the United States will garner the benefits from any regional trade bloc at the expense of other nations.

Compellingly, Mr Bush and most of the leaders present at the summit were democratically elected.

But what legitimate authority did the protesters represent as they hurled rocks at police and smashed the plywood sheets covering the windows of Quebec houses, shouting: "One. Two. Three. Four. We don't want free trade no more."

Late on Sunday evening, a New York-based producer for a European network said: "I know we should be asking them.

"I know they have no answers. But we had to get our pictures out. I couldn't even get my own crew in because of police restrictions. I had to use other footage."

Next time?

"Well, I'm off to cover the Tim McVeigh execution next - someone else will do the IMF show."

When anti-capitalist protesters first came from nowhere and ruined the image of the Seattle trade talks with well-orchestrated violence, the media were as unprepared as the WTO organisers.

Headlines blared "WTO talks scuttled," as media frenziedly covered protests not seen on such scuttled," as media frenziedly covered protests not seen on such large scale since the 1960s. But in getting their war pictures they missed the import of what had been happening behind the closed doors.

Prague. Melbourne. Davos. Names which easily trip from the tongues of protesters and journalists alike.

However, unlike the defining events of the 1960s and 1970s such as Kent State, May 1968, and even Woodstock - stopping discrimination against blacks, getting women equal pay and putting an end to the premature death of a generation of young US and Australasian men brought home from Vietnam to their mothers and lovers in body bags - today's war stories lack a higher moral purpose.

They certainly do not bisect US society, polarising neighbour against neighbour, as occurred in New Zealand with the 1981 Springbok Tour protests.

Then, staunch businessmen such as Fletcher Challenge chief Sir Ron Trotter linked arms with unionists and civil servants as they protested against a racist tour.

In Quebec, it is the protesters who wear the xenophobes' badge.

The 3m fence Quebec protesters attacked as the Wall of Shame hardly matches the Berlin Wall for its imagery and import. In Berlin, the wall existed to keep people from escaping to freedom; in Quebec, it existed to protect democratically elected leaders from threatened violence.

In North America, print media balanced their coverage with additional commentary. Conservative publications such as Canada's National Post and the New York Times played down the importance of the mobilisation and the impact of the protesters on future policy-making.

They sheeted power and responsibility to the democratically elected leaders. Liberal-leading organs like the Globe and Mail and the Washington Post wallowed in the ruckus.

Try this on for size: "At Ground Zero - Melee of Shouting, Broken Glass, Tears ... Defiance reigns in Quebec's Old City."

Washington Post reporter DeNeen Brown is in full flight: "And on the second day of the Summit of the Americas, Quebec's Old City remained a war zone smothered in tear gas and littered in defiance as thousands of protesters again tore down the gates that separated them from prime ministers and presidents meeting on the other side."

And this: "During the day there are lout shouts. It is said to be the cries of the voiceless who could not travel to Canada to be heard."

Or this from the Post's aspiring gonzo journalist: "'It's the people versus the minority of the population,' said a 52-year-old man identified as Ralph from New York City. 'It's a return to feudalism. The population has rocks and army tanks. We have scarves soaked in vinegar. They have gas masks - who will win?"'

Behind the myth-making lies the bare fact that protesters were not seriously injured. One lost the top of a finger throwing a live tear gas canister back at police. Another struck by a police rubber bullet had an emergency tracheotomy to restore breathing. Plenty suffered the effects of tear gas.

One page-long story related a mother's moral outrage. Her daughter was made to strip off her gas-soaked clothes and take a cold shower before being locked up with other protesters.

The reality check is that tear gas contaminates. It sears the tongue and leaves a rancid taste in the mouth. Despite dry cleaning, my own clothes still reek of the stuff five days later.

But the street theatrics provided some classic out-takes.

The hilarious shot of a mooning protester taking a full blast from a police water cannon. Graffiti, which mixed political messages with the sexual: "The US: A hole with Bush" - painted repeatedly on city walls.

Late yesterday, the action switched to Washington DC. Protesters were preparing for a demonstration at an IMF meeting as a prelude to the annual IMF/World Bank bash this year which attracts finance groupies of every persuasion - ministers, treasurers, central bankers, policy wonks, journalists and strategists.

The "NGO swarm" - the memorable term coined by Rand researchers David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla to describe the "multi-headed, impossible to decapitate" body of amorphous groups of non-governmental organisations which suddenly descend at these talkfests - was on the way.

Unlike the charming but impractical Marie-Follet private guest house in Quebec, my room at the Lombardy Hotel on Pennsylvania Ave is air-conditioned. Outside, the temperature is climbing inexorably back towards 80 in this unseasonably hot spring. But it won't be the tear gas that rips out my lungs this weekend.

The pollen is already doing that - swelling the air at levels nearly eight times above maximum safety range.

* O'Sullivan on Monday: Fresh from attending the trade summit and meeting trade officials in Washington, Fran O'Sullivan will look at some of the trends in international trade likely to affect New Zealand.