Protesters Aim for Quiet Persuasion

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11 last year it has proved harder to bring crowds on to the streets to protest.

And while that may mean less media attention, it may also leave a little more space for the less noisy and more persistent activists to engage the public and the institutions in a real debate.

Fans of the old-style demonstrations against the IMF and World Bank will still have their fun this weekend. But, as has become standard practice, protestors have split into two camps.

Today is the turn of the direct activists, led by the DC-based Anti-Capitalist Convergence - described by Zein El-Amine, one of its organisers, as a spectrum of anarchist, socialist and green activists. A suitably diverse string of direct actions is planned on "strategic targets", including mass bicycle blockades of city streets.

But, Soren Ambrose, a well-known activist with the "Fifty Years is Enough" campaign, founded in 1994 to monitor the fund and bank, says: "In the Washington activist community there has been a separation of sorts in tactics between an in-your-face approach and those trying to appeal to mainstream Americans, the general public, trying to persuade rather than employ resistance. We want people well fed, relaxed, even entertained, and interested in what we have to say - not irritated."

This week, Voices of the Global South, also run by Soren Ambrose, brought an array of activists from Africa, Latin America and Asia to DC. Several came via two-week tours of American college campuses and local campaigns, trying to build awareness of their views.

Their background is often impressive. Nora Cortiñas, a tiny, elegant Argentine wrapped in a white headscarf, is a veteran human rights campaigner. From its inception in 1977 she was a member of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo - the mothers who gathered in a square in Buenos Aires to protest about the disappearance of their sons or husbands under the military dictatorship. She sees similar evils today in the IMF's treatment of crisis-wracked Argentina.

"Today we have an economic dictatorship in our country," she says. "First we had genocide by the Argentine dictatorship and now we have genocide by the International Monetary Fund."

Some eyebrows may justifiably be raised within the IMF - which is struggling with a defiant Argentine government - at such ferocious rhetoric, particularly Ms Cortiñas' claim that Argentina's truculent politicians "are following what the IMF tells them". There are also challenges in making these issues play in middle America. Shelly Rao, a Fijian campaigner for labour rights and better healthcare, who has just finished two weeks touring the US's north-eastern states, says: "One of the difficulties is that people need to be in the struggle to know what it is like." The activists try to relate their concerns to US problems like hospital closure.

Some of the activists have won notable victories. The Right Reverend Peter Njenga, an Anglican bishop from Kenya, is active in the Jubilee debt relief campaign - which has continued with great vigour in poor countries even though it has largely wound itself up in several rich nations. Oscar Olivera, executive secretary of the Coalition for the Defense of Water and Life, forced a celebrated reversal of water privatisation in Bolivia - an increasingly controversial issue in many developing countries.

Activists have become aware that some of their more extreme tactics may be counter-productive. This time last year, "Fifty Years is Enough" issued a noisy challenge to the IMF to hold a public debate, which was met with suspicion and then abandoned when the meetings themselves were postponed after September 11. Mr Ambrose is currently working more quietly behind the scenes to rearrange the date for next week.

If he succeeds, it is a fair bet that the international financial institutions will care more about who wins the debate than they do about broken windows in downtown DC.