The Battle of Seattle - Looking back 10 years

This month marks the 10th anniversary of protests against the World Trade Organization’s conference in Seattle. In preparing for the November 30th opening of the WTO’s “millennial round of talks,” the mayor’s office and local police had no contingency plan for one inconceivable possibility: that protestors would succeed in their goal of “shutting down” the most powerful organization in the world.

How did this happen, and what, if anything, has been the legacy of the “Battle in Seattle” in 1999? Law enforcement officials, civic leaders and trade delegates were unprepared for the hallucinatory events that unfolded in the so-called “Emerald City.” Lifted out of their consensual Kansas by a tornado of democratic dissent, officials found themselves stranded somewhere between a bad mushroom trip and Munchkinland.

By the morning of November 30, Seattle’s streets were transformed by a massive, colourful wave of street theatre, while passively-resisting protestors in the downtown core kept trade delegates from conducting their Oz-like deliberations. To add a nightmarish L. Frank Baum touch, police in riot gear dispensed truncheon blows, tear gas and pepper spray. The only things missing were the flying monkeys –unless you count black-clad anarchists brandishing hammers, crowbars, paint bombs and spray paint.

What’s been forgotten is how massive this event was and how it rippled across the world. Throughout the week, the firefighters’ union refused authorities’ requests to train firehoses on protestors. Longshore workers closed down every West Coast port from Alaska to Los Angeles. Just before, during and after the WTO protest, thousands of Indian farmers marched to Bangalore in solidarity. In 80 cities across France, 75,000 people took to the streets and 800 miners clashed with police. European activists stormed the WTO world headquarters in Geneva. In Turkey, peasants, trade unionists and environmentalists marched on the capital of Ankara. Thousands marched in sympathy in the Philippines, Pakistan, Portugal, South Korea, Turkey, and across Europe, the US and Canada.

This was not a simple gathering of aging, disaffected American lefties or bongo-playing kids with dreadlocks, with a trendy grievance against the world. This WAS the world, saying ‘no more’ to secretive, unelected officials with the power to expand transnational corporate power past the control of all governments.

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