One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  There is more talk, there are group photos (the guerrillas grin like children when Steve shows them their own images on his digital camera) and then, Goliar and his men have to leave. Before they do, he pours himself another coffee and addresses us.

  ‘I knew you were coming to Timika,’ he says. ‘I could see you in the plane overhead. I knew that you wanted to see me, and so I came to you. There was no need for anyone to ask me.’

  The room has gone very quiet.

  ‘If I wanted,’ he goes on, ‘I could be in Papua New Guinea tomorrow. You may have heard about my abilities. It is all true. The forest gives them to me, and they are secret. Not even my brothers here know’ – he indicates the two desperadoes polishing off the doughnuts on either side of him. ‘When my time comes, I will pass these secrets on. But not yet. You must know this: we Papuans – we are not like everyone else.’

  Silence rings like a morning bell for a long five seconds. Then the rebels rise. They are heading back to the forest. On his way to the door, Goliar glances down at the tray and sees that someone has left the lid off the teapot. Neatly, he drops it back into place with his thumb and forefinger. He smiles.

  ‘Goodbye, my friends,’ he says. ‘You will come back.’

  The next day we say goodbye to our Demmak friends, and catch a plane out of Timika. I have less than a week left in the country, and Galile wants to take Steve and I into the interior – to see ‘the real Papua’. He is going to take us to his highland village – his true home. It is to be an unforgettable experience.

  Galile’s village is in the remote, forested highlands, a two-day walk from the nearest track. With a procession of family and friends in tow, we strike off into the forest. We climb gentle, forested hills, to the hooting of hornbills and – occasionally – birds of paradise. We ford wide, shallow rivers, rip our clothes on thorns, strip off and plunge into crystal rock pools when the heat gets too much. We stop to swing on low-hanging vines, howling like Tarzan and praying for them to hold. We trek past trees with trunks like cathedral columns, their branches reaching in supplication to the heights of epic rocky gorges.

  We slap at mosquitoes, and pick hopeful leeches off our boots at ten-minute intervals (the barefoot Papuans slice them off their feet with machetes). We are given sweet potatoes by women who pass us on tiny jungle paths, bowing as they walk under the weight of packed string bags. Great grey and green peaks, sheathed in mist, reveal themselves to us through breaks in the forest cover – the spine of New Guinea, rolling on towards an unseen sea. Crickets, cicadas, frogs and an orchestra of birds sing us to our destination.

  We stop overnight in a tiny clutch of honay on the banks of a river guttering through a wide green gorge, and the next day are escorted to our destination by men from the settlement, their bows and arrows and spears on their shoulders. They keep our spirits up with home-grown tobacco leaves, sweet potatoes – erom, as they are known to the highlanders – and boiled water. When we reach breaks in the forest cover, the men line up and sing to the mountains, the trees and the spirits that inhabit them. Their ancient chorus of celebration and worship merges with the mountain winds. Galile looks at Steve and I, smiling wildly in the highland air.

  ‘This,’ he says, ‘is what we fight for!’

  We reach Galile’s village late in the day. He has warned us that we will be greeted with a welcoming ceremony – and we are. Afterwards, the pig roasting in the earth oven, Galile and I stand in the centre of a clutch of honay and watch the last wisps of twilight being drawn into the dark forests, gazing in awe at a rainbow halo around a great, full moon. The sky is pinpricked with stars from horizon to horizon. I have never seen anything like it.

  Eventually, the pig comes. Sitting in a Galile’s father’s honay, steaming meat laid out on banana leaves on the floor, Galile and I are eating and talking. Galile is in thoughtful mood as he gnaws on a pig bone. The light of a single candle is patchworking the four people in the honay with us. I am having trouble with the more unsavoury bits of my pig, but Galile has no such qualms.

  ‘I want to know, Paul,’ he says, slurping the marrow out of a thigh bone, ‘what you think about this. Our culture, I think, is special, and I think we must fight for it. You think so? I think it very different to other cultures but I have not been out of Papua. I think we must keep this culture.’

  ‘I think you should, too.’

  ‘Papuan culture very different to English culture?’ he asks.

  ‘Well, yes, you could say that. You know, Galile, I think the important thing is for you all to get a real picture of what the West is like. This stuff you see on the films – we don’t really live like that. You have to get both sides of the story before you decide how you want to run your country.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I mean that you have to know what it will cost you. Everything has a price. You could gain many things if you wanted to try to live like us, but you’d lose a lot of what you have. You can’t do both. Listen, just one example: there are about seven million people unemployed in America.’

  ‘Pheeew!’ His eyes widen.

  ‘And something like two million without homes.’

  ‘Without homes? What you mean without homes? Where do they sleep?’

  ‘They sleep on the streets. And they eat rubbish, from bins.’

  Galile is speechless. He has lost all interest in the rest of the pig; an indication of the seriousness of the subject.

  ‘But I think everyone in America and England is rich!’ he says. ‘Everyone has cars, jobs, big houses, much money . . .’

  ‘Well, they don’t. And listen – something else: no land. I can’t even afford to buy a house where I live.’

  ‘But my family have three houses.’

  ‘If I wanted to buy a house the size of yours in England, guess how much it would cost me.’

  ‘How much?’

  I wish I had a calculator. ‘Maybe about three billion rupiah.’

  Galile nearly faints into the fire. A toothless, topless old man sitting across from us grins through the flames and waves his rolled tobacco leaves at us to indicate that he hasn’t got a clue what we’re talking about but he’s enjoying listening to it anyway.

  ‘Paul,’ says Galile, very seriously, ‘I want to know why you live like this.’

  ‘That’s just the way it is. We have plenty of things you don’t have, which a lot of people in Papua probably want. But some of the things we have you’re lucky not to have. If you want to live like us, you’ll have to have some of them, and things will change a lot. It’s a kind of cost–benefit thing, I suppose.’

  ‘What else you have?’ he asks, sounding as if he doesn’t want to know.

  So I tell him about old people’s homes and rehab clinics, Prozac and cardboard cities, motorways and climate change, genetic engineering and landfill sites. He looks as if I’m having him on. I’m beginning to feel cruel. But I have to tell him one last thing.

  ‘Do you want to know something else?’

  Galile steels himself.

  ‘Our pigs live in factories.’

  ‘Factories?’ This is the killer blow. Had Galile been sitting on a chair, and not on the grass-strewn floor, he would, at this point, have fallen off it.

  ‘Why?’ he pleads.

  ‘Because it makes economic sense. It makes them cheaper to buy. So do the chickens and the ducks.’

  There is a tingling silence, broken only by the contended slurping of the village dogs gnawing on bones outside.

  ‘Now my head is spinning,’ says Galile, slowly. ‘They never tell us any of this.’ He looks at the dejected remains of the pig, but his mind is elsewhere.

  ‘Right,’ he says.

  In my six weeks in West Papua I met a lot of people like Galile: wide-eyed, open, ill-informed about the modern world and, despite having every reason to be otherwise, instinctively trustful of strangers. The Papuans are a strangely beautiful people: they will take you under their wing with little o
r no introduction; invite you into their house, sit with you silently, smiling at the world and doing nothing in particular. Their conception of time, work, purpose, life and society is so different from that of the modern world that it’s sometimes difficult to cope with. Naïveté, or perhaps innocence, is part of what makes them who they are. But innocence should not be confused with ineffectiveness. For what the Papuans lack in guile, they make up for in determination. And until they are free, they will never give up. This is the other national trait that I saw everywhere I went: a quiet, fierce obsession with ‘getting free’. Ask a Papuan when they will be free and they won’t be able to answer: ask them if they’ll be free and the answer never varies. And this, despite the OPM’s stone-age weapons, despite the Indonesians and their brutal repression, despite the world’s ignorance of this most forgotten of struggles, is what gives me hope. ‘Papua is the next East Timor,’ Amunggur told me several times. I think he might be right; I think that the Papuans will be free, and I think that when they are they will want more than their own nation-state made over in the world’s image. They will want their own, Papuan, future, built on their own values, rejecting much of the pain that globalisation has already brought them, following their own path, defining their own ‘development’. They will want the Papua that all of them keep alive every day inside their heads and hearts. Their time will come.

  PART 2

  many yeses

  ‘The storm is here. From the clash of these two winds a storm will be born. Its time has arrived. Now the wind from above rules, but the wind from below is coming . . . When the storm calms, when rain and fire again leave the country in peace, the world will no longer be the world, but something better.’

  SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS, 1994

  6

  the end of the beginning

  ‘I know what they’re against but I have no sense of what they’re for.’

  TREVOR MANUEL, SOUTH AFRICAN FINANCE MINISTER, CONFUSED BY THE MOVEMENT, 2000

  ‘Bad capitalist! No martini!’

  BANNER, WORLD SOCIAL FORUM, 2002

  It’s too much. I can’t decide, and I can’t take it any more. I can hardly move, in any direction, and I need to sit down. The high entrance chamber of the university building is rippling with thousands of souls from hundreds of countries; a vast, heaving, multicultural, multicoloured fire hazard, and all going somewhere. All except me. I had been planning to go to a conference, in one of the large lecture halls, on ‘financial capital control’. It doesn’t sound thrilling, but it does sound important. At the same time, though, in another hall, is another conference, on transnational corporations, which sounds good too. And another, somewhere else, on international trade. Then there are the seminars. A group of landless farmers are holding a session on ‘food sovereignty and trade’ at the same time as several groups of campaigners are holding one on ‘ending global apartheid: dismantling the World Bank and the IMF’. There’s one on biodiversity, another on participatory budgeting and another on activist tactics.

  All this, of course, is before I even consider the workshops – hundreds of them, all at the same time, often miles apart. There are at least seven I want to go to this morning: one on public services, another on education, one on ‘new social movements’, another on ‘culture and globalisation’, one on sustainable agriculture, another on radical democracy, one on abolishing the WTO . . .

  It takes me a good five minutes to stagger through the throng and heave myself into the sunshine outside the building. I weave my way past a puppet show and an Amazonian Indian handing out leaflets, negotiate myself a cup of coffee with my three words of Portuguese and slump down on the grass, overwhelmed. It’s nine in the morning and I already want to go to bed. But there’s no time for that. Like the 60,000 other people who surround me, I’m here to change the world, and I’ve only got a week to do it.

  There comes a time in every activist’s life when he or she has to answer a question. After the elation and emotion has died down and the tear-gas wafted away; after arguments have been repeated a dozen times over, and campaigns have been kicked off against the aspects of globalisation that they object to – from the erosion of democracy to over-consumption, from environmental destruction to privatisation, from corporate power to colonialist development models – there comes a point when the question becomes unavoidable. Fine, it runs, I know what you’re against, but what are you for?

  Put that way, the question is hard to answer, because put that way it assumes the existence of precisely what so many activists are so keen to stave off – one way, one plan, one manifesto, one Big Idea. Nevertheless, it’s an important question. It’s important because, unless activists can begin to answer it, they’re going to have a lot of trouble explaining to the rest of the world what they’re up to and what they’re after – and if they can’t explain it to others, chances are they probably don’t know themselves.

  Critics of the movement have, for some time now, assumed that it is incapable of answering this question. It is incapable because its ranks consist of a grim alliance of lank-haired soap dodgers, ill-informed if well-intentioned liberals, malicious lefty ideologues, protectionist reactionaries and fearful Luddites, all of them based in the West and all of them with too much time on their hands. They don’t know what they’re for, because they’re not for anything; they’re just against anything that scares them, even if they’re not sure why. In his recent globalisers’ manifesto Open World, former WTO employee Philippe Legrain exemplifies this line of ‘thinking’, railing at ‘college kids who have rarely ventured beyond their middle-class suburbs’ talking ‘arrant nonsense’ about a global economy they don’t understand and have no alternatives to.1 ‘The protest coalition,’ declares The Economist, singing from the same hymn sheet, ‘can hang together only if it continues to avoid thinking about what it might be in favour of.’2 This song is sung so often in the Church of Global Capitalism that the choirboys are beginning to lose their voices.

  I hope that Part 1 of this book has helped torpedo one of the most widespread myths about this movement – the suggestion that, as the former Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, Stanley Fischer, puts it, ‘The critics of globalisation come mostly from the rich countries.’3 With any luck, Part 2 will help shoot down this second piece of misinformation – one which is extremely helpful to those beneficiaries of the status quo who propagate it so widely. The myth that the movement has no answers, no alternatives – nowhere to go from here.

  As I’m rapidly finding out, the truth is, if anything, at the other extreme. It is January 2002 and I have come, with those 60,000 other people, to the Atlantic city of Porto Alegre, the Gaucho capital of southern Brazil. It is the second World Social Forum, and for six days all of us here will be dedicating ourselves to answering that all-important question: what are we for?

  Just two days in, though, exhausted, sipping my coffee to keep myself going, the mêlée of activity that is the World Social Forum is assaulting my senses. The whole event is as exciting as it is overwhelming – and occasionally frustrating – and I am beginning to think, treasonably, that far from not having any alternatives, this movement has too many of them.

  All around me, people, organisations, ideas and realities are rubbing shoulders on a grand scale. US unions mingle with African fisherfolk, Japanese economists, Brazilian artists, Ecuadorian landless people, Israeli peace campaigners, Nicaraguan intellectuals, French debt campaigners, European politicians. From 8 A.M. until late every evening meeting halls, 3,000-seat lecture theatres, tent cities, stages, classrooms, gyms and churches all over the city are filled with thinkers, rebels, dissidents and dreamers. A 155-page programme, the size of a thick tabloid newspaper, lists everything that is going on – you can hardly get through it in the week available. The ideas, the theories, the proposals and the programmes are coming thick and fast: too fast to keep up with, and too thick to get my head around. It’s tough just keeping up.

  The World Social Forum is still young a
nd still bold, and is unlike any other international event around. It was conceived in the late 1990s, when a group of Brazilian activists decided that the movement they could see rising around them needed somewhere it could come together and hammer out its own agenda. With the support of others in France, a coalition of Brazilian unions, debt campaigners, peace activists, economists and landless farmers got together to make it happen. The government of Porto Alegre, run for a decade by the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), agreed to host the gathering, and in January 2001, the World Social Forum was born. The organisers expected about 2,000 people; 12,000 came.

  There was a symbolic reason both for the gathering’s name and its dates. It was, and is, held at the same time as the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF, a private corporation set up in 1971 to bring the world’s power elite together, makes the G8 look like a model of openness. Funded and run by 1,000 of the world’s biggest corporations (to qualify for this honour, a company must have an annual turnover of at least a million dollars, and pay a membership fee of around $15,000) attendance is by exclusive invitation only. Its winning combination of corporate big cheeses, leading politicians, ‘thinkers’, important media players and a handpicked, well-behaved and tiny clutch of ‘civil society representatives’ spend a week in the stunning surroundings of the Swiss Alps, taking full advantage of what the WEF calls ‘unique networking opportunities with other world leaders’.4

  ‘Men of the same trade,’ observed economist Adam Smith over 200 years ago, with timeless accuracy, ‘seldom meet together even for merriment or diversion but their conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.’5 He could have been describing the World Economic Forum. For three decades now, those ‘unique networking opportunities’ have made Davos one of the most influential control centres of the neoliberal project.