A dialogue at the Prague Castle

By C. Rammanohar Reddy

PRAGUE, SEPT. 23. The troubled 2000 annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were today honoured by an audience in the world's largest ancient castle when the Czech President, Mr. Vaclav Havel, hosted an exchange of views between the two financial institutions and their critics at the 800-year-old Prague Castle.

``Praga - Dialog Locus,'' loosely translated as ``Prague - A Place of Dialogue'' was planned on the personal initiative of the playwright, Mr. Havel, who was unhappy with all the attention being given to the security preparations for the conference; yet the main organisers of the street protests boycotted the dialogue since their nominees for the meeting had earlier been denied entry into the Czech Republic.

The discussion among an international panel of seven speakers (including somewhat curiously the currency trader-cum- philanthropist Mr. George Soros) was moderated by Ms. Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, in the presence of a few hundred members of Czech and international civil society, officials of the IMF, World Bank and the Czech Government, quite expectedly saw views ranging from calls to shut down the Bretton Wood twins to commitments by the heads of the two besieged institutions to continue working for the advancement of the welfare of the world's poor.

The most vociferous criticism came from Ms. Katerina Liskova, representing a Czech NGO, who said that the world would be a better place if the IMF and the World Bank did not exist while Mr. Walden Bello, from Bangkok's Focus on Global South, was less fiery than in a speech he gave at an NGO forum yesterday preferring to speak today instead of multilateral lending to corrupt developing country governments.

The middle ground was occupied by Mr. Trevor Manuel, South Africa's Finance Minister, who said that while the two institutions had much to account for, their closure would be disastrous for Africa since only two countries in that continent had access to global private capital with rest dependent on multilateral funding.

When it came to the turn of Ms. Ann Pettifor, head of Jubilee 2000 the coalition of NGOs campaigning for a write-off of debts of the world's poorest countries, she theatrically pointed to an empty chair and said that was for an absent Minister from the Group of Seven industrial nations since it was the G-7 and not the Bretton Wood twins which was standing in the way of debt forgiveness.

The 90-minute debate will have done little to defuse the tension in the city ahead of the anti-globalisation protests planned for next Tuesday.

But the participants in the dialogue must have at least left with the satisfaction of having been present in the grand Ball Game House of the castle followed by lunch on the lawns of the Palace gardens which some said rivalled the grandeur of the Versailles outside Paris.

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Section  : International
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