Premature end to plenary session?

By C. Rammanohar Reddy

PRAGUE, SEPT. 28. The troubled 2000 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank formally ended today in a half-deserted Prague Congress Centre while the three- day plenary session was wrapped up a day earlier with the heads of the IMF and the World Bank and the Chairman of the conference, the South African Finance Minister, Mr. Trevor Manuel, delivering their closing speeches yesterday evening itself.

It is widely believed and the empty halls in the Conference Centre today attested to the interpretation that the fears and concerns of the delegates about the demonstrations persuaded an early conclusion to the plenary session. The official view was that the conference ended only today as bilateral meetings were held this morning as well, followed by a joint press conference addressed by Mr. Horst Kohler, Managing Director, IMF, and Mr. James Wolfensohn, president, World Bank. Mr. Manuel said 47 Ministers and central bankers addressed the conference and no one who wanted to speak was refused a chance to do so. However, the plenary of the IMF-World Bank annual meetings always ends on the last morning of the conference and a spokesperson of the IMF was unable to say when it last concluded a day earlier.

The conclusion is therefore inescapable that the end of the formal conference was advanced by a day because the central bankers, Ministers and delegates to the conference were anxious to leave Prague as early as possible - a victory of sorts for the anti-globalisation protesters though not for the reasons the majority of the demonstrators committed to peaceful direct action would be happy about.

(The Union Finance Minister, Mr. Yashwant Sinha, was scheduled to leave later today while a few others like the Pakistani Finance Minister were still in Prague. They were, however, the exceptions.)

Prague itself is peaceful, though groups of a few hundred young demonstrators marched through the streets of the city last night, demanding that those arrested be released immediately. There was no violence though the city remained deserted with a very large proportion of the citizenry

having left town on the advice of their Government.

Today's closing press meet saw Mr. Kohler and Mr. Wolfensohn proclaiming the meetings a success and saying that their institutions would continue to work towards more rapid growth and faster poverty reduction. Not many, who were present in Prague, would agree with this view. The residents of Prague would have been happy to have done without the dislocation and street violence that the meetings brought to the city. The delegates to the conference would not have been too happy to have been bottled up in the Congress Centre on September 27 and suffering the ignominy of being transported from the venue in a special train on the underground because the roads were not safe. And most of the demonstrators who were on the streets on Tuesday (police now say they numbered 12,000 but looked more like 7-8,000) were unhappy that their voices were drowned by a violent few who were more concerned with throwing stones, Molotov cocktails and breaking window panes in the centre of Prague.

Prague 2000 may have a different kind of lasting impact on future summits and demonstrations. Few cities are likely to come forward to host a conference which earlier might have been a mark of prestige but now only bring with them higher costs of security, losses to local commerce and vandalism. The more serious and peaceful demonstrators, on their part, have begun asking if they should allow their movement to be hijacked by a few violent elements. Ms. Alice Dvorska of the Initiative against Economic Globalisation (INPEG) yesterday rued, ``all the hard work we put in over a year in organising the protests was lost by a few dozen, violent demonstrators.''

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