World's Downtrodden Looking for a Way to Rise Up

By Austin Long-Scott
4/2/09
(*Editor's Note: Journalist Austin Long-Scott, the husband of WEAP Executive Director Ethel Long-Scott, attended the conference to chronicle it for WEAP.)

RAMBOUILLET, France – In the last week of March, as the global recession tightened its grip on a fearful middle class, some organizers working in the world’s most voiceless and invisible populations gathered outside of Paris to discuss how to strengthen the voices of billions of marginalized people on the world stage.

Among the concerns of the nearly 40 participants was that bad times in the world economy could literally squeeze the life out of many of the people they have been working to support.  As organizers, they represented dozens of countries from every major continent.  Most came from grassroots “self-help” networks that are little known to most people.

The grassroots networks included:  “Shack/Slum Dwellers International,” an international organization of people living in slums and on the streets.  “Women Living Under Muslim Laws,” operating in more than 70 countries.  “The Global Wastepicker Network,” started a year ago after the first World Conference of Waste Pickers.  Streetnet International, working in 30 countries to promote the rights, voice and bargaining power of street vendors.  The “International Alliance of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests,” which fights for the rights of indigenous and tribal people.  The “World Forum of Fish Workers and Fish Harvesters.” and several communities of people living with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and abroad.  There were others as well.

The struggles the participants recounted over three days of workshops in this aristocratic French town of 25,000 would break your heart.  They spoke of people losing access to water – even in the U.S. – because of a worldwide trend toward privatizing and charging for this basic human need.  They spoke of people struggling to live with levels of poverty that shut off access to food, housing, education and health care no matter how wealthy the country.  They discussed how the social stigma of HIV prevents women from getting the medical help needed to cope with rates of infection approaching 50 percent in some areas.  There were discussions of countries passing criminal laws against persons living with HIV.  In Iran, where adultery is a crime against the state, women can be stoned to death even if they are victims of rape.  People are struggling to be heard in countries whose governments increasingly deny basic human rights.  A trend to repression is evident in the U.S. and other countries.  Groups with few monetary resources are struggling to overcome differences in race, class, caste, religion, family status, age, lifecycle, sexuality, politics and life experiences.

The conference “brings together the types of players that are not listened to enough,” said one of the conference organizers.  “We think we have a lot to learn about how you have refused to let others speak for you . . . and that you have a lot to learn from each other.” 

Conference organizers said participants represented four different kinds of grassroots groups:  Ethnic minority and indigenous movements, marginalized urban populations, people living with HIV/AIDS, and grassroots women. The “Women’s Economic Agenda Project” was invited as an organization working with low-income women and their families.  WEAP is also the host for the Calfornia Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC).

In speeches, videos, formal presentations and informal discussion groups in two languages (there was simultaneous translation in French and English), the participants talked about some of the ways these groups, which are often seen as powerless, have been organizing to improve their lives, and learn from each other.  One of the questions under discussion was whether organizing globally would make them stronger.

In a video presentation, Joel Bolnick said his group, Shack/Slumdwellers International, began in the early 1990s with the end of Apartheid in South Africa.  There was no international advocacy agenda at first, he said.  Urban poor people in the “shack settlements” of South Africa linked up “with pavement dwellers of the National Slumdwellers Federation” in Bombay, India, and learned from each other.  Then as more South Africans started moving across their borders, the movement jumped to West Africa and then to South America.

The primary issues at the conference were how to get more of the world’s poorest and most marginalized people to speak up for themselves, instead of having others speak for them, and how to get more effective international support for the changes they need to improve their lives.  Resources are a huge problem, delegates said.  So are stigmas attached to their situations, especially where HIV/AIDS is concerned. 

While the big NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) provide some support, participants said their fear is that NGOs have somewhat different agendas from the interests of the people they claim to represent. “The interests of the urban poor are not the same as the interests of formal institutions,” one participant said.

How to get support from other organizations was described as a fight it out one organization at a time kind of issue.  Pat Horn of Streetnet said her group is making progress in sensitizing trade unions to their issues.  WEAP Executive Director Ethel Long-Scott said her group partners with local colleges to extend the education of students. 

Esther Muiru representing GROOTS (Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood) told the conference that in Kenya, where she is from, the biggest challenge is organizing across tribal lines, but there are also class barriers and language barriers to worry about.  “We sing a lot in our meetings,” she said.  “We keep reminding each other we are different.”  That allows us to work within those differences, she said.”  “We have to work hard on this.  In Africa, it’s almost you are penalized for working together.”

“We live with tensions and suspicion based on different values and ideas,” said Sandra Schilen of New York City, the global facilitator for GROOTS International.  “We don’t give up, but those problems are time intensive and dialogue-intensive.

Margaret Nakato from Uganda spoke of not being taken seriously at first when she worked with fish workers, because most of them are men who are not used to having political discussions with a powerful woman.

“A lot of the reasons we’re dealing with these issues is because capitalism has gone global,” said another participant.  “Also, a lot of the rules come from global institutions.  If you don’t organize globally, you don’t get to the heart of the problem.”

Lurking in the background was the idea that organizing globally might show the need for distributing the world’s resources in different, more visionary way.  There was talk about how the social contract forged in the industrial era was rapidly being destroyed by a combination of the global recession, and the dwindling supply of good jobs resulting from computer-controlled production replacing human labor.

Although it wasn’t formally brought up, the World Health Organization’s latest report calls the distribution of health care between rich and poor countries “dangerously out of balance.”  It notes a 40-year difference in life expectancy between rich and poor, and says personal health care expenses now push 100 million people below the poverty line every year.

The three-day meeting was organized jointly by IRG, the France-based Institute for Research and Debate on Governance, and the Ford Foundation.  Unlike the early April G20 conference in London, which drew President Barack Obama and the heads of countries representing 90 percent of the world’s Gross National Product, the Rambouillet conference was from the perspective of marginalized people.  “Globalization is really a double-edged sword,” said one delegate. “We are all feeling the pinch of economic globalization.”

Among the issues discussed in three days of large and small groups:

    • The importance of finding ways to break the silence, so that people from marginalized groups can not only speak for themselves, but really be heard.
    • The difficulties of building strong support for causes that are very controversial across tribal, language, class, cultural, age and life experience groups.
    • The impact of the global recession on communities of people who were already marginalized by the countries where they are living.
    • The need for women to speak up strongly and take more leadership worldwide in attacking the problems that affect them.
    • The difficulties in getting help from United Nations agencies that are often bureaucratic, very slow-moving and afraid of challenging established governments.
    • The difficulty of getting NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) to let the people they claim to represent speak for themselves, rather than speaking for them.
    • Whether framing issues in terms of human rights can help their causes.
    • The use of people’s truth commissions, modeled on the ones set up by the South African government at the end of Apartheid, but conducted by marginalized groups themselves.  WEAP’s truth commissions on the need for universal single-payer health care were used as the example.
    • The way strong social stigma makes it difficult for people living with HIV/AIDS to speak up, and stereotypes them as “beneficiaries of services, not as experts” on what they need.  In Africa, “what is happening is that countries are coming up with all kinds of criminal law against persons living with HIV, and we are not doing anything about it,” one delegate said.


The Group of Participants at the IRG/Ford Conference in France
Credit: Austin Long-Scott (all photos found in this article)

One workshop focused on the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet – challenges because so many people don’t have access to it, although cell phones are making access easier.  Opportunities because the World Wide Web can create social networks, which make it much easier to connect with people who share the same situations.

Marty Kearns of the USA’s Green Media Toolshed, who led one Internet workshop, said social networking sites are important in building levels of trust in a different way from direct action.  He brought up the mybarackobama Website as an example of using the Internet to put social action tools into the hands of people who are anxious to make a difference where they are, rather than travel to a meeting or a rally.

On the last day there was general praise for the new tools and new perspectives the participants exchanged.  Aisha Shaheed of Women Living Under Muslim Laws said she was struck by “the interconnectedness of all of our struggles.”

Martin Vielajus, the IRG’s co-organizer of the conference, said it had been “three exceptional days,” and told the participants “IRG is committed to continue to help this organization.”

Lisa Jordan, the Ford Foundation’s U.S.-based co-organizer, said the conference taught her that it’s important to “fund people to be the agents of their own social change.”

WEAP Executive Director Ethel Long-Scott compared some of the people fighting today for their own liberation to some of the African Americans who stepped forward and spoke up in the long fight to end slavery and American segregation.  She singled out the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who was born into slavery and treated like a beast of burden until one of her children was sold into slavery.  Then she started fighting  back.  “What does it take,” Long-Scott asked, “for people to wake up to the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way?”

Waheedah Shabazz of the Positive Women’s Network, based in the U.S., delivered an emotional closing statement.

“I arrived with my head held high yet all the same...deep down ....feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders,” she said.  “What will it take to end AIDS? Must I work my entire life to that end?  Does the US Positive Women’s Network have a role to play outside of the United States?   What I got in touch with over these past few days . . . was  that if I were to hold my head just a little higher...that I would be able to see beyond the horizon and into trans global spaces  where there lies a  reservoir of resources through alliances based on the values of fundamental human rights.  A space where we all can exercise our rights and our duties as global citizens, that goes beyond all of our own borders.  Operating in these Trans global spaces may also have the potential of increasing our democratic spaces at home.”