AMY GOODMAN: And you are listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, here with my co-host, Juan González, as we continue with our series of specials on globalization, the Battle in Seattle. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Good day, Amy, and to all of our listeners. And this amazing event has happened, this Battle in Seattle, which turned out to be a virtually complete people’s victory for a change, as the WTO collapsed under the weight of its contradictions over the weekend.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s right. After seven days and nights of demonstrations by tens of thousands of protesters, a rebellion by developing nations and a deadlock among the world’s largest trading powers, the round of trade negotiations at the World Trade Organization in Seattle collapsed, ending without consensus on many — on any of the main issues. In fact, the Millennium Round of negotiations will not be launched at this point. By the time the U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky ended the talks late Friday night, she faced 135 weary trade ministers who had been unable to agree on anything, a city whose mayor had one last message for the WTO: If you want to do Seattle a favor, please get out of town.

Well, unions, farmers, environmentalists, students, professionals and many others took to the streets of Seattle by the tens of thousands last week to protest what they say is the world’s most secretive and powerful body. On Tuesday, they forced the WTO to cancel its opening ceremony and prevented the vast majority of the 3,000 delegates from entering for the first day of meetings. From that day on, as protests continued across the city, the conference barely limped ahead.

The delegates were unable to agree on issues such as farm subsidies, which the U.S. wants eliminated, as well as the use of bioengineering and a moratorium on tariffs on electronic commerce, among many other trade issues. Delegates from developing countries also publicly complained that the more economically powerful nations excluded them from important rounds of talks.

There were over 600 arrests of demonstrators last week as Seattle police cracked down on the protests with tear gas, with rubber bullets, with concussion grenades and other tactics that the city has now promised to investigate for incidents of brutality. Alongside with the protesters, residents of one area of Seattle, the Capitol Hill neighborhood, were also tear-gassed in their homes. And a Seattle councilmember said city police officers yanked him from his car as he was driving to a WTO event and started to handcuff him despite the fact that he showed them his identification. The councilmember, Richard McIver, is African American, and he accused the officers of racism.

There has been hundreds of stories throughout the week of people who talk about what happened to them in this week, but the one resounding cry from the streets at this point is “We won.” That is what people are saying, that they managed to force the Seattle talks to end in failure.

We’re joined by two people right now: Rob Weissman, who is editor of the Multinational Monitor. He was in Seattle and was at the U.S. Trade Representative Barshefsky’s closing press conference. And we’re also joined by Denis Moynihan of the Direct Action Network, which is a coalition of individuals and groups that were involved in direct action throughout the week, to tell us about the latest on the protesters inside and outside Seattle’s jails.

Well, let’s begin with Rob Weissman, Rob, can you tell us exactly what did happen by the end?

ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, as you had mentioned, there were a series of intractable conflicts that led to the demise of the talks. There were a handful of areas that the main negotiators weren’t able to come to agreement on. One was a dispute between the United States and Europe over agriculture subsidies. A second was a mass revolt by developing countries, especially from Africa and the Caribbean, over their exclusion from any of the negotiations, their actual formal exclusion. A third point was many developing countries’ resistance to the U.S. effort to include labor environmental standards, even in a totally haphazard and mostly irrelevant way. And I think a final issue was some of the developing countries’ concerns about the substance of what the industrialized countries are trying to impose upon them. In each of those areas, I think the demonstrators can take great credit for heightening the contradictions and bringing about a collapse of what was supposed to launch a new millennial negotiating round.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Rob, in discussions with some of the NGOs who attended the events over the week, they indicated to us that the protests outside helped to embolden a lot of the Third World ministers, who had basically given up the possibility of being able to derail or change the agenda of the industrialized countries. I read somewhere that there was even a threat toward the end of a walkout by many of the Caribbean delegates to the talks. Did you hear anything about that or about any of this new assertion by some of the Third World delegates of basically a newfound optimism about being able to reform or change what was going on at the WTO?

ROBERT WEISSMAN: Yeah, that did happen. On Thursday, about 75 countries announced they were not going to go along with the declaration that was going to be imposed upon them by [inaudible] countries. And a lot of those countries seemed to pull back from that position by Friday, the final day, but at least the Caribbean countries were still threatening to follow through on that threat. And I don’t think there’s any question that the chaos surrounding the entire event due to the events in the street and the new show of opposition in the leading proponent of a new round of negotiations really fired up the delegates from the Third World, who became increasingly angry at their exclusion over the course of the week, and did, as you say, embolden them to take this kind of step, which is completely unprecedented in WTO negotiations and its predecessor organization, GATT, negotiations.

AMY GOODMAN: It was interesting. On Thursday, I was inside the convention center talking to the World Trade Organization delegates, and one Caribbean and African member after another was getting up and saying, “We are being excluded.” We played on Friday the comment of the representative from Zimbabwe, who said, “There’s an old African saying: You can’t have your hair cut in your absence, and Africa is having its hair cut in its absence.” But they were also talking about the green room, and maybe you can explain what that is, Rob Weissman, and the fact that in the past there’s been one green room, and a great deal of complaint about that, where the exclusive decisions get made. And now they’ve expanded it to four or five green rooms, or even six, but still the same delegates are kept out.

ROBERT WEISSMAN: Right. Well, the green room, in the WTO negotiating terminology, refers to a self-appointed group of nations that decide the actual topic and final outcome of negotiations, presented as a fait accompli to the rest of the countries who were excluded from the process. And that has characterized GATT and then WTO negotiations for all time. And there had been increasing resistance to that, and complaints and grumbling about that, from developing nations. At this ministerial, Charlene Barshefsky, the U.S. trade representative, who headed the negotiations over the entire Seattle time, said that things would be done differently at this negotiation, that there would be — that they would break off by issues, not by countries, and that any country that wanted to come could go to the negotiations over four or five sets of negotiations. And they, in fact, seemed to do that, although, of course, there were secret meetings going on at the same time. That effort failed. And then they resorted to the old way of doing things, according to their own account, that they created — the U.S. led a green room negotiation with about 20 countries, again, handpicked by themselves, or by the United States, more likely, so that there was no democratic process of representation for which small countries, say, would be included in the green room. Even in the green room, they were unable to come to any kind of agreement. But the fact of the green room process taking place, again, just maddened the developing countries, who felt completely out of control over what was going on, and led them to intensify their resistance.

AMY GOODMAN: Rob Weisman is with the Multinational Monitor. We’re also joined by Denis Moynihan of Direct Action Network. As that was going on inside the convention center, Denis, can you tell us about what happened at the county jail, where, as we were leaving — and we should say we’re back in New York right now — there were still hundreds of people inside the jail. Total, what, more than 600 arrests?

DENIS MOYNIHAN: Well, good morning. Yes, the situation, that has become, with each passing day, really more horrific, is that there were a number — there were, sure, 600 arrests. We don’t know if it was 600 or 800. We were — we had organized a nonviolent civil disobedience, but we had not anticipated the police riot of the magnitude that occurred. And so, the civility of the operation was irrelevant, and our people participating in the disobedience, their support was also arrested. We had — we lost all control of our documentary evidence of the arrests. So, essentially, we’ve had people — we don’t know where they are. We don’t know — not everyone was processed. Some people were just snatched off the street, roughed up, brutalized and intimidated for 18 hours, then dumped into what we call Mayor Schell’s no-protest zone, or the Constitution-free zone, downtown, where there was essentially a — well known that you could be beaten or arrested arbitrarily at any time of the day, merely for walking down the street if you look like, quote, “a protester.” And as it turns out, even many Seattle citizens were just snatched off the street, as well.

Inside the three detention centers — and there’s a fourth detention center that we heard about, that we actually haven’t — we haven’t been able to confirm if people were actually held there. But the three that we have widespread testimonial about shows that there was a systematic use of brutality and terror to try to break the solidarity of these people. As, well, many people know, there were only 12 arrests or 20 arrests on Tuesday, out of the 50,000 to 80,000 people who turned out in the streets and engaged in a beautiful festival of resistance, that there was a feeling of community, and it was a beautiful thing. The police were not interested in arresting people. They were interested in using terror and sheer force to disperse the crowd. The most incredible, like, courageous people who experienced all of the pepper spray, beatings and, into the night, concussion grenades, and those details that are well documented — 

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds.

DENIS MOYNIHAN: OK, OK, I’m sorry. I want to say, there have been hundreds of accounts of police brutality, including hog-tying and having their clothes ripped off, denial of access to insulin. Many people — 

AMY GOODMAN: And how many people are still in jail?

DENIS MOYNIHAN: There are still people in jail. We’re worried about them. And I meant to say we didn’t know that — we can’t tell for sure how many people are in jail, because we don’t have records. And nor do they. It’s really frightening. And finally, one of the local papers has used the term “police brutality.” There’s going to be a City Council meeting on Wednesday where people can air their experiences. And this is a really horrible situation here.

AMY GOODMAN: And we will certainly continue to follow the developments of the people who — dozens, who remain in jail, the hundreds who have been released, but the stories that they have to tell, as well as the developments of the WTO talks and whether or not the Millennium Round will ever get launched.

But next up, after we come back from our break, we’re going to hear a debate that did take place, amazingly enough, on Tuesday night, when people were being tear-gassed in the streets, at Seattle’s Town Hall between Ralph Nader and Vandana Shiva, Indian anti-globalization activist, as well as a representative of the Clinton administration. Rob Weissman of the Multinational Monitor and Denis Moynihan of the Direct Action Network, thank you for giving us this update. You are listening to Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.