Who should be in the dock?

The International Peoples' Forum in Batam (Indonesia) was bafflingly flooded by police this afternoon. I find it mind-blowing that people who are struggling to achieve economic justice for the world's poor are treated as criminals, whilst the Singaporean goverment - whose own police force has spent most of the day surrounding a tiny group of demonstrators who dared to appear in a group of more than five people, wearing t-shirts saying 'Democracy Now!' - has just been rated by the World Bank in the top ten of its 'good governance' listings.


The police here mostly hung around the entrance, but several did spend a long while copying the programme of events from a wall-chart into their notebooks. If only they had come into the Asian Peoples' Debt Tribunal, they would have heard a searing indictment of the policies of the World Bank and IMF, and clear calls for these institutions to be brought to justice. After the prosecutors and witnesses had had their say (the defence inexplicably failed to show up) the judges withdrew for consultation, returning to deliver a (hugely popular) guilty verdict. The sentence included not only the policy changes for which we all advocate (debt cancellation, end to imposition of policies through conditions, etc), but also the rather more imaginative (and again hugely popular) instruction that the President of the World Bank and Managing Director of the IMF spend a year living amongst the world's poor, without the benefit of their Bank and Fund salaries.

It seems a timely suggestion for the World Bank President: he opened his statement at the "town hall" meeting with civil society on Friday by saying that when you live safely in five-star accommodation, it's easy to forget that billions of people live in poverty. Not the right audience for that admission, Paul.