Anti-globalisation group risks being infiltrated by extremists

Date: 27/09/01

By Simon Coss

ONE of the most high-profile groups trying to promote responsible and peaceful protests against the current world trading system has left itself wide open to malicious infiltration, European Voice has discovered.

The Association pour une Taxation des Transactions Financières pour l'Aide aux Citoyens - better known by its acronym Attac - was out in force in Liège last weekend.

The group failed to persuade EU finance ministers meeting for informal talks in the Belgian city to adopt the controversial 'Tobin tax' on currency transactions.

Attac believes the tax could help iron out economic imbalances between the world's richest and poorest states and argues that following the terrorist attacks in the US such measures are needed more urgently than ever.

"Terrorism takes root in people's despair and suffering, which it exploits for its own ends," the group said in a statement issued the day before the Liège talks. But the finance ministers said they saw no sense in supporting the Tobin tax unless it could be applied worldwide, which they believe is still impossible, even in the wake of the US tragedy.

As a token gesture they asked the European Commission to prepare a detailed feasibility study on the levy for mid-November. But as the EU executive has done little recently to hide its scepticism for the Tobin plan, few analysts are expecting the report to contain any good news for the anti-world trade organisation.

Attac was set up in France in 1998 by a group of intellectuals headed by Ignacio Ramonet, director of publication for the respected newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, and the group now exists in over 30 countries.

But according to a spokesman at the organisation's French headquarters in Paris, there are no clear rules for setting up an Attac office and the organisation has no formal worldwide coordination.

"Every Attac is autonomous and there is no central management," said Christophe Ventura, who is in charge of international questions for Attac France.

"Groups form around Attac's ideas but adapt to the specific realities of their home countries," he added. While this free-and-easy approach ensures people can set up Attac groups with little difficulty, critics point out that it also poses a number of problems for the organisation.

Firstly, with no clear manifesto, it is difficult to define exactly what Attac stands for. The original French group's aims are clear: it wants to see the Tobin tax introduced and the money raised used to ease Third World poverty. But other groups need not demand exactly the same things and can still call themselves Attac.

Secondly, the lax rules would seem to leave the organisation open to infiltration. Under the present system there appears to be nothing to stop a group of hardline anarchists calling themselves Attac and damaging the group's reputation.

National police forces would also be able to set up their own bogus Attacs with relative ease if - as Ventura alleges was the case with the Italian security services at the recent G8 meeting in Genoa - they wanted to discredit the anti-world-trade movement.

Some analysts argue that when Ramonet and fellow 'high-brows' set up the group in 1998, they simply didn't realise how popular it would become. US academic Susan George, one of Attac France's vice-presidents, seemed tacitly to recognise this in an article that she wrote shortly after the Genoa protests.

"If we can't guarantee peaceful, creative demonstrations, workers and official trade unions won't join us, our base will slip away, the present unity - both trans-sectoral and trans-generational - will slip away," she warned. And Attac was recently the target of embarrassing criticism from the very man whose ideas it is trying to promote.

US economist James Tobin, who invented the eponymous tax back in the 1970s, recently denounced groups like Attac for "kidnapping" his name.

Tobin also said he "did not have the slightest point in common" with the anti-globalisation movement.

Attac's somewhat lame answer to these comments was to argue that the Tobin tax no longer has anything to do with James Tobin.

"It has become an object now and no longer belongs to its creator," Ventura said. "In any case, it's the media who have linked us to the Tobin tax, we have always been interested in the question of taxing international currency transactions," he added sniffily.

As nearly all of the group's literature refers explicitly to Tobin, many analysts have found this final criticism a bit rich.

One of the most high-profile groups trying to promote responsible and peaceful protests against the current world trading system has left itself wide open to malicious infiltration.