APEC Summit without ‘Aloha’
The Hawaiian culture places great emphasis on the word “Aloha,” which means love, peace, compassion, and charity. Hawaiians greet and bid farewell to their guests with Aloha. Unfortunately, there was no Aloha at this year’s APEC Summit (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) in Honolulu, Hawaii. Sadly, a local Hawaiian youth was killed on the first day of the summit after scuffling with a U.S. federal agent who was hired as a security guard for the multi-day event. This caused bewilderment and a wave of protes
ts from locals.
Honolulu, normally a peaceful vacation town, was not very friendly during the week of the summit and seemed to escalate into chaos. Roads were closed for world leaders and their entourages, causing massive traffic jams. According to witnesses, just the Chinese delegation alone, arrived with 1,000 members and that was only one of the 21 delegations in attendance. Thousands of armed soldiers and federal agents patrolled the perimeter of the tourist part of Honolulu-Waikiki, where the summit took place. Displaying weapons to cause fear in peaceful people is, unfortunately, a common practice in many countries. The meeting was held on Hawaii, far from the US mainland, where large-scale protests were unlikely. Yet, authorities and the APEC planning committee apparently decided to take special measures in light of recent Occupy Movement Protests in most large US cities. To give you a sense of how much security was there, the US government spent $44 million to prepare for the summit, including $18 million for police and $10 million for “contingency expenses” such as 700 thousand units of non-lethal weapons, including 25 thousand pepper sprays, and even 3 thousand tasers, all purchased by American taxpayers.
The APEC Summit unites 21 Asia-Pacific countries to convene on regional trade and liberalization of investments, to increase economic growth and prosperity in the region and to strengthen the Asia-Pacific community. To give you a sense of the scope, approximately 40% of the world’s population inhabits the member countries, and approximately 54% of world GDP and 44% of world trade is located in Asia-Pacific. Attendees at the annual APEC meetings include heads of states, cabinet ministers, and representatives of large and medium-sized businesses along with the officials from the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
One of the main goals of the summit in Honolulu was to develop a new free trade agreement – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – to include the US, Australia, Malaysia, Peru, Japan, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore. The treaty will reduce all trade tariffs to zero among member countries by the year 2015. This mutual free trade agreement includes provisions for rule of origin, trade in commodities, trade in services, trade remedies, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical barriers to trade, intellectual property, government procurement and competition policy. The main criticism of this agreement is that the treaty threatens to transform the Asia-Pacific region into a source of raw materials for export to developed countries like the US, while allowing markets to be absorbed by corporations and monopolies, destroying local economies, eliminating local regulations, raising unemployment, and allowing a massive outflow of capital to the most developed countries. Thankfully, Russia is not a party to this agreement. Russia does, however, expect to receive membership in the World Trade Organization this coming December.
Declaration
At the same time as state and corporate leaders negotiated their free trade deals, civil society activists gathered at the Moana Nui (Great Pacific Ocean) conference in protest of the APEC Summit. Organized by a coalition of non-governmental organizations such as International Forum on Globalization (IFG) and Pua Mohala I Ka Po, scientists, activists, analysts, lawyers, and union organizers, Moana Nui hosted representatives from Guam, Palau, Tongi, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Rapanui, Samoa, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, South Korea, Russia, and the USA. As an alternative to APEC, Moana Nui attracted activists from the Asia-Pacific region to strategize and to bring attention to the region’s problems. This is why I was in Hawaii.
Unlike the APEC meetings, which are usually closed to the public, the Moana Nui conference was open to everyone. All three days of the conference drew between 500 and 600 people, including official participants and local residents and visitors. The conference also drew attention due to a great selection of speakers. One of the speakers was Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the former Chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Another, Walden Bello, is a well-known activist from the Philippines. A full list of participants is available here:http://ifg.org/programs/apec.html.
This conference lasted three days, and all three were rich and informative. On the fourth day conference participants went out in the streets of Honolulu to protest against APEC. At the conference, participants discussed various issues, including the rights of indigenous peoples and the implementation of the resolutions of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the influence of globalization on island peoples, militarism and construction of military bases, the current state of the campaign against militarism and colonialism on Guam, Okinawa-Japan, Jeju Island – South Korea, and Hawaii, climate change and environmental destruction, the battle for Pacific region resources, geopolitical conflicts between Asia-Pacific countries for control of the region, and free trade agreements and their negative consequences.
On one of the days, Hawaii’s Governor Abercrombi and his wife invited Moana Nui speakers to introduce themselves and discuss their most pressing problems. In his opening speech, the governor acknowledged that at the same time that Occupy Wall Street activists were met with pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets and clubs, world leaders in Honolulu were met with wine and cheese. Next year, the APEC forum will take place in Vladivostok, Russia which will most likely be converted into a “military zone” similar to the high levels of security in Honolulu this year. Already one year in advance of APEC, Governor of Primorye region in Russia Sergey Darkin is asking residents to abandon the city so as not to disturb summit participants. It is highly doubtful that the summit in Russia will cost less than one million rubles, with the cost – this time – paid for by Russian taxpayers, who will not likely to be served with wine and cheese.
###
