The Point

Sunday, January 28, 2007

What gets said

While doing some soul-searching about this business of journalism tonight, I came across two interesting things - interesting not so much in themselves, though they're both worth considering, but in their confluence. First, some background.

The BBC has been heavily covering the World Economic Forum in Davos and all of the gilted handshakes going around there since it started earlier this month. Today there was a triumphant headline about Tony Blair's optimism that Germany's upcoming G8 presidency will mean good prospects for a much broader international agreement on post-Kyoto Accord action on anthropogenic climate change. In the article, he says, 'I believe we are potentially on the verge of a breakthrough.'

Potentially. On the verge. He believes.

What struck me is that this conference continues to monopolise the mainstream media, even as a massive counter-gathering went on in Nairobi with some 60 000 attendees. Every year, while presidents and finance ministers shake hands in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, an alternative conference is held in the South: the World Social Forum. It's meant to be a venue for critical discussion of key issues of global inequality, it's closely associated with the anti-globalisation movement, and there are a massive number of attendees going to this thing presenting genuinely well-thought out critiques of the global hegemonies being agreed on up in Davos.

Surprisingly, unsurprisingly, the BBC has given almost no coverage whatsoever to the World Social Forum except a brief, almost sneering story about local kids taking food from the venues. A lot of food in a city where thousands can't afford to feed their families, and some of it was stolen? Shocking!

The interesting thing, though: I did find an article on Christian Today about something Archbishop Desmond Tutu said at the conference about terrorism:
The war on terror will "never" be won "as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate," like dehumanising poverty, disease and ignorance, former Archbishop Desmond Tutu told ecumenical participants at the start of the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi. [...]
Tutu emphasised that the "fundamental law of our being" is that "we are bound to one another". Because of that, "the only way we can make it is together, all of us". Only together can we be free, safe and secure.
And then, five minutes later, I was looking through videos of Robert Fisk on YouTube. He is, you may recall, the author of the 1136-page The Great War for Civilization, and one of the foremost Western journalists in the Middle East. And to my amazement, he said almost the exact same thing. Not a defense of terrorism, nor of violence. Simply the posing of the question: why do people commit these horrific, barbaric attacks?

What responsibility do we have to address those grievances at the heart of the violence?

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posted by Christopher at 2:13 a.m.

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