Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-10-Speech-1-066"
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"en.20030210.7.1-066"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to start by congratulating the European Parliament on having scheduled this debate on the differing, if not outright antagonistic positions of the Davos Economic Forum and the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre. I have taken part in both forums and know what I am talking about – in Davos, around twenty years ago, when I was Prime Minister of Portugal and had to negotiate hard for a loan from the International Monetary Fund. In Porto Alegre, I have taken part for the two last years as a Member of the European Parliament.
The last Social Forum, which took place last January, was particularly significant, as has already been said, for the number of participants, around 100 000, who had come from all over the world, it was significant for the around 1 500 NGOs and other civic associations that were present and, above all, for the quality of the speeches. Incidentally, it was not only the World Social Forum that took place in Porto Alegre: there were also other forums such as the World Forum of Judges, the Local Authorities Forum, the World Education Forum, the World Independent Media Forum, and the World Parliamentary Forum.
This World Forum in Porto Alegre gave rise to a new sociological phenomenon: global citizenship, which means people getting together as part of a network, freely and regardless of their political parties or religious or secular affiliations and fighting, in a peaceful and orderly way, for their rights and for what they consider to be fair. This is an important civic and participatory form of activism, which will continue on every continent with the meeting of various regional forums, since the next World Social Forum will be held in India.
This year, the Porto Alegre World Forum was attended by a unique personality, the recently elected President of the Republic of Brazil, Luís Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva. In his extremely coherent speech to a crowd of hundreds of thousands of listeners, he explained to the Forum why he had accepted an invitation to attend, following the Porto Alegre Forum, the Davos Economic Forum, which some of his supporters found hard to understand. It was not so hard to understand, however: Lula explained to the audience of politicians, businessmen and experts gathered at Davos, and I quote ‘that his war was different; it was the fight against hunger and poverty, for access to better education, against diseases and epidemics such as AIDS, not the war against Iraq or to call for higher rates of growth at the expense of unemployment and of greater poverty’. Curiously and paradoxically, his speech, which was the same at both forums, was characterised by sincerity and truthfulness, and perhaps this is why it was applauded so loudly in Davos, considerably more than Colin Powell when he defended the inevitability of the war against Iraq. Even when they are defending interests, people also have a conscience and this is what drives the world forwards, even in these current troubled times."@en1
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