The WTO conference in Seattle at the tail end of last year ended as a complete fiasco with no one seeming to agree with anyone else. Nevertheless it provided developing countries, particularly from Africa, the opportunity to tell some home truths. Milan Vesely ponders the consequences.

Billed as the conference to put the stamp on a "New World Order" in trade relations, the December World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle proved an embarrassing fiasco. After four days of fruitless discussion and the largest protest demonstrations seen in the United States since the Vietnam war, the conference broke up in disarray.

Anarchists, organised labour groups and a whole plethora of special interest groups turned the coastal city's streets into a debris-covered battle ground. They claimed victory. As WTO delegates departed from what had been touted as a crucial conference, not a single core issue had been resolved.

"We are a city of free speech going through a very serious challenge," Seattle's mayor Paul Shell said in imposing a 24-hour curfew on the 50-block 'security zone' around the WTO venues. Calling up hundreds of National Guardsmen and Washington State troopers to quell the violence, he expressed surprise at the extreme reactions unleashed by 30,000 environmentalists, isolationists and trade union activists connected only by their hatred toward WTO policies.

In reality, the mayor's lack of understanding at what was going on among protesters reflected the stance held by US negotiators inside the debating chambers. Indeed the protesters themselves reflected the debating participants: all shouting for their own cause while ignoring or misunderstanding anothers'.

Few papers reported the deeper issues of the protests. American steel workers sank tons of steel girders in Seattle bay protesting China's dumping of subsidised steel in the US putting thousands out of work. No sooner had they finished when they were turned on by hundreds of Greenpeace activists who demanded they not pollute the waters and for the rest of the day sweating steelworkers were seen trying to recover bubbling girders.

Of course the developing nations crowed with delight. Seething under the heavy-handed approach of the United States and some of its western allies to regulate their penetration of western markets, African, Caribbean and South American delegates greeted the collapse of the talks with undisguised enthusiasm. "Ding Dong, the Round is dead," one flier swirling around the picturesque city streets read.

"The failure of these talks is a good thing," a senior Zimbabwe trade official said, "Africa has stood firm on its threat not to sign any text it disagreed with."

Martin Khor of the Third World Network group went even further. "The consequences of more trade liberalisation under the proposed rules could be 'so negative and serious to the third world that there will be tremendous political instability over the next five years,'" he stated. A Chinese delegate, picking up on the protester's theme, added: "The only thing worse than no agreement was the agreement it looked like we might get."

So why has the issue of free trade become so divisive?

Like the steelworkers and Greenpeace members, people such as Dan Seligman of the American Sierra Club and Murasoli Maran, India's Commerce and Trade minister might have reason to be there but will never agree. The Sierra Club's primary interest is preserving American park lands, not India's low cost exports. Maran's agenda is one of forestry clearance to promote India's tea industry. These are opposing points of view.

Four contentious issues stood out at the Seattle conference; labour rights, liberalising trade, the leadership of the 135-member WTO and transparency in the organisation's deliberations. These four core issues were backed up by a whole host of special interest concerns.

For developing nations, particularly those in Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent, the issue of trade sanctions over labour rights proved the most contentious. The threat to block imports over the use of child labour in their fledgling manufacturing industries was seen as directly hitting at recent third world penetration of US and European retail markets.

Supported by China, the African and Caribbean blocks objected most strenuously to President Clinton's eve-of-conference agreement with the American A.F.L-C.I.O labour organisation to use trade sanctions against countries that the US government perceived as violating workers' basic rights. Going further, he stunned delegates by telling a Seattle newspaper that the WTO should use sanctions to enforce core labour rights around the world and crowned this by signing a treaty barring the most abusive forms of child labour, including the use of children in prostitution, mining and in any WTO member nation's military.

This suggestion went well beyond the US's previous position of only prompting the WTO to consider the issue and was seen by developing countries as setting up a trade punishment system to enforce western ideas of labour rights. Any moral arguments of genuine concern of exploitation only met with the most cynical of comments.

"It is nonsensical," Egypt's Trade Minister Yousef Boutros-Ghali said. "Why all of a sudden, when third world labour has proved to be competitive, do industrial countries start feeling concerned about our workers?"

Going further he added: "If you start using trade as a lever to implement non-trade issues it will be the end of the multilateral trading system, maybe not this year, but certainly within 10 years. Such sudden concern about the welfare of our workers just when we are penetrating western markets is very suspicious."

Kenya's Trade Minister Nicholas Biwott also sounded a word of caution. "The best forum to deal with labour matters is the International Labour Organisation," he said, reminding delegates that the ILO was a United Nations body that promotes labour issues and worker's rights without having enforcement powers.

This approach was dismissed out of hand by John Sweeney, president of the American A.F.L.-C.I.O who scathingly referred to the ILO as, "A toothless, underfinanced agency unable to stop child labour and to protect other rights." Politically powerful in an American election year, his opinion held sway over President Clinton, already hard-pressed to support vice-president Al Gore's 2000 campaign for the US presidency.

The issue of liberalising trade between developing nations and the major trading blocks was also of vital interest to the African and Indian sub-continents. Exporting mainly agricultural products such as tea, coffee and horticultural produce, they are desperate to break into the manufactured goods sector. The raising of environmental issues in the liberalisation of trade was seen by African and Asian countries as an excuse to protect special favoured nations such as Mexico, already incorporated in the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association).

The same applies to the EU where Turkey and Greece have special dispensation from environmental pollution regulations for a undetermined grace period (although Turkey is not an EU member), as well as to less developed Asian countries already grouped into the APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Committee) trade bloc.

"The rich countries have not honoured the previous agreements to open up their markets to products in which we have a comparative advantage, such as textiles and agriculture," the Organisation of African Unity said in a hard hitting communique issued on the eve of the Seattle talks. "There is no transparency in the proceedings and African countries are being marginalised and generally excluded on issues of vital importance."

This argument gained added weight when a draft on reducing and eventually eliminating farm subsidies proposed by Singapore's Trade Minister George Yeo was rejected outright by the European Union. The city-state of Singapore has no agricultural industry.

"It's a sensitive issue," US Agricultural Secretary Dan Glickman said in reiterating that the US was still seeking the elimination of export subsidies in principle. "And I don't want to talk about any of the substance."

As it was, the proposal to establish a working group on agricultural and biotechnology issues and put forward by the European Union was totally rejected by US negotiators as too wide-ranging. Even such basic matters as the setting up of committees proved too contentious for the WTO to handle.

Equally divisive was the issue of leadership in the WTO. The strong-arm tactics of President Clinton's top negotiator Charlene Barshefsky came under attack. Unilaterally convening committees made up of a majority of US delegates to ram through legislation, she caused scores of delegates to complain that they were being left out of the process. Riding roughshod over their objections, she then added fuel to the fire by holding closed sessions with committees made up of a smaller, more select group of negotiators to hash out final details.

Caribbean delegations, incensed at what they saw as a total disregard for the democratic process in the drafting of vital legislation, even threatened to walk out of the conference to spotlight the issue. The Senegalese Foreign Trade Minister Khalifa Ababacar Sall summed up the developing nations' objections to Barshefsky's forceful methods thus, "The United States, through its main delegate Ms. Charlene Barshefsky, virtually told us to come to an agreement and get on with it, by which she meant taking the USA's side. Or else, she said, she would find another solution."

Finally, when it became obvious that the conference was doomed to failure, Barshefsky backed down. With Mike Moore, the trade organisation's director general by her side she stated that; "The WTO. has outgrown the processes that were appropriate for an earlier time. There are clearly issues of transparency that affect perceptions of the WTO by member economies themselves."

This left African delegates wondering whether the pre-planned outcome was the outcome we got: a collapse. Also contentious was the core issue of transparency in the conference's deliberations. Long dominated by the developed nations, the various committees setting the agenda came under increased scrutiny, their secretive deliberations no longer acceptable to the majority of African and third world delegates.

"For an agency that forever praises 'transparency' in trade, the establishment of clear rules of deliberations and the elimination of back-door deals, the WTO is notably lacking in that quality itself," critics charged. Pointing to the 'dispute panels' that act as judges when countries have trade disputes, they questioned why these should operate in secrecy and why there was no requirement to make filings and briefs public.

"We get to talk while the real decisions are being made somewhere else, behind closed doors," Jason Mark of the Global Exchange activist group charged.

"The failure of this conference is the first signal that things are not as they were in the past," Senegal's Trade Minister Ibou Ndiaye stated while referring to the fact that wealthy nations, particularly the United States, have long set the pace and tone of trade negotiations.

As if to herald the close of an era, the final decision to abandon the talks came from President Clinton after a flurry of late night phone calls to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain (whose representative, Chancellor Brown, had vociferously disagreed with Clinton on a number of issues), Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi of Japan and Supachai Panitchpakdi, Thailand's Commerce Minister and future head of the WTO.

In part his decision was forced by Pakistan's delegation threatening to declare the conference illegal and by the African bloc's anger at the US decision to deprive their scheduled internal discussion meeting of translators and microphones.

"This failure amounted to a catharsis for the organisation," Youssef Boutros-Ghali, Egypt's chief trade negotiator concluded. "We needed a decision to stop this process until we can figure out how to balance transparency and efficiency."

Not all delegates agreed with his point of view however. Many felt that questions of trade, labour rights and the environment had become deeply politicised around the world. "The failure of the conference is being hailed as a victory by the third world," a US delegate stated on condition of not being quoted, "But all they have done is to strengthen the isolationists."

He was referring to a powerful lobby within the US that advocates a virtual withdrawal from the international system. This includes cutting any aid budgets and only trading when it suits US interests. Such a move could decimate developing economies.

Which raises the question of whether the approach by the third world, particularly Africa, to derail the deliberations is 'merely defeat, snatched from the jaws of victory.' With the United States, Canada, Japan as well as the European Union already locked into the NAFTA, EU, APEC and the Cairns trade blocs, it raises the spectre of these powerful groupings simply strengthening protectionism in favour of their less developed members at the expense of the emerging nations of the African continent.

Whatever the final outcome, one thing is clear. No one came out of the Seattle fiasco unscathed, least of all Africa. Now more desperate then ever to open western markets to their fledgling manufacturing industries, many African delegates reflected on whether quiet dialogue, rather than virulent attacks, should have been the order of the day.

The WTO is due to hold a post-mortem in Geneva early in the new millennium. Seattle is over but the battle for public opinion has only just begun. As such Africa's fledgling industries can only hope that more sober counsel prevails.

Negotiated agreements geared to dismantling trade barriers are essential for their prosperity and require quiet diplomacy to succeed. Rhetoric, pepper spray and victory speeches among a backdrop of tear gas make the headlines but only industrialization will enable Africa to take its rightful place in an ever changing, technological world. The continent's struggling people demand it, their very survival depends on it.