STATEMENT
Assert People’s Rights and Reject Imperialist Globalization at the World Summit on Sustainable Development

(Position Paper of the Philippine Network for Sustainable Development or PhilNet-WSSD. PhilNet-WSSD is composed of BAYAN, KALIKASAN-PNE, KMU, KMP,CPA,GABRIELA, AMIHAN, PAMALAKAYA, CEC, AGHAM, CONTEND, IBON Foundation, Bayan Muna, Anakbayan, KAMP)

WE ARE workers, peasants, fisherfolk, national minorities, women, youth and low-earning professionals in people’s organizations of the basic sectors and social development and environmental NGOs of the Philippines.

We have decades of experience in the struggle to build a more just and equitable society and are united in advancing this in every possible arena including international inter-governmental and multi-stakeholder forums like the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) scheduled for August 26 to September 4, 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Our general position and convictions
We hereby declare that our struggle for social justice and the promotion of the rights and interests of the people is based on the following principles and understandings:

1) Sustainable development upholds the people’s welfare above all and ensures that the majority are free, and will continue to be free, from poverty, hunger, disease and ignorance. This is only possible through a political, economic and social system that gives the greatest importance to people’s well-being and human rights, that fosters the judicious and responsible use of social and natural resources, that rejects the reckless, wasteful, destructive and exploitative logic of profit-driven capitalist production and consumption, and that renounces militarism and war as instruments of domination and oppression.

2) The world’s richest industrial powers have reaped boundless benefit from their long histories of conquest, intervention and imperialist plunder. Hundreds of millions of people barely subsisted and died miserably during the centuries of exploitation and hundreds of millions are in the same desperate conditions today. Because of all this the people have the unambiguous right to struggle for and demand a more just and equitable world order in all the ways open to them.

3) The so-called neoliberal globalization of the last two decades continues that history of exploitation. The deepening of imperialist control of neocolonial economies and the sabotage of domestic and self-reliant development have caused terrible poverty and appalling inequalities. The multilateral institutions and agencies like the WTO, IMF and WB, regional arrangements like NAFTA, AFTA and APEC, and the monopoly operations of transnational corporations and banks have caused grave human and environmental crises.

4) The world’s leading power, US imperialism, is undertaking condemnable terrorist acts against the people of the world in a brutal drive to maintain the global political and economic structures of its domination. It’s engaged in the most brazen acts of terrorism: it wields modern state power in crippling economic blockades, including of food and medicine; it unleashes its high-technology war machine against peoples across the world; it engages in proxy wars against movements of national liberation; it threatens holocausts through the build-up of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction and bolstering of its first-strike capability; it intimidates and encircles rivals through military exercises and war games, security arrangements and arms exports to client regimes.

5) The greatest damage to people’s well-being and to the environment is caused by imperialism’s social and economic policy exactions and its unrivalled militarism. On the other hand, the surest means to sustainable development is for the people to continue to uphold their long tradition of fundamental struggles for a just and peaceful world based on basic human rights, human dignity, real democracy and progress.

6) International institutions and agreements are manipulated, subverted and wielded by the world’s powers in a variety of subtle, deceitful and brazen ways if not outrightly disregarded and violated. When used to advance the cause of the people they must complement and not weaken our social and mass movements. We must be alert to how the political, economic and ideological domination of imperialism extends even to these.

Our demands to the WSSD
Given the foregoing, we therefore challenge the WSSD to take the following positions aimed at promoting social justice and improving the welfare of the world’s majority:

1) Unequivocally reject neoliberal globalization and uphold the sovereign right to development and to determine social and economic policies that are in the national and the people’s interest.

2) Categorically condemn militarism and denounce the US’ self-declared “war on terror” as itself terrorism of the highest order that inflicts untold suffering on innocent civilians for the sole purpose of consolidating and expanding US imperialist domination.

3) Vigorously uphold the people’s right to struggle against massive poverty and grossly iniquitous social and economic relations and to build a just and peaceful social order that protects and promotes their fundamental social, economic, cultural, civil and political rights as already made explicit in various international covenants.

Specifically, we propose that the WSSD take concrete steps towards:

1) Affirming the people’s right to reverse policies of trade and investment liberalization and put in place policies which ensure that the flow of goods, services and financial resources promote domestic goals of deep and widespread social and economic development and not just the profits of monopoly capital.

2) Institutionalizing international economic and financial rules and regulations, as well as organizational processes, that are biased towards the needs, interests and welfare of the people of underdeveloped economies.

3) Ending all attempts at manipulating, influencing and forcing domestic policies to conform to imperialism’s needs including the use of economic blockades, political pressure, multilateral and bilateral agency conditionalities and implicit market-based sanctions.

4) Repudiating the massive foreign debt including not only public debt but also large private and commercial debts to stem the capital drain of underdeveloped countries and free resources for public health, education and housing as well as for basic agricultural and industrial development.

5) Increasing capital flows to underdeveloped countries on concessional and explicitly untied terms.

6) Holding the US accountable for its scores of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, beginning with demanding that it desist from its direct and proxy wars worldwide and provide remuneration to the many hundreds of thousands of victims of its global carnage.

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