World Social Forum: Series of Global Protests to Begin in March

World Social Forum: Series of Global Protests to Begin in March

CARACAS- A day of international protests against the occupation of Iraq, on Mar. 18, will mark the start of a series of demonstrations and mobilisations organised at the sixth World Social Forum, which ended Sunday in Venezuela.

A conference against the U.S. occupation of Iraq will be held Mar. 24-27 in Cairo, Egypt, announced the international Assembly of Social Movements, which met on the final day of the WSF in Caracas. Some 2,200 civil society organisations organised nearly 1,800 seminars, panels, workshops and other activities during the five-day WSF, which served as a meeting-place for sharing ideas and experiences, but also for organising networks to undertake concrete campaigns, as advocated by the Assembly of Social Movements.

"We have around 300 organisations and networks that bring together more than 900 groups interested in taking part in this programme of campaigns," Piero Bernocchi with COBAS, an Italian alternative network of trade unions, told IPS.

Speaking before thousands of participants at the Forum on Friday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said he hoped the WSF did not turn into merely a "revolutionary tourism" activity, and called for it to come up with programmes for concrete action against "political imperialism" and neoliberal, free-market economic policies.

In March, civil society groups will organise protests and other activities in Mexico parallel to the Fourth World Water Forum, to be held there. The Assembly of Social Movements proclaimed that resources like water, land and energy, as well as biodiversity, belong to the people and are public goods, while it condemned the privatisation of communications, health care and education.

Yes, Dear Friends the time is NOW.