November 4, 2001	Sunday	Shaba’an 17, 1422

BEIRUT, Nov 3: Opposition to the US-led war in Afghanistan headed the agenda on Saturday on the first day of anti-globalization talks organized by activists one week ahead of the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Qatar.

Some 500 people attended the opening of the conference, whose aim is to discuss the effects of globalization on the Arab world.

The first day of the gathering focused on “challenges to globalisation after September 11,” when New York and Washington were hit by terrorist attacks.

Egyptian parliament member Hamdin Sabahi, one of the opening speakers, called on anti-globalization protestors to support the Palestinian intifada against Israel, who he accused of leading globalization in the region.

Faouaz Traboulsi, one of the founders of the pan-Arab committee for anti-globalization which organized the conference, said “the United States responded to the September 11 terrorist attacks by a terrorist war.”

“Globalization is in the process of taking on a military and security aspect, whereas before it limited itself to the economic domain.”

Radical French farmer Jose Bove said “the very name of globalization is not about exchange, but about the domination of one part of the world over another.”

Bove was met with a huge round of appluase when he attacked sanctions against Iraq and called NATO a tool of the United States.

Abou Ahmad Fouad, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group recently added to the US terrorist group blacklist, said “violence or state terrorism, which has been used to impose globalization, has created the counter-violence that we arbitrarily call ‘terrorism.’”

The conference hopes to found an Arab and an international assembly to resist globalisation and publish a “Beirut Declaration.”

Ministers from the 142-member WTO are to meet in the Qatari capital Doha November 9-13 to debate an agenda for a new round of multilataral trade liberalisation talks.—AFP