ISLAMABAD, Feb 24: The Pakistani organising committee of the World Social Forum (WSF) on Friday asked the government to facilitate visas for 8,000 to 10,000 delegates from South Asia, Middle East and Latin America who intended to attend the WSF’s March 24-29 gathering in Karachi.

Pakistan Social Forum secretary Irfan Mufti told a news conference that the committee had already informed Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao and the prime minister’s office about the WSF gathering well in time to ensure attendance of all those who had confirmed their participation.

“We don’t have any pleasant memories because the government tried not to make our gathering a success each time we tried to collect the masses to speak out against corporate elites and multinationals who have mortgaged this country,” he said. “But we hope this time the government facilitates our gathering,” he added.

Mr Mufti said about 10,000 trade unionists, farmers, peace activists and members of anti-corporate forces from Latin America, Middle East and South Asia, including India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, had confirmed their participation, some of them being well-known anti-corporate and left intellectuals.

“We are sure we could gather another 35,000 or so from those downtrodden classes of Pakistan who know that an alternative system is unavoidable to put an end to their exploitation at the hands of the capitalists, corporate and their local agents”, he said.

The 35,000 figure, he said, was a conservative one because in India 130,000 people had participated in the WSF conference.

Mr Mufti said social set-up in Pakistan was favourable for a social movement like the one the world was witnessing now in Latin America because of what he called chronic poverty and social inequality existing here.

He said over 400 seminars would be held during the six-day gathering where social rights activists, pro-people intellectuals and political thinkers from across the world would reinforce the global movement against corporate-led globalisation, wars, colonisation, denial of rights, all sorts of terrorism, extremism, fundamentalism, militarisation, corporate farming and a host of other issues.

He said contrary to “super-rich location” of Davos, Switzerland, that hosted the recent World Economic Forum, the WSF in Karachi would be held in the People’s Football Stadium in the slum area of Lyari.

Mr Mufti also discussed the multi-billion-dollar contracts for which the multinationals and leaders of the developed world seduced and pressed leaders of the Third World to sign agreements. President Pervez Musharraf participated in the Davos conference at a time when a large number of multinational companies were interested to gain contracts in the Pakistani areas destroyed by the October 8 earthquake.

Mr Mufti said the WSF would highlight human rights violations in Pakistan which saw an unprecedented increase since the country joined the US-led war on terror.

“We would take up the issue of the US missile attack on the innocent people of Damadola village in Bajaur and the willingness and desire of the international financial institutions to fund Kalabagh dam against the wishes of Pakistani people,” he said.

Mr Mufti said poverty- and inflation-stricken people of Pakistan needed a progressive and democratic set-up and WSF was of the view that there was no democracy in Pakistan because political institutions were not growing and people had no say in the affairs of the state and policy-making.

He said the world had now realised that World Trade Organisation (WTO) was yet another tool used by the elite states to control the trade of the poor countries.

“This is not free trade. This is one-way trade through which the developed world has converted the masses in the Third World to mere its consumers. Our labourers cannot enter the first world countries but their products are freely brought to the shelves of our markets”, Mr Mufti lamented.

He said farmers in the developing world, especially in South Asia, were frustrated over their continuous exploitation under WTO. In Karachi, the committee was expecting a big number of farmers as well as workers of national companies “blindly privatized at the cost of national interests and labour rights”.

Basharat Gauhar, a forum member, said Pakistan was now like a colony where heads of financial institutions like the World Bank served as viceroys while “our own leaders” acted as their managers.