Miren Gutiérrez

Miren Gutierrez interviews AYE AYE WIN of Dignity International

ROME, Jan 26 (IPS) – NGOs like Dignity International are packing their bags to fly to Belem in Brazil where the World Social Forum (WSF) is taking place this year. The stakes are high.“We are all gathering in Belem because we still firmly believe that another world is possible,” says Aye Aye Win, executive director of Dignity International, a Netherlands-based organisation supporting people and groups engaged in fighting for human rights. “I do believe that the current global economic crisis in many ways confirms the importance of the WSF as a forum that proposes viable alternatives, and it would be wise for the World Economic Forum at Davos (Switzerland) to lend its ears to ideas coming out of it.”

Aye Aye has worked for the Council of Europe, an organisation that seeks to develop common principles based on the European Convention on Human Rights. She has coordinated the Global Forum for Poverty Eradication, from which Dignity International originated. She has worked also for the Advocacy and Early Warning Department of the London-based NGO International Alert, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Japan, and the Development Centre of the Organisation For Economic Cooperation And Development (OECD, a grouping of 30 wealthy nations).

Aye Aye Win spoke with the IPS Editor-in-Chief about the role of the WSF today.

IPS: The WSF is a movement against the “kind of globalisation which is based only on the values of market and profit,” in the words of WSF international committee member Roberto Savio. Do you feel vindicated by the global financial crisis?

Aye Aye Win: The financial crisis is a sad proof that globalisation based only on the values of the market is fundamentally flawed. You cannot endlessly go on speculating in the global casino. The bubble cannot endlessly grow. All of them eventually burst, leaving millions destitute, as is the case now. The reckless behaviour of the financiers, and the system that permits it, amount to a crime of unimaginable scale. What angers me in all this is that governments come galloping along to rescue the very financial institutions that have profiteered from the people and whose behaviour has led to the crisis! Having said this, it is also obvious that state intervention is necessary now that chaos has come.

IPS: Do you think this will lead to a different type of capitalism?

AAW: After a bit of patchwork here and there through bailout plans and stimulus packages, there is a real risk that things will soon return to business as usual – capitalists return to market worship, start playing again in the global casino and again enter another cycle of speculation. We as social activists have an opportunity now to go back to the drawing board to reconstruct the global economic system to be one based not on greed but one that does reward hard work and innovation, a system built on solidarity and justice. We need to come up with viable alternatives – move beyond ideology and find solutions that work. This will indeed be a challenge. We are so good at ‘opposing’ but we need to become much better at ‘proposing’!

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Miren Gutierrez* interviews NANCY SNOW, propaganda expert

ROME, Jan 22 (IPS) – The war of words continues in Gaza, in spite of the ceasefire. Nancy Snow, propaganda expert, talks to IPS about information spin strategies and whether we, the public, have learnt any lessons from Iraq.

Snow is a writer and a Huffington Post blogger. Her latest book is “Persuader-in-Chief” about public diplomacy and persuasion in the Age of Obama. She is also Associate Professor at the Newhouse School of Communications, Syracuse University.

IPS: The Israeli propaganda effort is being directed to justify their attack. The sight of Hamas rockets streaking into Israel has been helpful in this respect. But do you think Israel’s effort has achieved anything?

NS: Israel’s effort seems to be designed to shake the confidence of Hamas. Of course, innocent people are in the way of this power struggle. We don’t know yet if Hamas will be emboldened or weakened by the Gaza conflict. We do know that global public opinion is against Israel for its raining of air attacks on a densely populated area. A lot of people died unnecessarily simply because of where they lived.

IPS: On Dec. 28, Israel released a video of a missile attack against what appeared to be a lorry being loaded with rockets. A caption says: “Grad missiles being loaded onto the Hamas vehicle.” As of last week, 632,714 people had watched it. However, it turned out that a Gaza resident named Ahmad Abdallah Muhammad Sanur claimed that the truck was his and that he and his workers were moving oxygen cylinders from his workshop. How do you think this case has hampered Israel’s propagandistic efforts?

NS: If one believes that the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) is acting in self-defence and that Hamas is completely responsible for creating the Gaza conflict, then the resident’s claim that this truck was his and that they were only moving oxygen cylinders places innocent victims smack in the middle of the propaganda war between Hamas and the IDF. If Sanur’s claims are true, naturally it hurts the IDF position that only Hamas is the target of its rockets.

IPS: Has the ban on foreign correspondents “helped”? (The television channels Al-Jazeera and BBC operated there during the attack). The absence of reporters from other major organisations has meant, for example, that Sanur’s story has not been as widely told as it probably would have been, or his account subject to examination.

NS: How do you think the ban is affecting this war of words? I’m all for the complete access of media to conflict areas. If correspondents are willing to put themselves in harm’s way in order to tell the story, completely and truthfully, then they should be allowed in. When a ban takes place, all we can wonder is what is being left out of the story being told? We cannot allow just officials to tell their stories. We need people on the ground, both citizen journalists and foreign correspondents, to complete the landscape picture.

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