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’!
