Operation SalAMI: Resisting the MAI
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Operation SalAMI: Resisting the MAI ARTICLE
In Montreal May 25, 1998, hundreds of demostrators took to the street to blockade the closed-door meetings of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Behind the closed doors, the OECD was discussing a secretive neo-liberalisation plan called the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).
Operation SalAMI (in French, literally, bad MAI or bad friend) brought over 500 people out to protest the fourth annual gathering dedicated to economic globalization and the supreme rights of corporations.
In what has been discribed as the largest non-violent resistance action staged against the MAI, 99 people were arrested and criminally charged at the protest outside the Conférence de Montréal. Participants in the blockade came from all over Quebec &emdash; Jonquiere, Chicoutimi, Quebec City, Joliette, Sherbrooke, Asbestos, Hull, Ste.-Hyacinthe, Ste.-Anne-de-Bellevue, Longueuil and Montreal &emdash; as well as from Ottawa, Toronto, Peterborough, Guelph and Vancouver.
Operation SalAMI was launched officially at midnite, May 1st, with a street party outside the Montreal Stock Exchange (in conjunction with a similar party in Paris). Unofficially, the origins of SalAMI go back to the "G Plan" when, in a similar action, hundreds of demonstrators shut down the government of Quebec for a day by blockading the huge G Complex in Quebec City, the hub of the Quebec bureaucracy. The G Plan was in opposition to the neo-liberal policies of the government of Quebec.
Despite being asked not to participate at a conference which featured registration fees of over $1,000 and invited instead to address the protesters; federal NDP leader Alexa McDonough chose to hobnob with the organizers of economic globalization. McDonough's panel, "Capitalism &emdash; European or American?" featured a former Thatcher cabinet minister and executives from the Power Corporation and Bombardier.
During the demonstration, police used excessive force on the participants. It was reported that some demonstrators cite the use of cattle-prod-like instruments which gave off electric shocks.
The following day witnessed many front-page pictures of police violence against non-violent protesters. The publicity helped rally the 'global civil society' movement against the secretive agreement. As several sources have noted, the civil society movement was instrumental in the eventual collapse of negotiations.
The MAI was officially abandoned when France declared it would withdraw from negotiations. The annoucement followed a scathing report on the MAI from French MEP, Catherine Lalumière. After receiving this report, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin addressed the Assemblée Nationale on 10 October 1998 and announced his decision to withdraw. He said the Lalumiere Report had identified a number of fundamental problems with the Agreement, particularly relating to matters of national sovereignty. Of equal or greater significance was the importance accorded by Mme Lalumière to the global protest movement which at that time she attributed to the work and influence of NGOs: "For the first time, one is seeing the emergence of a "global civil society" represented by NGOs which are often based in several states and communicate beyond their frontiers. This evolution is doubtless irreversible. On one hand, organisations representing civil society have become aware of the consequences of international economic negotiations. They are determined to leave their mark on them."
France was followed by a succession of other nations including Canada and Australia whose governments had been under relentless pressure from civil society to abandon or radically revamp the MAI.
The movement created by the anti-MAI struggles laid the foundation for the mobilisation against the WTO in Seattle, 1999.
Further Recources
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The Lalumière Report in English.Non-official online translation of the report which advised the withdrawal of France from the OECD negotiations it was hosting in Paris http://www.geocities.com/w_trouble_o/lumier.htm
A civil-society perspective.from UK independent journal Red Pepper http://www.redpepper.org.uk/intarch/xmai3.html