Protesters barred from trade summit

Some anti-globalisers have made the journey to Doha

By BBC correspondent Mike Donkin

Delegates to the World Trade Organisation meet on Friday in Doha, capital of Qatar, to mount a fresh effort to remove barriers to global trade.

This time there will not be the sound and fury on the streets which had become familiar at such key economic set-pieces.

With the current heightened security fears, the Gulf state has not been issuing visas to would-be anti-globalisation demonstrators.

Security surrounding the meeting has been tight

Just before the attack on New York's World Trade Center their protests reached a climax at a summit in Genoa.

The events of 11 September may have led them to change their tactics - but not, they say, to abandon their cause.

When anti-globalisation protesters laid siege to the G8 summit in Genoa it took steel barricades, ranks of riot police and clouds of tear gas to allow the world's industrial leaders to do business.

The detailed objections of the more thoughtful campaigners may have been drowned in the uproar, but world trade was a headline issue.

Then came the attack on the twin towers.

After that the World Bank cancelled its Washington meeting, Commonwealth heads of state scrapped their Brisbane summit and there will only be a handful of dissenters allowed visas for Doha.

Change in tactics

But although its profile may be lower the movement has not gone away.

It rallied a sizeable crowd in London last weekend and has called an anti-globalisation forum in Beirut, parallel to the inaccessible WTO.

Its agenda, the forum's organisers say, could not be more relevant now.

Delegates from 142 countries are expected

11 September showed how a few extremists can exploit things when one one half of the world feels disenfranchised and alienated.

Yet the policies of organisations like the WTO, they say, keep widening the gap between the best and the least well off, sowing the seeds of more conflict.

Caroline Lucas, a British Green member of the European parliament will be in Doha.

She says the anti-globalisers are indeed now looking at different tactics to the controversial mass lobbies of Seattle, Prague and Genoa.

But tactics, she says, have constantly been switched.

What will not change is their call for a check on the international corporate greed that is still making life miserable for so many.