Global Financial Meetings to Encounter 50 Protesting Oberlin Students By Sarah Bania-Dobyns and Sarah Green
			APRIL 14, 2000--Some 50 students representing a new campus group, Oberlin Trade Watch, will journey to the nation's capital to take part in a national protest during meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) April 16 and 17. "Oberlin Trade Watch grew out of a coalition inspired by the anti-World Trade Organization protests last semester," says member Sarah Bania-Dobyns, a junior from Denver. "A core group traveled to Cleveland to take part in a World Trade Organization demonstration the first day of the Seattle protests. Several of the people in that group are now active members of the coalition [that is] planning for April 16 and 17 in D.C." As in Seattle, the weekend's main goal seems to be preventing meetings from taking place. "The objective of the demonstration in the simplest terms is to shut down the meetings in a nonviolent manner," Bania-Dobyns says. "But I want to point out that a coalition called Mobilization for Global Justice has proposed a nonviolence clause that everyone taking part is asked to accept." "We believe the nonviolence code is crucial; we take our actions seriously and believe that nonviolence is the only sensible, compassionate method for protesting," adds Laurel Paget-Seekins, a junior from Philo, California. "Inevitably there will be people at the demonstration who will destroy property and we want it to be very clear that property destruction is outside the nonviolence guidelines." "The IMF is an institution in which wealthy nations make policy for the world's poorest nations; a new form of colonialism so the United States has 18 percent of votes in the IMF, although the IMF never makes policy for the U.S," says Gillian Russom, a senior from Providence, Rhode Island. "By imposing measures which slash social spending, the IMF forces workers and the poor to pay the price for economic crises which they had nothing to do with creating." Despite activists' targeting of the IMF and World Bank for specific reasons, Bania-Dobyns says: "While I am in D.C., I will not only be protesting. The policies of the WB and IMF are not the root of the problem; their status simply tells us that what we are dealing with is systemic. And because it is a systemic problem, I do not see the protest as an isolated event; rather, it is a building block for a larger movement against corporate globalization." Their desired outcome? Although many groups--including Jubilee 2000, Global Exchange, and 50 Years is Enough--are going to Washington with worthwhile goals, such as an end to Third World debt, OTW members agree that what they will get out of the demonstration is not legislation but more energized, radicalized people ready to continue the movement.
			Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about Oberlin Online news and feature articles to online.news@oberlin.edu.