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the Hague: PRESS RELEASE - Action at World Water Forum in The Hague
PRESS RELEASE:
Action of Solidarios con Itoiz at the World Water Forum,
the Hague, The Netherlands.
THE NAKED TRUTH OF
THE WORLD WATER FORUM
On Friday 17th March at 10:00, six members of the group
¨Solidarios con Itoiz¨ disrupted the opening ceremony of the
World Water Forum at the Congress Centre of the Hague,
in protest against the Itoiz dam in the Basque Country.
Two members of the group approached the Presidential
Table, removed their clothes and handcuffed themselves to
each other. On their bodies were painted the following
slogans: ¨STOP ITOIZ DAM¨and ¨NO TO WATER
PRIVATISATION¨. These two people were eventually
removed by conference security and police. Following the
first interruption, there were further repeated interruptions
over the next 45 minutes as two members of the group in
climbing gear scaled the walls and unfurled banners with
the same messages. Situated in different parts of the
Amazon Hall, two other protesters hand-cuffed themselves
to chairs and threw leaflets into the air and shouted slogans
against the construction of big dams, like the one at Itoiz,
and against the privatisation of water.
Two more members stripped naked, while others stripped
off to reveal T-shirts showing the same slogans. At the
same time, stink bombs were thrown, creating an
unbreatheable atmosphere in the hall. After the repeated
interruptions of the opening speech, the last of the
protesters were arrested and violently removed from the hall
by conference security and police.
This action is the latest in the European Tour ¨S.O.S Itoiz¨
that the group began in September last year, in order to
publicly denounce the irrational Itoiz Dam project and the
unjust sentence of five years imprisonment for eight
members of the group, for defending the earth by stopping
the construction of the dam by non-violent public action.
Today´s action, in common with all the actions of their long-
running campaingn, has been public and non-violent.
The motive for today´s action is to condemn the World
Water Forum in its totality.
This forum is nothing but a means to smooth the way for
privatisation of an essential resource for life, a resource that
should never belong to anybody.
Multinational corporations and government are controlling
this resource and making it a commodity and an instrument
of power. They disguise their massive financial incentives
for this project with empty rhetoric about improving
conditions in developing countries, claiming to conserve and
rehabilitate ecosystems and promising flood control through
monstrous constructions.
Within the logic of privatisation and speculation, huge
hydraulic infrastructure, such as dams, basin management
and canal systems are constructed. This means nothing
but the displacement of millions of people, huge
environmental destruction and a scandalous waste of public
money, in irrational and useless projects. Inevitably,
corruption accompanies these enterprises, as does heavy
repression of public resistance to them. The Itoiz Dam is
just one of the many irrational dams that are being built all
over the world.
In the attempted inauguration of the World Water Forum this
morning, the Forum was presented to the world as part of a
democratic participative process for water management,
when in fact the process was designed by powerful
multinationals many years ago, without taking into account
the basic needs of the people.
The aim of this forum is to publicly present water
privatisation worldwide, and to set targets for government
and institutions to achieve by 2005. This is an unacceptable
imposition which ever way you look at it. We only have to
look at the long list of promoters and sponsors, to see who
is behind this: multinational corporations such as KLM,
NESTLE, SHELL Nederland, etc and institutions such as
the World Bank, United Nations Enviromental programme
(UNEP), UNESCO and UNICEF.
The system of water control they are trying to impose does nothing but
make the rich richer and the poor poorer, removing the possibility of
self-sufficiency for communities, and continuing the destruction of planet
earth.
SOS ITOIZ
STOP WATER PRIVATISATION
Press contact number: 0624400453
ALL EMAIL REPLIES TO : solidarios@ythis.zzn.com
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE ITOIZ DAM AND THE
EUROPEAN TOUR:
UK and Netherlands: www.s-o-s-itoiz.org.uk
Germany: www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/itoiz
Italy: www.tmcrew.org/int/itoiz
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