The Hindu : Political activism grows younger

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 22, 2004

National

National

Political activism grows younger

By Aniket Alam

MUMBAI, JAN. 21. While delegates debated the takeover of the world by corporates, the takeover of the World Social Forum by big-pocket NGOs, the takeover of our imagination by cultural stereotypes, the takeover of protests by the youth went almost unnoticed.

Visible in all their energy and flamboyance were young people from all over the world at the WSF, contrary to the perception that social protests are middle age — middle class pursuits of the flower power generation.

A leading trade union leader in Indonesia, Dita Sari, joined the underground Communist Party in 1992 when still a student. Today, after serving four years in Suharto's jails, she is a leading member of the 70,000-strong National Front for Indonesian Workers' Struggles. She recounts how young people spearheaded the protests against Suharto's military dictatorship. Over the years of the East Asian economic crisis, Indonesia's workforce fell from 95.5 million to less than 55 million. Most of those who lost their jobs were young people and today they form the backbone of the popular struggles demanding jobs and democracy.

Khaisian Mung, was a high school student who was forced to leave Burma in 1988 after the military rulers crushed the democracy movement. Living in exile in Delhi, Mr. Mung today works for the democracy movement and is busy building networks with democracy activists from Tibet and Bhutan.

The examples are too many to list. Whether it is Julia di Giovanni of the Brazilian Sempraviva Organizagao Feminista, Lee Byung-Jin of the Korean Government Employees Union, Colombian Victor de Currea-Lugo working with the Palestinian Environmental NGO Network or Trevor Ngwame of the South African Anti-Privatisation Front, it would be difficult to find any movement or group at the WSF not dominated by people in their 20s and 30s. Even the alternate media, covering the event in large numbers, was dominated by youth.

The WSF organisers had set up a separate youth camp at Matunga, far from the main venue at Goregaon, to involve the youth. But almost all those who registered for the camp used it only for sleeping at night and spent all their time at the main WSF venue, attending seminars and participating in the singing and dancing.

Dorothy Keet of South Africa, who has greyed her hair defeating apartheid, said that this growing involvement of young people with social and political concerns was the one great hope for the future.

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