In April, the All Workers Conference of Mauritius, Indian Ocean [east of Madagascar] added its voice to the international protest movement against the IMF andWorld Bank. The All Workers Conference, a platform of trade union federations, women, youth and ecology protection associations, organised two major events. The first event was the hosting of a Regional Workshop of the newly formed Southern African Peoples‚ Solidarity Network, held April 17-19. The second was an All Workers Conference of 600 union and association delegates debating the theme "After Seattle, Humanity Can Create a New World." This event, held April 21-22, was supported by 50 Years is Enough. The 50 Years is Enough demands of the IMF and World bank formulated in the run-up to the Washington demonstrations was distributed to and adopted by the All Workers Conference. The All Workers Conference also formally transmitted these demands to the Mauritian Prime Minister.

  The 4-day Southern African Peoples‚ Solidarity Network workshop on the WTO and globalization was held before the All Workers Conference. Some 20 delegates of organizations from South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Swaziland, Uganda and Mauritius came together to discuss new perspectives opening up after Seattle 1999 and Washington 2000. Debates were focused on what was on the neo-liberal agenda in Se attle, and how this agenda was being imposed in the Southern African region through trade agreements and unilateral laws such as the US‚s Africa Growth and Opportunity Bill, or through African regional blocks such as COMESA and the SADC. Two declarations: one against the WTO agenda and another against the Africa Growth and Opportunity Bill were adopted by the SAPSN workshop.

  The emphasis in the 2-day All Workers Conference held after the SAPSN workshop was on the importance of linking up regionally and internationally to the world-wide movement opposing neo-liberalism. The fact that there was a SAPSN workshop with some of the delegates staying over to participate in the All Workers Conference facilitated this link-up. Resolutions debated and adopted in the conference were centered on the need to regionalise the struggle to oppose capitalist globalisation and to contribute towards developing an alternative where human rights and human needs are cared for. There were discussions on new forms of regional trade union organisation that aim at creating a new form of "collective bargaining" at the regional level and at the international level where appropriate.

  In the conference, the All Workers affirmed its being part of the international movement that has risen in Washington to oppose the IMF and World Bank, to oppose all IMF/World Bank conditions and to ultimately demand the closing of the IMF and the World Bank. The All Workers is committed to struggling for a new international economic system where equality reigns.

  There were also resolutions against repressive laws in Mauritius such as the Public Security Act, which threatens a permanent State of Emergency in the country, against privatization and the commodification of social services such as water, electricity or telecommunications and against the massive delocalization of Mauritian capital. This delocalisation has been accentuated by the passage of AGOA, with capital leaving the country for other African countries, such as Madagascar, where wages are the lowest. This implies both a dilapidation of the national wealth created by Mauritian workers from the period of slavery and indentured-labour up to modern wage slavery, and over-exploitation of workers in the region. The All Workers, particularly after this conference, is committed to struggling for the uniformization of working conditions so that they are pushed upwards, rather than downwards, which the present delocalisation aims to do.

Declaration adopted by the 600 delegates of the All Workers Conference

Port Louis, Mauritius: 21 April 2000
Humanity Can Create a New World

 In our first Labour Day celebrations of the new millenium, we meet in a new spirit of hope.

Everything we were told was "inevitable" is not "inevitable." When we were instructed to adapt or perish, we resisted this very instruction. Today we know we were right to do so.

So, we meet today, 21st April, 2000 in order to say loud and clear: "After Seattle and Washington, we now know that Humanity can create a New World!"

We are aware as we meet today in these times of capitalist globalization, that over the past 10 to 25 years, all the rights for which working people have fought over the past two hundred years to win, have been attacked again and again--by the bosses, by the government and by the financial institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.

We meet in a state of awareness. We are aware that the global response to these attacks on our rights has started to win gains. The beginning of new successes in our struggles was symbolized by the mass meetings, rallies and demonstrations held on 30th November in Seattle. This movement opposes the deadly logic of the World Trade Organization,

 And we recall that we, the All Workers‚ Conference, as a sign of our endorsing of this movement, held a public distribution of leaflets in the centre of Port Louis, after our planned demonstration was banned by the police, on the very same day, i.e. 30th November, 1999.

And we bear in mind that our 15th All Workers‚ Conference - "Africa Protest Day" - held on 17th October, 1999 was consciously in preparation for what only later was called The Battle of Seattle, that is to say we adopted for that conference two weeks prior to Seattle, the very same call: "WTO: No New Round, Turn Around!"

We bear in mind that the movement around Seattle represents a new unification of all sorts of diverse currents - peoples‚ movements, organizations of ecologists, feminists, peasants, and the entire working class movement in the United States, and all these in alliance with immense peasant organizations from India and France, in particular, and mass movements from all over Asia and Africa, as well as trade unions from the whole of the Third World - all these in alliance with artists, thinkers and academics, backed up by important groups of "alternative media"; and this huge movement succeeded in blocking the WTO ministerial meeting, and obliged the world as a whole to begin a profound critical analysis of the philosophy behind the WTO, and against the complete lack of economic democracy in the WTO, as well as the WTO‚s undermining of the little political democracy for which we have fought so hard over hundreds of years;

And today we meet in a world-wide coming together of all the same peoples‚ organizations, networks, unions, women‚s groups, peasants organizations, ecologists. Once again getting together in the same way as we did to oppose the WTO at Seattle, but this time in order to put together our strength in order to oppose the IMF and World Bank who held their general assemblies amid huge street demonstrations in Washington on 16th and 17th April.

And our Conference is being held today in order, once again, to cry out against the destruction being perpetrated by these two institutions world-wide, and to add our voice to the voice of all the demonstrators in Washington and all over the world - in the union trade movement, and the peoples‚ movements to say: Close down the IMF and World Bank! Create new institutions that are both more democratic and less secretive, and which make as their aim the nurturing of and care for the whole of humanity and our planet instead of their out-moded aim of profit for corporations and their bosses.

Humanity can indeed create a new world.