For more than sixty years, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank together with their partner regional development banks and export credit agencies, have used international finance capital to exercise control and restructure the societies of the South to serve the interests of global private corporations and the economic and geo-political agenda of the few powerful nations that control these institutions. The resulting effects on people’s lives, on communities, on the environment, and on the economic as well as political structures in the South have been profound and over the years have generated numerous resistance struggles against these institutions.

1. Five years after the first international South-North consultation on debt was held in Dakar, Senegal, representatives from 51 countries convened the second, ‘Resistance and Alternatives to Debt Domination’, from 28 to 30 September 2005 in Havana, Cuba. We commemorated the 20th anniversary of the historic Havana meetings that focused the world's attention on the true nature of the debt crisis and strengthened resistance to the payment of an enslaving debt.

Developments leading to the 6th Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization show little in store for the majority of economically marginalized and debt-burdened people worldwide save the promise of wider and deeper trade liberalization both in goods and services. It is an opportune time to make the inextricable links between debt and trade doubly clear and to expose them as mutually reinforcing sides of the same coin. It is through the nexus of debt domination and exploitative trade that international finance institutions, North governments and corporations continue to condemn the South to poverty and deprivation.

As the 6th WTO Ministerial Summit draws near, so does the noose tighten on women’s rights to access water, health and other basic services. Deeper and more expansive liberalization measures are being sought particularly on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the first legally enforceable multilateral instrument covering 160 service sectors from childcare and education to water use and sanitation.

HONG KONG—The suppressed violence of the Hong Kong police broke through the thinly-veiled façade of ‘politeness’ and ‘responsible behaviour’ through a series of brutal actions beginning evening of December 17 and continuing till early morning of December 18. Sources suggest that over 600 protesters of the ongoing World Trade Organization negotiations were arrested around 3 am on Sunday morning, and were stripped and beaten up in police lock-ups like in Kong Tong (East Kowloon).