House of Commons

Pink flowers in their sunhats, a line of Japanese files silently through the middle of a packed press conference with Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and the vice-president of Vietnam, Ngyugen Bihn.

Between them they carry a 20-foot banner which reads: ‘‘Pull out US forces from Iraq; Stop sending Japanese troops.’’ After a seemingly pointless circuit of the room, they move on.

At the Iraq Gallery—a space dedicated to artistic protest against the war, the anger, frustration and sadness over a war that these activists failed to prevent is given a sense of scale by a haunting 30-foot mural by a group of Swiss artists. Six-foot steel walls stand ready to be scrawled with their feelings.

‘‘The sentiment is more anti-American than pro-Iraq,’’ reckons Mamta Murthy an organiser of the exhibition. Networking with organisations like the Anti-War Coalition groups from Munidal Brazil, Africa Forum, Greece, Spain, the Phillipines and Thailand, Murthy found an entire virtual community protesting the Iraq war.

Opposition to the war is in the genes of the disparate groups who’ve come to the World Social Forum, all of whom are now faced with the choice of what they do next—especially after after a tidal wave of protests worldwide failed to shock and awe Bush and Blair into stepping back from the brink…

‘‘We may not have stopped the war in Iraq,’’ says Jeremy Corbyn, British member of parliament and anti-war thorn in Tony Blair’s side. ‘‘But maybe we’ve stopped the next one. We’ve made it much harder for them to pull off another war against the ‘Axis of Evil’.’’

For Corbyn, the war was about democracy, but not Iraq’s: ‘‘Bush thought he needed a war to win votes. But it’s also about the US achieving global security after 9/11 and oil supplies.’’

He sees a frightening correlation between the neo-liberal economic prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, imposed through conditions attached to loans, and the mass sell-off of Iraq’s national assets, imposed by force.

‘‘There’s this assumption that the only way to run an economy is to privatise everything, allow foreign ownership and allow 100 per cent repatriation of profits—it’s very curious,” says Corbyn.

‘‘If and when a representative government does achieve power in Iraq, it’s power to influence the country’s economy will be limited, as everything will be in foreign hands,’’ he adds.

‘‘Iraq is a very special country,’’ says a grim-faced Amir Al-Rekaby, the leader of the Iraqi National Democratic Opposition. Al-Rekaby is an Iraqi, and it sounds as if he is about to eulogise the beauty of his motherland. But his next sentence is heavy with cynicism: ‘‘It’s position is very strategic and it has oil.’’

His explanation of why the war took place is equally stark: ‘‘The US invaded Iraq because it wants hegemony over the world,’’ he says. ‘‘We progressives can fight them, but we need to give ourselves the tools to do it.’’ Corbyn and he are hoping the WSF is the place those tools can be forged.