Larzac 2003 : 300 000 people !

Cet article a été écrit comme mon témoignage sur le rassemblement Larzac 2003 à destination des participants d'Ecotopia 2003. Ecotopia est une rencontre internationale de militants écologistes, et prend place cette années en Ukraine. La langue habituelle d'Ecotopia est l'anglais, et c'est pourquoi l'article est en anglais. Cet article pourra donc interesser les lecteurs internationaux qui ne lisent pas bien le français, et veulent se renseigner sur la rencontre Larzac 2003. Plus d'infos sur Ecotopia : http://www.eyfa.org/gatherings.htm

I wrote this article to describe my experience of the Larzac 2003 gathering, and is primarily aimed at the participants of Ecotopia 2003. Ecotopia uis an international gathering of ecologist activists, and it takes place in Ukraine this year. The usual language in Ecotopia is english, that's why this article is in english. As such it might interest international readers who don't easily read french and who are looking for a report on the Larzac 2003 gathering. To learn more about Ecotopia : http://www.eyfa.org/gatherings.htm

I'm Vincent from France and i've been taking part in some previous Ecotopias (Polen, Czeck Republic, Scotland, Germany). I will not come this year in Ecotopia in Ukraine. I'm just coming back from the GREAT gathering of Lazac 2003 and I want to give you a report of my impressions there. As an Ecotopian, i will also compare this meeting to some traits of Ecotopia.

"On August 8, 9 and 10 in Larzac, South of France, a gathering against the WTO, and for promoting alternatives to economic globalisation, brought together as many as 300 000 people! It's a very important milestone as it has enabled a meeting of very different people, organisations and fights, that are usually separate. It has shown the enormous number and strength of the people who are disatisfied with economic globalisation, and who think that "other worlds are possible". I should post pictures on the web soon and i'll let you know" (end of the summary).

A little background : Larzac 2003 was a gathering with the main focus : "Contre l'OMC : d'autres mondes sont possibles", which translates : "Against WTO (World Traid Union) : Other worlds are possible". It was organised mainly by an NGO : "Ensemble pour un monde solidaire", wich translates more or less by "Together for a World of Solidarity", as well as "La Confédération paysanne" ("Peasantry Confederation"), which is a Trade Union of farmers, defending the rights of small and/or organic farmers, and representing about 25% of the french farmers.

La Confédération Paysanne has become very famous in France with the "dismouting" of a Mac Donald restaurant that was under construction in Millau (near the Larzac) in 1999. This action was meant to be a symbol, to get attention of the public to the danger of the WTO, transnational corporations, and junkfood. La Confédération paysanne fight these, because they consider them to be a threat to small farmers, to healthy food production, and more generally to Liberty and to Nature.

The leader of La Confédération Paysanne, Jose Bove, has already been 3 or 4 times in prison, because of this action against Mc Donald and also because of the destrucution of transgenic fields. Indeed Jose Bove was imprisonned for this Mac Donald dismouting, at the beginning of the year, and he was released just a week ago.

Other actions that have made José Bové famous in France and in the whole world, are actions of destructing transgenic fields or seed stocks, and the taking part in international resistance to economic globalisation, through the Porto-Alegre and Annemasse Counter-summit, and through the international peasant organisation Via Campesina.

Of course these imprisonnements have also conducted Jose Bove to take position against the criminalisation of activist and trade-union actions, and against the bad conditions of prisonners in France.

The Larzac is a barren land in south of France : it's a "plateau" (high plain), very flat, with little woodland and little water. The weather is very cold and windy in the winter, and very dry and hot in the summer. There are few inhabitants, and agriculture is mainly extensive sheep raising.

In 1973 there was a enormous protest against a plan of the french goverment to turn a huge part of this area into a military training place. This protest was very important and symbolic, it succeeded and the project of military training place was withdrawn.

It held on 3 days : Friday the 8th, saturday 9 and sunday 10 august. It was located on the small village of l'Hospitalet, 20 km South from Millau, 100 km north from Montpellier. 100 000 people were expected.

I arrived there (by car...) on the friday evening. By using the small roads I managed to avoid traffic jams. It must be said that the public transport are rather poor in this area of France, and they stop at Millau, 20 km from the gathering, so people had to go there by car, hitch-hiking or bike. Most people went by car i'm afraid...

The intention of the organisers was to distinguish between parking places and camping places. It turned out that a lot of people camped next to their car or truck, and later quite a few cars or trucks came into camping places, because people removed signs and fences!

My first impression is of a gigantic meeting : big distancies between parking places, camping places, and the gathering itself. Lots of people, lots of open-air "shops", lots of stands by NGO, trade-union and political parties.

The weather was very hot. At first i was oppressed by the size of the event and the number of people. This size made it very different of Ecotopia, and very far away from the motto "Small is Beautiful". And yet when I arrived we were "only" 50 000...

The tents and stages were far apart enough so that the sound of one would not disturb the others, wich was a very good idea. As a drawback, 2 stages were directing towards camping areas, and the walking distances were important.

The main idea is to oppose the concept of "sustainable development". Economic development on the western model involves more and more consumption of matter and energy, and the development of poor countries (4 or 5 billions people), on the same model as rich countries (1 billion people consuming 80% of the world ressources) would lead to a disaster. Economic growth is nethertheless considered by all western economists and politicians as a founding statement that can not be criticized.

- Decrease our level of consumption (in rich countries) in a smart and thikful manner. If we don't take this need of consumption descrease into account in economics in politics from now on, there will sonner or later be a big crisis that will force us to do so.

After the 4 speakers presented their ideas, a microphone was passed in the tent for the public to react. It turned out that even alternative people don't like it when the very idea of development and progress is questionned. The debate also went on "is it possible to live cheaply (with style ;) ) ?" : some people; who actually live on a low income and are happy to do so and encourage people to do so, met with the resistance of other low-income-people who were upset by these statements, because they find it very difficult to pay the rent and raise their children with a low income!

The structure of the talk was rather formal : 4 "lecturers" lined at a table speak first, then the audience can ask a few questions. The audience was large (about 120 people), and there were microphones and speakers to amplifiy the sound. On this forum, the lecturers were carefull to leave much time for the debate, but it was going to get worse on the next day (even more people and even more formal structure).

The way in which most workshops are organised in Ecotopia is much different : usually people sit in a circle, and the workshop organiser is more a stimulator than a lecturer. The number of people is small, usually 4 to 20. there is no microphone, everyone can just speak.

I found that it's a very important point, as a participant not only learns on the topic of the workshop : s/he (he or she) also benefits from "People empowering" : s/he learns that s/he can talk in front of others, that his/her meaning is important too, and that the knowledge raises from the interactions between people, rather than from the speech of one lecturer.

I was happy to witness that people talked to each other easily, even without knowing each other, for a few light words or for a serious discussion. People used "Tu" instead of "Vous".

In french, "Tu" is used when talking with the family, the friends, the close collegues. "Vous" is used when talking to strangers, and as a mark of respect with people you know (elderly people, "important" people, etc.). So the common use of "Tu" on this gathering was expressing a cheering feeling of fellowship and comradness, abolishing the usal distances between strangers.

I arrived late and the tent was overcrowded with sitting people, and surrounded by standing people. The characters spoke arab, with frenchs subtitles, but i could not read the subtitles due to the crowd, so I could not understand anything and instead of seeing the film I went to get some food.

I saw 2 anarchist kitchen where "clients" payed what they felt like for the food. There were a few organic kitchen run by organic food organisations, a few by small organic producers themselves. A lot of shops and kitchen were selling non-organic, but quality small-scale agriculture : a lot by local comitees of La Confederation Paysanne, and also some by individual farmers. Another lot were organisations that are not directly concerned with agriculture, but who sold food or drinks as a way to raise funds : NGOs, minorities, etc. And another lot were people who were just doing their occasionnal or regular business of selling food, sadly these people were outnumbering the others, and made no effort to provide local or quality products, and they sold the ordinary beer, orange juice, water bottles, sausage-sandwich, and fries, that can be found on any other gathering.

Generally the price of food and drinks was rather high, and the food provided by farmers and organisations was definitely not more expensive, and indeed usually cheaper, than that of people making business selling ordinary food.

Yet, on the saturday the queues in front of food shops became quite long, even with these 420 shops and kitchens, and i guess that without all the people selling ordinary food for business, the search for food would have become a nightmare, and would have led to riots and stealing!

I was tired and i went to sleep. I found thad the music stages were rather louds, and oriented towards camping places. There were also several trucks on the camping places, playing techno music ALL NIGHT LONG. So every participant had to sleep with the continuous music noise, especially the boom-boom of bass transmitted very strongly by the dry earth.

I am very angry with these techo-people : they know that most people did not come for techno music but for a meeting against economic globalisation. They know that most people go on a camping place to SLEEP. By providing techno music all night long, they annoy 99,9% of the participants, for the only pleasure of themselves and a very little bunch of techno-fans (I saw no more than ten people in front of each truck, each time i went by).

I feel that these people live a sort of transe in their own world, in wich they give themselves a mission to make a music wich never stops, and they just don't care with the needs of other people. They've forgotten what the word RESPECT means.

I remember that in Ecotopia Polen, Emily told us at the morning circle, that the techno music in the night was disturbing, and that the spirits of nature (she is into native-american-indian religion) had fled the place, which was very bad for all of us! Most people complained in a more ordinary manner that it was disturbing the sleep and the quietness, and it was agreed that any amplified music should stop at midnight. Altghough this decision was not 100% applied, it contributed to the quietness of the camp.

In Larzac no such measure was taken, and we had to suffer all night long boom-boom. On such a huge gathering, maybe they could have tried to provide a "free music area", far away from the camping place, to try and get these techno-trucks out the camping places?

On saturday morning I went on another forum about the repression by fear of the resistance to liberalism. A french judge explained that since 4 or 5 five years, the laws, and the behaviour of police forces and of courts, restrain the right of individuals to a fair justice. For example, the rate of people put in prison is very high and matches the high levels of after second world war, although the prisons are already overcrowded. Laws in project should restrain it further : for example, a person admitting a crime to the police, could be going in prison without a fair trial in a court!

After those speakers made their speach, the microphone was passed to people in the audience who wanted to make a comment or ask a question. I noticed that the longer the people waited to get the microphone, the more their talking was marked with anger and frustration. They would have needed a Vibe Watcher to raise the point! ;) (A Vibe Watcher is a person in an ecotopian meeting that is appointed to watch the emotions of participants and report any problem s/he notices, and by doing so, help prevent build-up of frustration or misundestandings).

This kind of big audience where few people can react, and have limited time for it, really exacerbate the frustration of the people, of not being able to express themselves and to share with others. It stresses once again how much the shape of Ecotopia workshops is important : small circles, where everyone can express themselves.

During the night from friday to saturday, and all saturday long, people kept arriving on the camp, creating massive traffic jams (a person told me that they left Millau at 9 pm and arrived at 5 am, which means that it took them 8 hours to cover 20 km, in the middle of the night!!!).

On saturday between noon and 4 pm I went for food, water, and a rest in the shade. The queues in front of the water tanks had become 10 metres long, and it could take half on hour before you could fill your bottle. The queues in front of the food shops at the central location were huge too.

Most small producers were located in a sort of market, wich was 15 minutes far by foot. There was a long and large uninterrupted column of people walking there, and another same colum walking back by another path. It ressembled colums of refugees fleeing a town under bombing. It was really an amazing sight. By that time there were about 120 000 people on the gathering.

The sun was very strong and quite a few people exhibited very red skins. People wore all kinds of hats on their head, and there even was a fashion (which i followed) of folding the programm of the meeting into a paper hat... The temperature was very high (the whole France, and most of Europe, is suffering from extrememely high temperatures and drought at the moment), about 40°C in the shade. As the soil was dry, and because so many people were walking around, dust was filling the air.

I went for a nap in a pine wood near the food market, and it was crowded! People were sitting and lying on the earth, filling nearly enterely the shady places in the whole wood! Really weird!

In the late afternoon I went to a forum about liberalisation of public services and especially environnement services. Vandana Shiva was expected, but was retained in India by the preparation of the anniversary of the death of Gandhi. Yet the other speakers (Agnes Bertrand (IRE), Lori Wallach (Public Citizen) and Raoul Jennar) were very interesting and the audience was totally silent in carefull listening, although the tent was even more overcrowded than the day before and there were maybe 300 people attending this forum.

The speakers explained about the GATS (General Agreement on the Trade of Services) prepared by the World Trade Union. This Agreement would have terrible consequences, making all parts of public services open to companies searching only for maximum profit. This agreement is terrible because it says which national or european laws can be taken, and wich laws and regulations can not be taken or must be dismantled!

So this agreement highly restrains the power of the, democratically elected, national or european parliaments to make their own rules, so it's a big threat to democracy. This agreement was prepared in secret and the information to politicians is restricted so that they don't realise what this agreement is really about. It was even more secret for ordinary citizens of coutries member of the WTO. An interessing fact is that european negociators were the most willing to push this agreement... On this occasion Europe was no couterweight to USA, it was even taking the lead of the economic globalisation!

Luckily the information about the content of this agreement was made available by leaks, and the resistance is growing.The agreement will be examined at the next WTO meeting in Cancun in September wich means that this fight is really urgent now!

You can read more on the following link http://www.citizen.org/trade/wto/gats/index.cfm and I encourage you to attend the workshops that will be organised on this subject in Ecotopia.

After this forum i met old friends and we went for a drink. By this time, the whole space was FULL of people inspite of the huge dimensions of the site. The place was just full of people everywhere, the air was full of dust and still very hot, you had to see it to believe it. Also there were no showers as the water was scarce, so everyone was becomming rather dirty, with skin and clothes stained by sweat and dust.

Talking to people I learnt that there were an estimated 300 000 (yes, three hundred thousands!) people on the site by this saturday evening. Indeed on this same saturday at 4 pm the organisers, together with the police forces, decided to declare that the site was closed and to putbarrageson all roadaccess.Theytook this decision because they felt that it would put participants in danger to let event more people come. Some of the barrages were even installed very far frome the site, and the motorway was even blocked 100 km north from the site! Later in the night i've seen the desert motorway, with only emergency and police cars passing by with their flashing lights. Strange sight.

With so many people there, it seems that even more merchants had come by, and some people were just tourists or consumers on this gathering. There was even a small demonstration touring on the camp to shout to the crowd : "this is not a market place or a festival! Inform yourself, resist globalisation and join the fight!". Yet i think that the "tourists" were a small minority.

The diversity of people was striking : babies, children, adults, elderly people. Punks, anarchists, ecologists, peasants, tourists... I even saw an hindu ermit : nearly naked with a string-woven slips, a small bag of the same fabric, sun-burnt body, long gray hair and beard, and walking on strange wood-sole sandals.

The coming together of people of such wide horizons is a very important thing. That's a point that need to be underlined : in France everybody do their things in their corners : politic parties, NGOs, trade-unions are all very separate. Communists hardly talk to ecologists, there are 3 different ecologist politic parties, and at least 5 different extrem-left parties (more or less equal to communists, i hope they'll forgive me!). Ecologist NGOs don't want to be affiliated with any politic party. Often, trade-unions even manage to demonstrate separetely from each other to stress the differences between them.

The meeting was labeled "extreme gauche", ie "radical left" by the press, and that's a political labelling. But instead of a political gathering, it was really a coming together of ALL people resisting economic globalisation : ecologists, trade unions, all sort of NGOs, all sort of people who think that another world was possible.

The " mouvement alter-mondialiste" (movement for a different globalisation) seems to be the only one capable of making all people come together, as they proved earlier in France in Annemmasse, the counter-Summit of Evian.

I think that the amount of people who came will really shake the politicians and make them realize that the people are fed up with globalisation and liberal economy. I think that it's a strong signal to politicians of all sides.

A criticism could be that this meeting was very french : it was meant to be a gathering for french people, not for european or international people. Nearly all forums, films and speeches were in french. A few speakers were coming from other coutries, but the people who actually attented the gathering were nearly all french.

Maybe for fighting globalisation it would be good to organise international gathering. Maybe the international counter-summits play this role, and we needed this very french gathering in between?

On saturday evening I then saw a film called "Attention danger travail" wich i would translate "Caution, Work!". It presents people that quit their jobs (badly paid, strenuous jobs in the industry or in services), and how they enjoy longtime unemployment, having less money but a lot more time and freedom. It also presented the propaganda of the french government and french employers, about the hapiness of working, and about how bad it is not to work and the measures that should be taken against unemployed people who refuse a job they're offered.

I knew already of theses ideas because i've been in the activist movements for a while, and because i've also been a happy unemployed! But this film spreads these ideas outside the little circle of well informed activists, and that's great. In France 99% people think it's bad to be unemployed, and they will always encourage you to accept any job, even a strenuous, precarious and badly paid one.They don't realise that with 3 millions unemployed people in France, and with a lot of the working people who are unhappy or ill because of the stress of their working conditions, it's the system that is wrong, not the unemployed person.

For this film too, the cinema tent was overcrowed. People laughed and smiled and reacted to the film, partly because they were surprised by the ideas expressed by the "work objectors", partly because they were happy to see that their own underground, hidden or confused thoughts and longings were clearly and openly expressed by others. I believe that these ideas and words gave to the unemployed people in the audience a sudden relief to the feeling of guilt that is untertained by the mainstream propaganda!

Then i went to the BIG concert by Manu Chao (very famous french-spanich singer, wich ideas and lyrics join the fight against economic globalisation, although he's more on the partying and poetic side than on the strictly political side). After Manu Chao, Asian Dub Foundation played.

A woman and then a man spoke : they had been taking part in the fight against the military camp in Larzac 30 years ago. It was very touching to see these elderly people, with white hair, almost fragile, tell us a strong message : "the fight against the military camp 30 years ago was a success. there is hope in succes of the fight if a lot of people with faith come together. A fight can be legitimate even if illegal by the laws. And they encouraged us to fight in turn against the evils of our time : WTO, economic globalisation, the restriction of freedom by laws and by police forces."

An amazing thing about Larzac : the air stays warm until about 11 pm, then within an hour the night gets very cold, and you need to wear trousers and a jumper if you don't want to be shivering with cold!

The stage, and the space in front of it, was HUGE! The technical means were also enormous : everything you see usually on big concerts : a truck that provide the power for the show, towers of speakers, lots of lights, another tower for the technicians, and 2 giant screens. The space in front of the stage, although very wide and long, was filled in people, maybe 200 000. There were uninterrupted lines of people going in and out of the concert.

Despite the huge and costly technical means, all concerts were free and i wonder how they paid this all. I guess that musicians and technicians played for free, but the materials must be very expensive to rent...

More generally the technical and physical means used in this gathering were enormous and impressive : several big tents, a sound system in each, big video screens, water trucks, food trucks, garbage trucks, sewage trucks (for the very smelly lines of platic toilets, yuk), health and emergencies tents cars and trucks, signs and fences everywhere... Although some points can be criticised, i'm really admirative of the people who managed to organised such a huge event : they are not specialists of such huge events, they are "small" NGOs and trade unions. They were helped by hundreds of volunteers.

Although much of the organisation must have been thoroughly planned, i've heard that a few days before the meeting, nothing was planned to ensure the selective collecting of garbage. So only a few days before the event, 2 volunteers noted it and took the responsability to set it up! And everywhere on the camp, they were bins for disposing selectively glass, paper or other garbage.

A major concern was fire : a few days before, 1500 hectares of wood had burnt nearby, and it took a week to the firemen to control and put out the fire. The site was very very dry, and a fire could have had terrible consequencies with 300 000 people on site and with only narrow roads to evacuate them. So there were big signs "No Fires" everywhere on the camp. Near every bin, there was a special metal bin for cigarettes-ends : as you know a cigarette-end can put a bin on fire, which would have certainly started THE big fire.

Indeed, a fire started 20 km away from the camp on saturday evening, and was burning in its direction. After a few hours the firemen controlled it and the camp was not threatened with fire, nor with the need to evacuate.

On sunday morning I packed and leaved, not waiting for the official conclusion speeches. After some jams in the center of the village, the small roads were clear and i could drive off easily, after packing my car with hitch-hikers! ;)

I heard on the radio the summary of the conclusion words by Jose Bove : At first he praises the unification of so many various fights and people on this gathering. He then sets next appointments :