What a morning! I stopped writing in the early hours of morning (it is on the computer, later will post here) and start my day at 7:30 am, rushing to get to the harbor in Kowloon with some folks from Focus on the Global South as one of the very few press members to be in the Fluvial Protest Boats that Filipino and Thai fisherman rented!
We left the harbor and toured all around Hong Kong for an hour or more before we get near the Hong Kong Convention Center (Mom, it is really an amazing building, I wish you could be here and see it yourself, and I also hope that one day our dear Istanbul will have one just like this). As the sight of the coast guard, press and the HKCEC became closer, one of the organizers of the protests, Rusty i think his name was, came up to me and said:"hello my dear journalist friend, now for you guys two of our comrades will jump on the ice cold water for the cause!" I thought he was joking for a second, making fun of the yellow journalists constantly hungry for that kind of bullshit, but he was not! I went downstairs to the deck and saw two Thai fisherman, barefoot and freezing, waiting there. At the end those two did not jump, two filipinos from Mamamayan-pakisama showed courage and made quite a scene in the early hours of Tuesday.
As soon as we decked in Hong Kong, I went straight to HKCEC for the Pascal Lamy's (the bold French guy who became the Director General of the WTO recently)long-awaited inauguration speech, did a live coverage of the event for Acik Radyo, and witnessed 75 Koreans jumping off the water from the pier outside the HKCEC, from the window of the convention center. Suddenly the calm and clean streets of HK started to look like Fallujah, or the movie Robocop, when the hk government send off thousands of SWAT teams to hold back the calmest protest I have ever seen, no violence at all, people had flowers in their hands for god's sake.
Overall my observation is that the Asian worker unions, and groups are very well organized, diciplined and peaceful in their protests and willing to do anything to beat the WTO negotiations. Getting wet is definetly is not an issue and from what I hear, some koreans are willing to go further and repeat what happened in cancun in 2003.
Later I met with the official turkish delegation to the WTO and the NGOs who came with them, interview one of them, and had a great dinner at the GRAND HYATT (how do I always end up at these weird dinners, I think they find me), DIMSUM a la turca! There are some turks that are riots, I have no words to describe the things they do, it is so turkish it is hilarious! The way they ask the check...and my fav: turkish speakers, you will love this one: all the guys at the delegation, businessman and all, call the charger of the cellular phones....sarz aleti! I was dying, trying to hold my breath, not to laugh hard as I wanted to.
Anyways, it is 2 am again and I am awake, tomorrow is another day!
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