‘Spontaneous’ Protests Wake Audience Up
BALI, Aug 12 (TerraViva) – The lightning protests happened quite quickly — twice – at Wednesday’s plenary session at ICAAP, but the two chairs of the session, Marina Mahathir and UNDP’s Jeff Malley, handled them quite deftly.First, the activists filed into the front section of the cavernous plenary hall of the Bali International Convention Centre and shouted slogans against big drug companies, causing the speaker, Indonesia’s Nafsiah Mboi, to pause during her speech on lessons learned from the country’s experience with AIDS. At one point, one activist took over the podium, forcing her to step to the side for a moment.
A bit uncomfortably later on, Malley said to the audience that surely been ‘woken up’ by the protest: “Thank you for that brief intervention.”
But just when it seemed things had settled down, the same group filed back in with placards against patents on HIV drugs that were marked ‘Lives Before Profit’. This time, the protesters came in at the end of the remarks by Pakistan’s Javed Jabbar, who had just railed against the intellectual property rights structure on drugs.
“Thank you for not doing this in the middle of presentation,” he said, gratefully. Then, Mahathir quipped: “We like spontaneity in the HIV world.”
From the plenary hall, this set of ‘breaking news’ came knocking loudly at the Media Centre’s door. “No to patents!” they shouted over and over outside, before barging into the cramped room to give a brief statement. “Do you want news? Then follow us, we will be making a statement next door,” said Shiva P, a spokesman for the group.
Before the journalists could gather their thoughts — and their pens, notebooks and cameras — the group made its way down to the Exhibit Hall and ‘invaded’ the Abbott Industries booth, where activists proceeded with their impromptu mini press conference.
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Breathe in. . . breathe out
Some ICAAP sessions were just meant to lull people to sleep. At a discussion that gathered religious leaders from the region to talk about faith-based groups’ response to the HIV and AIDS, one of the speakers noted that the already sparse crowd was starting to fall into a mid-afternoon stupor. So he did the next best thing — conduct a brief meditation session.
“Shake your hands and move your shoulders. . . relax. Close your eyes, breathe in love. . . and breathe out love. . . ,” he said over and over until everyone in the room was silent. Whether half of the audience fell asleep or not, no one will ever know for sure. (END/IPSAP/TV/09)
