IN THIS ISSUE

VISIBLE BORDERS & HIDDEN BORDERS
Towards an elite peace in Kashmir

MOBILISATIONS OF SOLIDARITY AND CITIZENSHIP
Renewed hope for fisher folks

PAKISTANI WOMEN ARE NOT SUBMISSIVE !
Most colourful women

CULTURES & SOLIDARITY
Karachi, nice lesson against received ideas!

A GLIMPSE OF THE KARACHI WSF
Karachi, an atypical forum
 ISSUE N°4
May 2006
Special Issue Karachi WSF


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EDITORIAL

Gathered in a joyous, secular, pacified and intensely political atmosphere, we were about 30000 to freely get organised, get mobilised, to debate, protest, and dance. It is in this World Social Forum time-space that all Pakistanis, women included, could express themselves freely as they would do in private.

It was an unprecedented mobilisation: during six days, progressive political actors, dissidents, and resisters, most of them working and oppressed people from all over Pakistan, got together and exchanged ideas. It was with sparkling eyes that they met thousands of different faces: rural, urban, tribal, Pakistanis speaking various languages, and a minority of foreigners, 1700 participants, from 58 countries.

Pakistan is on the front line of the war on terrorism declared by the United States; it endures a military regime, its society is still sometimes feudal and it suffers from violence by religious fundamentalists. For this reason, we would have preferred that the defenders of peace, democracy and freedom from all over the world had chosen not to stay aside from the forum and that they would lend their support to the Pakistani popular movements.

Karachi WSF 2006 will be remembered as an historic and outstanding landmark and we hope the International Council of the World Social Forum will lend a hand to Pakistani organizers and to all the other movements from Asia who have so much to give for the building of a better world.


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Towards an elite peace in Kashmir
Once again, it is thanks to the initiative of the social and civic movements from the South Asia region and the world over that an official connection has been made possible between India and Pakistan. On Sunday 26th March, in the Karachi Sports Complex where the World Social Forum (WSF) took place, the leaders from different Kashmiri movements publicly gathered around a debate on the peace process in Kashmir.

 

Renewed hope for fisher folks
The Karachi world social forum gave the opportunity to the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum and its leader Mohammed Ali Shah to organise the international fisherfolks convention in the small port of Ibrahim Hyderi on Saturday 25th March .Thousands of fisher workers, some ten thousand people according to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, men and women from all over Pakistan had gathered under a huge tent to take part in this impressive demonstration.

 

Most colourful women
From the opening session of the World social forum, tone is given: women are present in large numbers and they do not hesitate in raising their voices. In the crowd, Laila Dossa, Kenyan by birth and a Pakistani by adoption, chairperson of an association for deaf people, and Samina Peerzada, famous Pakistani director and major activist for human rights, speak for a long time about the idea foreigners usually have of their country and of women’s conditions. According to them, the status of Pakistani women is overridden and many efforts have to be made so that their rights are respected and their voices heard, but things have been changing, as proves the important presence of women from the opening of WSF.

 

Karachi, nice lesson against received ideas!
Destroying clichés, open-mindedness, mutual respect and discovery of the other … these are the words which symbolise one of the characteristics of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Karachi. More than any other WSF, this meeting will have permitted to set out in a very strong way an alternative to the restrictive and often negative vision given by media about Pakistan and its inhabitants.

 

Karachi, an atypical forum
The richness of world social forums lies in the variety which everyone can contribute to. Karachi’s one was not the most expected; for a long time it has been trivialized, even denigrated and many people were puzzled regarding the legitimacy of a forum in Pakistan. So that it will have attracted only few foreign delegates and will not have managed to arouse the interest of the international media… A poor track record, do you think? Far from it! Thanks to the organizers’ incredible dynamism and to Pakistanis’ great mobilization, the forum was an unprecedented success.