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(Special Envoy)
Nairobi,
20/01/2007 (SPS) 7th World Social Forum (WSF), the annual rendezvous
of anti-globalisation and anti-colonialism movements, organisations
and actors of the civil societies, opened Saturday in Nairobi with a
march of protest marked with a distinguished participation of a
Saharawi delegation representing many organisations and actors of
the civil society in the Saharawi refugee camps.
In his speech opening the Forum, the ex-President of Zambia, Kenneth
Kaunda, especially underlined that all the active forces of the
world’s civil societies must imperatively join forces "to struggle
together against poverty ".
The members of the Saharawi delegation, on their part, had had many
contacts with members of other participating delegations,
journalists who were attracted by the dynamism of the Saharawi
group, whose members were lifting the Saharawi flags and chanting
slogans condemning the Moroccan colonial presence in the Western
Sahara.
Before the official opening of the Forum in the afternoon, more than
80.000 participants, according to the organisers, were present in
the morning in the Kenyan capital to participate to this marc of
solidarity with Africa and with Kenya in particular, in a great
march that started from Kibera, one of the biggest ghettos of
Nairobi.
The 7th WSF will be an occasion to draw the light on "Africa and its
non-stop history of struggle against foreign domination, colonialism
and neo-colonialism", underlines a press release in the official
website of the Forum, also adopted in slogans and placards by the
many participating NGOs, Churches, associations, scholars, youth
movements, women and trade unions…etc
This impressive even, which is held every year since the pilot Forum
of Porto Aligre, in Brazil in 2001, is considered by the youth and
other participating ONG as the real popular and human alternative to
the projects of the World Economic Forum.
The Forum has always been organised in Porto Aligre, until 2004,
when it was organised in India, or in 2006, when organised for the
first time in three continents successively, in Venezuela, Pakistan
and Mali in Bamako.
(SPS)
060/KENYA/000 202027 Jan 07 SPS
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