I went to the WTO protests in Seattle in November, 1999 somewhat reluctantly. I had many commitments at home, my stepdaughter was in town that weekend for Thanksgiving, and I had lots of leftover pie to finish. But I knew some of the organizers, old friends from many years of nonviolent direct action campaigns against nuclear weapons, militarism, and other forms of injustice. And I had a posse of friends coming from up and down the West Coast—many of us veterans of those same campaigns going back to the Diablo Canyon blockade in 1981.

I'm a Canadian who in 1998-99 was in Australia working for Greenpeace from which I got fired for organizing their fundraisers into anti-uranium mining, which was a huge issue with dozens of mines opening up around Australia to make it the main supplier of uranium to the world. Getting fired propelled me into RTS (Reclaim The Streets) and EarthFirst!, both of which have a huge historic grounding in Australia.

Over the course of the year leading up to the Seattle WTO Protests in November/December 1999, I was involved in five different groups, each of which had its own founding principles, strategic guidelines and organizational narratives assisting the writing of their respective members into the common story of the unfolding events: mine were the Industrial Workers of the World, Direct Action Network, Workers and Students For a Walkout Network, Seattle Tenant's Union and Seattle Anarchist Response.

The WTO History Project, created in 2000 by several programs at the University of Washington, created an archive of materials and personal accounts of the WTO protests. It includes interviews with dozens of organizers and participants in the WTO protests; photographs; audio and video files; and images of planning documents, protest signs, fliers, posters and leaflets. Many of these materials are available online at www.wtohistory.org.

Below is a more detailed description of the project, taken from the www.wtohistory.org website:

Originally published in Grist(http://www.grist.org/comments/dispatches/1999/11/29/patel-anti-WTO/)

Tuesday, 30 Nov 1999
SEATTLE, Wash.

Originally published in Grist(http://www.grist.org/comments/dispatches/1999/11/29/patel-anti-WTO/)

Raj Patel, author of the new book "Stuffed and Starved," has worked for the World Bank, interned at the WTO, consulted for the UN and been involved in international campaigns against his former employers. Currently a researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and a visiting scholar at the Center for African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, his education includes degrees from Oxford, the London School of Economics & Cornell University.

NO TO WTO/SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL PEOPLE'S ASSEMBLY CONTRIBUTION TO SHUTTING DOWN THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION (WTO)

January 2000