In 1999, over 40,000 demonstrators gathered in downtown Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference. The large-scale anti-globalization protests were held in opposition to the intergovernmental organization’s anti-democratic control over global trade. Human and workers’ rights, environmental protections, child labor laws, and community standards are general impediments to the profit motives inherent in multilateral free trade agreements. Over four days, people from vastly different backgrounds took to the streets to defend the welfare of humanity against the encroachment of corporate power and the loss of popular sovereignty to faceless bureaucrats.
By 10 a.m. on the morning of November 30, the Seattle police, in a sharp pivot from their initial watchdog approach, had begun tear-gassing nonviolent protestors who were blocking key downtown intersections. By then, the protestors had successfully delayed the WTO’s opening ceremonies by blocking delegates from entering the building, and the Seattle police department — on orders from the local government, who were likely pressured by the Clinton administration — escalated the conflict. Soon after, protestors started confronting the police and vandalism ensued. By 4:30 p.m., Seattle mayor Paul Schell declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew, effectively suspending constitutional rights and handing over unilateral power to the police for the duration of the conference.
Ian Bell’s archival documentary “WTO/99” chronicles the four days of protests, the government’s dramatic response to the widespread activism, and the subsequent media coverage. The film’s first and stronger half covers the first day of the conference, also known as “N30,” on a gripping hour-by-hour basis as protestors briefly overwhelmed WTO delegates and police before being overrun by “non-lethal weapons” such as chemical agents and rubber bullets. The second half recounts the subsequent three days when the National Guard was deployed to “keep the peace” while protestors were being arrested or harassed en masse. Meanwhile, the media, whose presence only increased after N30, fielded both criticism from demonstrators and attacks from the police.
Culled from over 1000 hours of footage shot by protestors as well local and international news sources, “WTO/99” primarily illustrates how the brief success of a populist movement compelled the state to adopt an aggressive tack to halt their efforts. Bell and co-editor Alex Magaro limit expository information about the WTO and the anti-globalization movement to a short prologue. Instead, their goal is ground-level immersion. By sticking to a strictly chronological approach, “WTO/99” captures both the feeling of solidarity that emerges amongst disparate people united by a shared cause, and the sheer horror of watching the establishment violently attempt to dismantle it.
Amidst the peaceful marches and intense skirmishes, Bell intermittently highlights protestor voices. One of the criticisms leveraged against the WTO protests is the vagueness of their message, ostensibly embodied by the loose, ideologically diverse coalition of the anti-globalist movement. Environmentalists, veteran unionists, and black bloc anarchists are all depicted in the film, but while Bell acknowledges their dissimilar political backgrounds, he emphasizes the WTO as the common enemy that transcends any entrenched divides. “WTO/99” implies that part of what frightened the state was how the objections to multinational corporate control seemed to exist outside of a left vs. right binary. “It doesn’t matter what your issue is,” says a stranger interviewed on N30. “You are gonna get worked over if these people are allowed to continue with their unregulated rampant lust for profit.”
Bell largely eschews cheap nostalgia by focusing on daily activist operations, but since “WTO/99” is set in the relatively recent past, anyone halfway conversant with the era will feel a twinge looking at the fashion and manners of speech on display, especially amongst the younger sect. Moreover, familiar and “forgotten” players inevitably emerge across news footage to probe “Remember him?” nerve endings. Bernie Sanders and Michael Moore appear to confirm the value of long-term consistent messaging. It’s almost impossible to make a political film set in the late ’90s without incorporating punk frontman Jello Biafra and Bill Maher, then-host of “Politically Incorrect.” (The former still basically a humorous firebrand, the latter still an unconscionable asshole.)
Bell underlines how factional conflicts looked and sounded differently over 25 years ago. During a New Hampshire forum of circa-2000 GOP presidential candidates, Alan Keyes, who would later become a face of the Birther movement just eight years later, broke from his peers by praising the Seattle protestors and denouncing the WTO as unconstitutional. Roger Stone, then-manager of Donald Trump’s third-party candidacy, declared that his candidate rejects the WTO as the vanguard of free trade. (“We’re in a position where the voters are fed up with both parties…and if the American people are presented a viable, different choice, they may just take it,” he says prophetically.) Concurrently, the liberal Seattle mayor impotently tries to sidestep blame for deploying tear gas by meekly insisting that he also marched in the 1960s, and President Bill Clinton pays bland lip service to the importance of dissent.
Most of these commentators viewed the WTO protests as an activist showcase to close out the 20th century, but with his film, Bell chiefly argues that they were a key inflection point. The speed at which the cops turn against the people by ripping off masks to ensure pepper spray lands in their eyes, or charging at crowds to eagerly shoot rubber bullets in their chests, is to witness the eventual hyper-militarization of the police. You can set a clock to how quickly the local media would seize upon small pockets of property destruction either to overshadow or discredit the protestors’ message. The gleeful, unrepentant suspension of civil liberties by the state would soon become the norm in 21st century America. Bell implicitly asserts that the 1999 protest would foreshadow the next quarter century of direct action against fascist overreach, police brutality, and genocide.
Certain structural choices in “WTO/99” open themselves up to legitimate political criticism — like using 9/11 as a bookmark on the anti-globalist movement, or the refusal to depict any nativist or xenophobic sentiments among the protestors, for example — and Bell and Magaro’s decision to slacken the pace of the film’s second half, likely to parallel the general cooling of temperatures as the conference winds down, inevitably lends “WTO/99” a lopsided quality. However, these possible blind spots and predictable aesthetic flaws mostly pale in comparison to the chilling footage that dominates the film. 1999 would be one of the last years when cameras were primarily used as tools of documentation as opposed to performance, largely because there weren’t yet accessible venues for footage to be screened, a la YouTube. Hence, “WTO/99” features plenty of unvarnished, authentic behavior from civilians and authorities alike, who hadn’t yet been trained to be “camera ready.”
By the end of the conference, the protestors generally expressed optimism about what they accomplished. To be fair, they aren’t being naïve: their actions did impede and ultimately overshadow the WTO itself. But as the film’s epilogue underscores, we’re living in a world where we didn’t heed their warnings. Globalization ultimately destroyed American manufacturing and widened income inequality; corporate profits continue to explode as wages further stagnate; and the United States has further concentrated the power to make unilateral trade decisions that impact global economies. On top of which, we’ve only handed more power to the police state to quell popular dissent using any means necessary. The ominous tone “WTO/99” slowly adopts suggests a perennial truth, one that becomes more frustrating as time marches on: We will witness history repeat itself again and again until we choose to learn from it.
Grade: B+
“WTO/99” is now playing at the DCTV Firehouse Cinema for Documentary Film in New York City.
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