About AEPF and South Asian involvement

The Asia-Europe People’s Forum (AEPF) is a network of progressive civil society and social movements across Asia and Europe.  It has actively advanced people’s voice within Asia-Europe relations especially in areas of peace and security, democracy and human rights, and social, economic and ecological rights.

The imminence of regional integration, political and economic re-grouping, and the imperative for the working together of Asian and European civil society led to the formation of AEPF on the eve of the first official Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in Bangkok in 1996.

ASEM  is a key structure that sets the tone for integrated policies between Europe and Asia, even though none of its decisions are supposedly binding. ASEM serves as the main multilateral channel for communication and dialogue between Asia and Europe. ASEM countries control over half of the world´s GDP – almost 60% of the world’s population and 60% of global trade – hence ASEM could be a key mechanism to lead the world on a sustainable path.  . AEPF as the civil society organization that works out a parallel process critically engages in the Europe Asia processes including in the ASEM by giving an input of peoples voices. AEPF is building peoples' voices and mirroring peoples struggles and resistances for an emphasis on the ‘social’ dimension in the institutions, policies, and practices being promoted both at the respective domestic affairs of ASEM member countries and at inter-regional relations.

At present, the members of ASEM are the 27 European Union Member States, the European Commission, the ASEAN Secretariat, ASEAN member states, China, Japan, Republic of Korea, India, Pakistan and Mongolia – the last three South Asian countries joined in 2007.

Formed as a parallel people’s network of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), AEPF has developed a unique function of fostering people’s solidarity across the two regions and continues to tamper the neo-liberalism policies that ASEM is globalising through multilateralism. Beyond ASEM’s trade and investment themes, AEPF has included people and participation in Asia-Europe relations through the regular biennial forums it has been organizing and its campaigns on urgent and critical issues affecting the people at the grassroots, national, regional, and global levels.

The significant contributions of AEPF to the issues of social movements in Asia and Europe through the years show the importance of the Forum’s continuous existence and sustained engagements.  AEPF has:

• Consistently critiqued the ASEM for promoting pro-market policies and cooperation between governments and the TNCs (For example the AEPF has an institutionalized role between key ASEM bodies) and for its exclusion of civil society in the official process. The AEPF has also called for ASEM’s structured relations with the civil society.
• Continuously working towards developing alternatives to neo-liberal policies in both regions –  in particular, the market-driven policies that are inimical to the well-being of the peoples of Asia and Europe.   At the advent of the global financial and economic crisis, AEPF consequently promoted the replacement of blind pro-market policies by alternative people-centred policies.
• Collective and coordinated actions of AEPF have enabled the peoples of both regions to influence policies on Asia-Europe relations at the national, regional, and interregional level
• Innovative and substantive contributions of putting a people-centered regional integration on the agenda of civil society in Asia and in Europe
• Addressing issues of regional democratization, which includes drawing lessons from Europe’s experience of democratic deficit and the centrality of citizen’s participation to viable regional integration processes.
• Having positioned itself as a space for political mobilization at the interregional level.

The biennial people’s forums

AEPF has a vision to realise from the bottom up, a peaceful and democratic world where people live with dignity and where social justice, human rights – including the right to self determination, – participatory democracy, and environmental sustainability are the core values that animate state and non-state programmes and activities. The biennial fora provide space for discussions and dialogues to tackle these issues and develop alternatives or people’s agenda.

The biennial people’s forum is held in the city where ASEM is also held and as close in time to the ASEM as possible.  It focuses on Asia-Europe relations but does not limit itself to either the ASEM agenda or ASEM-member countries. It is open to social movements, networks, organisations, and individuals from ASEM and non-ASEM member-countries that support the AEPF Charter and are committed in taking it forward.

From Bangkok onwards, an inter-regional network broadened further, drawing in hundreds of organisations across Asia and Europe working on issues of common concern to both regions.

Six successful biennial people’s forums followed Bangkok – in UK, South Korea, Denmark, Vietnam, Finland and the most recent, China – each forum reaching new height.

The recent biennial forum (AEPF-7) in China in 2008 brought together not only NGOs, but more importantly key grassroots networks, regional and national sectoral movements in Asia (Southeast, East, and South Asia) and important movements and NGOs in Europe at a time when the global economic crisis was unfolding.

More than 500 participants from 30 countries and from more than 200 NGOs and social movements, including emerging civil society organisations from countries in transition such as China, Vietnam, and from Eastern Europe, and from new ASEM member countries like India and Pakistan.  They participated in more than 35 events – plenary, workshops, and strategy meetings on critical issues under the core themes peace and security, social and economic rights, and democratisation and human rights. Some led to formation of new campaign circles including the proposal for a South Asia caucus.

AEPF-7 provided a venue for nightly meetings of representatives of social movements to take stock of the meaning of the unfolding global economic crisis and the opportunity it presents, including some of the inspiring and feasible alternatives many of these progressives have been working on for decades.

In October this year, the 8th AEPF will be held in Brussels, coinciding with the 8th ASEM Summit, with the overarching theme of challenging corporate power in the context of new trends in Europe and Asia that are eroding social protection, decent work, creating casualisation, etc.  The focal issues that will be addressed in the coming people’s forums are trade/investments and FTAs, decent work and social protection, climate change, and food sovereignty.

AEPF in India in 2012

One major result of AEPF-7 was the proposals for AEPF expansion in South Asia. Three proposals from India, Pakistan and Nepal were submitted to the AEPF International Organizing Committee (IOC) to expand and activate AEPF committees in these countries and to hold a South Asia caucus before the next biennial people’s forum.  The proposals emanated from the realization of South Asians that their participation at  AEPF 7 signals the need to determine and clarify the role of South Asia in AEPF in addressing inter-regional involvement, advocacy and cooperation given that:

1. the importance of South Asia in the next five years is underscored by its current political situation as one of the hotspots in the continuing “War on Terror” policies and campaign of the United States and Europe through NATO; and
2. South Asia (India) is going to be the site of the ASEM Meeting after Brussels in 2012.

There are urgent issues considered by South Asians as common to both Asia and Europe that need to be addressed in AEPF. These are:

• Corporate power is concentrated in the hands of  a small self serving elite that has far more leverage than the numbers it represents. The goal should be to expose their nefarious designs to de-centre this power.
• The All Out War Policy and the continuing and escalating military presence of US and Europe forces through NATO especially in the borders of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.  This is the region where the War on Terror is being played out with impunity. This has tremendous impact on the lives of people and the environment that sustains them. The war on terror shapes and has an adverse effect on democratization and ensuring the protection of civil, democratic and human rights of people. It is being successfully used as a powerful weapon by the Indian State to demonise and incarcerate 'human rights defenders' as Muslim militants, Maoists or extremists.
• There is also the rise of religious fundamentalisms, a long standing problem in most of South Asia, disrupting the social fabric violently and contributing to internal as well as external displacement people.  The phenomenon of rising number of internally displaced people (IDPs) have not been addressed despite the tremendous amount of resources being poured into the region that prioritizes armaments, nuclear weapons testing, intelligence gathering, military training and counter-insurgency operations.
• The ballooning debt for most of the countries in the region is a burden that impacts on economic and social condition of the people. As a consequence, governments are forced to adopt emergency but palliative measures to relieve the burden of economic crisis.
• Secret bilateral trade talks like EU-India FTA seeking to arm-twist India into ditching its citizens to boost European capital by insisting on Intellectual Property (IP), agriculture, agrochemicals, finance, banking and insurance sector and softening of rules relating to foreign investments and capital flight.

It's a shame that those like Bayer who concocted the  Zyklon B, a chemical used in the gas chambers of Hitler are today contaminating our soils with poisonous pesticides, surreptitiously pushing GMOs and arm-twisting our Sovereign Governments to change the drug patent law to reap pharmaceutical profits. AEPF has a critical role here in building solidarities and linkages with Asian and European progressive movements to halt this rampant exploitation and plunder of Asia.

Currently, India plays an important role in ASEM.  It is one of the four ASEM Coordinators, the rest are Cambodia, the EU Presidency and the European Commission. ASEM Summits are biennial.  Every year over fifty other ASEM meetings concern widespread sectors such as transport, immigration, trade, financial regulation, economic policy, education, energy, environment, development policies, culture and civilizations, counter-terrorism, other security issues, labour and employment, information technology, and many other issues - as well as political dialogue.

As socially active organisations, AEPF in 2012 provides us an opportunity to collectively explore creative ways of avoiding getting trapped into parallel events and 'unwillingly' legitimising these forums serving the interests of corporations; but go beyond official summits  to build linkages of diverse movements and struggles from all over India to mobilise and open up new avenues for regular dialogue, solidarity and action among Asian and European movements; advance peoples' voices in Asia and Europe; support peoples movements against the corporate grab of their natural resources and livelihoods; and resist the shrinking democratic spaces.

A meeting of the AEPF is especially important in the context of the multiple global crises-the financial, climate, ecological and security crises that confront us. A peoples view on this crises will be critical on how policies are framed in response to these. It is with this in mind that we call for a meeting of the AEPF in South Asia.