Walden Bello, the director of the Focus on the Global South, a diffident, shyly-spoken and bespectacled man, is fast becoming one of the stars of the "fringe" here at the counter-conferences to the Gleaneagles summit.
His modest demeanour belies a radical mind and a calm but provocative way with words – which has seen him receive death threats from the Communist party in the Phillipines this year, where he is a professor of public administration and sociology.
He ended this morning's session of the "Corporate Dreams, Global Nightmares" event with a rousing call for mass civil disruption of the next World Trade Organisation in Hong Kong in December, to a rapturous ovation.
He told the audience of around 400 activists: "We must be militant, not mellow. We need to lay bodies on the line to stop this monster. The World Trade Organisation is like a vampire – its gets back up again and again, until you finally drive a stake through its heart."
Turning his fire on the British government, he warned the crowd: "Never underestimate the Blair administration's ability to put a spin on things."
Professor Bello called the agreement on debt relief at the G7 finance ministers' meeting in London last month "a real putsch" for not mentioning the terms of conditionality attached, for not mentioning it only applied to 18 of the world's poorest nations, and for not mentioning trade justice at all.
Paying tribute to the suicide of the South Korean farmer Lee Kyoung Hae at the fifth ministerial round of WTO talks at Cancun, Mexico in 2003 as "electrying the civil society mobilisations", he called for the WTO to be "derailed and destroyed" rather than reformed – although when asked by a questioner at the end of the talks what would replace it, no clear consensus emerged beyond an entity with "no central body."
Lots of questions, fewer answers.
