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Download PDF As the seventh World Social Forum (WSF) 2007 meet ended yesterday in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, Nobel laureate Prof Wangari Maathai urged participants to take actions to make a better world to live in.
“I am quite sure that at the individual level we will go away with a special message having come to listen, learn and share experiences. We will go away with something that will make each person say, ‘I came, I learnt and I will take actions in this direction,” Prof Wangari Maathai, the winner of Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, told The Daily Star yesterday.
Talking to this correspondent during the closing ceremony of the WSF 2007 at Uhuru Park in Nairobi, the Nobel laureate said he believes through this gathering the participants have been encouraged and now they will go for action.
Asked whether it is possible to make a better world without involving the government with the process, Prof Wangari, who is also a Kenyan environmentalist, posed the question, “Who is the government?”
“We are the government…We, the people, are power…we make the government and we will compel the government to act in line with our desire for the betterment of the people,” the Nobel laureate asserted.
The WSF 2007 that began on January 20 in Nairobi ended yesterday.
Processions, workshops, singing, dancing, networking etc marked the occasion that was aimed to focus on the world disorder, create awareness and encourage the participants to fight for making the world free from injustice and all kinds of repression.
The international organising committee has decided that the next WSF meeting will be held in 2009, but it did not decide the venue.
A member of the international organising committee of WSF 2007, Taofik Ben Abdullah, urged more actions over the next two years to respond quickly to world events.
Like the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony was marked by cultural programmes protesting all kinds of repression and injustice worldwide.
The six-day meeting that brought together thousands of delegates from across the world put social justice, international solidarity, gender equity, peace and protection of environment on the world agenda. Speakers in different seminars and processions accused the rich countries of the world and different international financial organisations of pushing through policies that had increased the poverty of third world countries.
Bangladeshi organisation, Shushashaner Jonno Procharabhijan (campaign for good governance) organised a seminar that focused on the ‘dark side’ of foreign direct investment in Bangladesh.
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