TERRAVIVA - THE INDEPENDENT FAMILY OF PUBLICATIONS FROM INTER PRESS SERVICE. http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/default.asp Copyright © 2006 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved. en-US http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/viewstory.asp?idnews=605 Roop Chintamani “Muslim countries, by their very nature, cease to take the first step towards creating a democratic modern state because their citizenship is based on inherited race and religion,” says Tarek Fatah, a Pakistani-born journalist who speaks boldly on how state and religion are separate entities -- and why the difference needs to be maintained. http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/viewstory.asp?idnews=607 Bikash Sangraula Over a hundred countries in the developing world have taken to neo-liberal policies thanks to the insistence of creditors from the north, including the G8, the World Bank (WB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But after 20 years, it is clear that these policies have not worked. The poor are poorer with their governments spending a lot of money to pay back loans, activists say. http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/viewstory.asp?idnews=608 Stanislaus Jude Chan Folk music streams steadily through the clouds of billowing dust at the KMC Sports Complex, as it has over the past five days, since the opening of the polycentric WSF in Karachi on Mar. 24. http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/viewstory.asp?idnews=609 Zofeen T Ebrahim Call it a jamboree, or a carnival of people, call it an NGO bazaar or a ‘mela’ (fair) if you will. After five days of debate, dialogue and discourse, amidst fun and music, just when the momentum was built, the forum comes to a grinding halt. Yet, for times to come, it leaves a lasting taste of how civil society in Pakistan, together, took its first step into the world of social movements. http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/viewstory.asp?idnews=597 Stanislaus Jude Chan “More than 30,000 farmers from India have committed suicide over the last five years!” says one participant at a Monday discussion on the post-Hong Kong World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial summit. Yet another claims that the total figure of self-inflicted deaths of poor farmers in South Asia stands at “more than 2.5 million” to date. http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/viewstory.asp?idnews=598 Zofeen T Ebrahim Once you’re in Jammu & Kashmir, it’s very hard to remain just an observer, as Sonia Jabbar, a young firebrand Indian journalist from the region, says. Also a human rights activist, she has been chronicling the domino effect the conflict has had on the various actors of civil society. http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/viewstory.asp?idnews=599 Bikash Sangraula Every disaster may hold opportunities, but activists at the WSF say the way post-tsunami rehabilitation has virtually been turned into business and commercial opportunities is nothing short of scandalous. http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/viewstory.asp?idnews=600 Sumera S Naqvi Inside the tent of the eating area at the WSF sit a few hefty boys in white shalwar khameez, feeling a little out of place. They are with the Balochistan Students Federation, and an odd melancholy reflects their faces. “My friend disappeared a few months back and since then we haven’t heard of him,” narrates one of them. “His father worked hard as clerk in a government office to earn enough to put him through college. He now sits here at the WSF venue in a hunger strike on the vague hope that his son can return.” http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/viewstory.asp?idnews=601 Stanislaus Jude Chan “Nothing can happen that is worse,” says Jamal Jamu of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti- apartheid War Campaign, “than waking up and finding that your house does not exist anymore, that your people have been driven out from the farms, from the factories, from their houses, and scattered elsewhere in the world.” http://www.ipsterraviva.net/tv/karachi/viewstory.asp?idnews=602 “The easy way probably of defining ‘alternative media’ is to say it’s neither the CNN’s or the BBC’s approach,” is how Johanna Son, director for Asia-Pacific of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, began to define the somewhat “hazy” term. But “sometimes it’s easier to define what it isn’t than what it is,” she explained, speaking at the seminar ‘An Alternative Media World is Possible’ organised by the World Social Forum in collaboration with IPS.