EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy compared the WTO to someone who has survived a serious accident and still bears the scars. US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick talked about removing the stain.
The shadow of Seattle -- the 1999 meeting of trade ministers that ended in abject failure while outside police fired tear gas at rioting protesters -- hung over this week's desert meeting as it has hung over everything the WTO has done for the past two years.
When ministers agreed on Wednesday to launch a new round of trade liberalization negotiations, they were all hoping that they had put Seattle out of their minds forever.
"This is particularly sweet since I suppose the WTO rises from the Seattle ashes," said Sergio Marchi, Canada's ambassador to the WTO.
"We have removed the stain of Seattle," said Zoellick.
The failure of the Seattle meeting did much more than just delay the trade round by two years.
Work that was already underway -- such as discussions on how to improve the WTO's fledgling dispute settlement system -- was halted because ministers had failed to renew the mandate.
But most of all the failure of Seattle left negotiators paralyzed and traumatized, unable to find the momentum to get their work back on track.
At the WTO's Geneva headquarters, the autopsies continued for months, as ambassadors tried to understand what had happened.
Most agree on what they did wrong -- they went to Seattle with overambitious plans and then tried to steamroller them through.
Developing countries, already complaining that they had lost out overall from the last round, decided enough was enough. Presented with a fait accompli drafted in meetings from which they were excluded, they exercised their collective muscle and blocked the consensus.
"Seattle failed for a lot of reasons, but the most important reason was because of democratic choice. Governments have the right to disagree," said WTO Director-General Mike Moore.
The Doha meeting, however, was always going to be different. Seattle had taken place at the height of an economic boom, Doha as the world faced slowdown and possible recession; the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had given a new impetus to anything that looked like a show of global cooperation; and nobody underestimated the developing countries this time.
Despite the tough negotiations and the holdouts by a number of countries that drove the meeting into an unplanned sixth day, this time all nations wanted the trade round.
Even so, Lamy admitted that that he had feared the talks would collapse, because of what he termed the "Seattle syndrome."
"People who have lived through an accident ... keep a sort of scar or sensitivity," he said.
Ministers left Qatar Wednesday on a high, claiming that the ghost of Seattle had been forever laid to rest.
However, one part of the Seattle experience seems to have been skipped in Doha rather than overcome -- the grass-roots protests that were born there and have followed every major economic meeting since.
Demonstrators had claimed credit for the Seattle collapse, though it was clearly political and economic differences among the negotiators that doomed those talks.
The expense of getting to Doha, combined with the strict Qatari visa requirements and a temporary lull in the zeal to protest following the terror attacks and the US strike on Afghanistan meant that negotiators were faced with little more in the way of protests than members of Greenpeace dropping WTO agreements into a large recycling bin.
RSS