[WSIS CS-Plenary] WSIS: Secret police, hunger and booze. The aftermath of a world summit

[Ralf Bendrath]

Here's a nice, light-hearted report from a reporter's perspective on WSIS. 
I've copied the first paragraphs below. I especially like the phrase 
"Conference World - where human existence is put on hold". :-)

Best, Ralf

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/20/wsis_blog_five/

WSIS: Secret police, hunger and booze. The aftermath of a world summit

By Kieren McCarthy in Tunis
Published Sunday 20th November 2005 22:00 GMT

Secret policemen: you miss 'em when they're gone. It seems most people 
shipped out of Tunis soon after the closing ceremony ended around 7pm. 
When I got back to my hotel around 10pm, there was only one secret 
policeman standing guard and he didn't even bother to inspect my badge.

This morning, I only saw one who idly came to check out why a lunatic 
Englishman was in the swimming pool. To Tunisians, the weather is almost 
unbearably cold. To me, it feels like a cool spot during the summer. 
Besides that swimming pool had been mocking me for a week. Unless I was 
willing to get up at 5am or go for a midnight dip, I haven't had a chance 
to get near it since the conference opened.

These aren't proper secret police anyway, mere security. And I hope to God 
the real ones weren't the men pretending to be journalists in the press 
centre this week either. If they were, the Tunisians really have very 
little to be afraid of. If MI5, say, were to decide to infiltrate a news 
organisation, it would train the people up, make em at least able to 
appear to do the job. Instead, Tunisian secret police appear to have come 
direct from Tunisian secret police training school.

Pre-requisite skills are the ability to wear a cheap suit badly, sit for 
hours on end not doing anything except showing indirect interest in the 
loudest and quietest people in any room, and to forget to maintain your 
cover when outside of the immediate area.

I asked one, in French, what he was working on, just for a laugh. He just 
mumbled some in Arabic and stared at the keyboard as if willing it to 
start typing something.

Conference World - where human existence is put on hold

That you can start to enjoy the fact people are being paid to spy on you 
is a clear sign that you have entered Conference World™ - a self-contained 
microcosm of madness where even the most ridiculous things become accepted 
as normal.

(...)