The drums for a confrontation are beating at the NGO “village,” where activists seethe at the government’s decision to impose order on protests against the World Summit on Sustainable Development. I am here covering events as they happen. There seems to be a lot of unhappiness in many quarters, as Reuters reports:

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A much-publicized and stepped-up police presence could slash the incomes of sex workers who had hoped to cash in on a massive United Nations summit in Johannesburg later this month.

In a country with the highest number of people living with HIV-AIDS in the world, sex workers who ply their trade on the streets say the police, not the disease, is their biggest worry.

“Already police are swarming the streets. Our clients are running scared,” said 19-year old Thandeka Zwane, who works at a corner a few hundred meters away from the main summit venue in the city’s lush northern suburbs.

“I hate this summit, they are bringing soldiers in, we can’t work like this.”

No doubt a big conference like this disrupts ordinary life, but its heady presence seems to be infecting the principles and practices of the ANC government. It came to power by protesting apartheid. You hear people, including a leader of the Free Expression Institute, who spoke to me yesterday, compare Thabo Mbeki’s “crackdown” on peaceful protest to the odious abuses of the old regime.

(Polls here show support for the government, so this anger may be confined to a core of activists. Still, all it takes is one horrific incident and the situation could change, and not for the better.)

What gives?

It seems as if the spectre of out of control anti-globalization protests like the ones leaders here think happened in Seattle or Genoa have led to pressure from the UN and their members states for “security.” That translates into an uptight atmosphere of angry threats and stubborn officials who insist on permits and controls of all marches. Power tends to corrupt and co-opt. It also distances people from their roots, and gets them playing by a “logic” that fuels an us/them conflict.

Let’s hope a showdown will be averted, because as everyone knows, once the police are unleashed — and one wonders how well trained these “newies” are — anything can happen and usually does. Unfortunately, when and if it does, that drama and any attendent violence tends to overshadow the life and death issues that brought so many here.

That’s all for now, as it is hard to find quiet time to write while running between summit venues. Hope to have more later.

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