http://www.hindu.com/2004/01/18/stories/2004011800181400.htm
Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jan 18, 2004
Do turkeys enjoy thanksgiving?
By Arundhati Roy
It's not good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our
resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something, we need to
agree on something." After a tour d'horizon, the author of The God of Small
Things calls for a " minimum agenda" as well as a plan of action that
prioritises global resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Here is the text
of her speech at the opening Plenary of the World Social Forum in Mumbai on
January 16, 2004:
Arundhati Roy
LAST JANUARY thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Allegre in
Brazil and declared reiterated that "Another World is Possible". A few
thousand miles north, in Washington, George Bush and his aides were thinking
the same thing.
Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs to further what many call The
Project for the New American Century.
In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things
would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good
side of Imperialism and the need for a strong Empire to police an unruly world.
The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost
of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to
`debate' the issue on `neutral' platforms provided by the corporate media.
Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can
we say? That we really miss it?
In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodelled, streamlined
version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single Empire
with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has
complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons
to break open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is
not caught in the cross hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF
chequebook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the poster-boy of
neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep.
Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to Empire, or have a
`market' of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, god forbid,
natural resources of value oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal must do as
they're told, or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of
natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources
willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented, or war will
be waged. In this new age of Empire, when nothing is as it appears to be,
executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy
decisions. The Centre for Public Integrity in Washington found that nine out of
the 30 members of the Defence Policy Board of the U.S. Government were
connected to companies that were awarded defence contracts for $ 76 billion
between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State, was
Chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the Board
of Directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest, in
the case of a war in Iraq he said, " I don't know that Bechtel would
particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the
type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you
benefit from." After the war, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for
reconstruction in Iraq.
This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again, across Latin America,
Africa, Central and South-East Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes
without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a Just War. This, in large
part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It's important to understand
that the corporate media doesn't just support the neo-liberal project. It is
the neo-liberal project. This is not a moral position it has chosen to take,
it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media works.
Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't often
necessary for the media to lie. It's what's emphasised and what's ignored. Say
for example India was chosen as the target for a righteous war. The fact that
about 80,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them
Muslim, most of them by Indian Security Forces (making the average death toll
about 6000 a year); the fact that less than a year ago, in March of 2003, more
than two thousand Muslims were murdered on the streets of Gujarat, that women
were gang-raped and children were burned alive and a 150,000 people driven from
their homes while the police and administration watched, and sometimes actively
participated; the fact that no one has been punished for these crimes and the
Government that oversaw them was re-elected ... all of this would make perfect
headlines in international newspapers in the run-up to war.
Next we know, our cities will be levelled by cruise missiles, our villages
fenced in with razor wire, U.S. soldiers will patrol our streets and, Narendra
Modi, Pravin Togadia or any of our popular bigots could, like Saddam Hussein,
be in U.S. custody, having their hair checked for lice and the fillings in
their teeth examined on prime-time TV.
But as long as our `markets' are open, as long as corporations like Enron,
Bechtel, Halliburton, Arthur Andersen are given a free hand, our
`democratically elected' leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between
democracy, majoritarianism and fascism.
Our government's craven willingness to abandon India's proud tradition of being
Non-Aligned, its rush to fight its way to the head of the queue of the
Completely Aligned (the fashionable phrase is `natural ally' India, Israel
and the U.S. are `natural allies'), has given it the leg room to turn into a
repressive regime without compromising its legitimacy.
A government's victims are not only those that it kills and imprisons. Those
who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation
and deprivation must count among them too. Millions of people have been
dispossessed by `development' projects. In the past 55 years, Big Dams alone
have displaced between 33 million and 55 million people in India. They have no
recourse to justice.
In the last two years there has been a series of incidents when police have
opened fire on peaceful protestors, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it
comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get
killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to
protect forest land from encroachments by dams, mines, steel plants and other
`development' projects. In almost every instance in which the police opened
fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was provoked by an
act of violence. Those who have been fired upon are immediately called
militants.
Across the country, thousands of innocent people including minors have been
arrested under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) and are being held in jail
indefinitely and without trial. In the era of the War against Terror, poverty
is being slyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalisation,
poverty is a crime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism. And
now, our Supreme Court says that going on strike is a crime. Criticising the
court of course is a crime, too. They're sealing the exits.
Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism too relies for its success on a network
of agents corrupt, local elites who service Empire. We all know the sordid
story of Enron in India. The then Maharashtra Government signed a power
purchase agreement which gave Enron profits that amounted to sixty per cent of
India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was
guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for
about 500 million people!
Unlike in the old days the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the
tropics risking malaria or diahorrea or early death. New Imperialism can be
conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is
outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.
The tradition of `turkey pardoning' in the U.S. is a wonderful allegory for New
Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation presents the U.S.
President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial
magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one).
After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan
Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million
turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day.
ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says
it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school
children and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!)
That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys
the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants,
investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some
singers, some writers (like myself) are given absolution and a pass to Frying
Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes,
have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically
they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine.
Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO so who can accuse those
organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey
Choosing Committee so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They
participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation?
There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the
way?
Part of the project of New Racism is New Genocide. In this new era of economic
interdependence, New Genocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. It
means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out
and killing people. Dennis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq
between '97 and '98 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term
genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam
Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives.
In the new era, Apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary.
International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of
multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their
Bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalise inequity. Why else
would it be that the U.S. taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer 20
times more than it taxes a garment made in the U.K.? Why else would it be that
countries that grow 90 per cent of the world's cocoa bean produce only 5 per
cent of the world's chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow
cocoa bean, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they
try and turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that
spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor
countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidised
electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by
colonising regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in
debt to those same regimes, and repay them some $ 382 billion a year?
For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancun was crucial
for us. Though our governments try and take the credit, we know that it was the
result of years of struggle by many millions of people in many, many countries.
What Cancun taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and force radical
change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international
alliances. From Cancun we learned the importance of globalising resistance.
No individual nation can stand up to the project of Corporate Globalisation on
its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neo-liberal
project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary,
charismatic men, giants in Opposition, when they seize power and become Heads
of State, they become powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of
President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last
year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension
benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party. I'm thinking also of ex-
President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in
1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It
instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment,
which has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and
electricity.
Why does this happen? There's little point in beating our breasts and feeling
betrayed. Lula and Mandela are, by any reckoning, magnificent men. But the
moment they cross the floor from the Opposition into Government they become
hostage to a spectrum of threats most malevolent among them the threat of
capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a
leader's personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will dent the Corporate
Cartel is to have no understanding of how Capitalism works, or for that matter,
how power works. Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can
only be enforced by people.
This week at the World Social Forum, some of the best minds in the world will
exchange ideas about what is happening around us. These conversations refine
our vision of the kind of world we're fighting for. It is a vital process that
must not be undermined. However, if all our energies are diverted into this
process at the cost of real political action, then the WSF, which has played
such a crucial role in the Movement for Global Justice, runs the risk of
becoming an asset to our enemies. What we need to discuss urgently is
strategies of resistance. We need to aim at real targets, wage real battles and
inflict real damage. Gandhi's Salt March was not just political theatre. When,
in a simple act of defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made
their own salt, they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the
economic underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement
has won some important victories, we must not allow non-violent resistance to
atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theatre. It is a very precious
weapon that needs to be constantly honed and re-imagined. It cannot be allowed
to become a mere spectacle, a photo opportunity for the media.
It was wonderful that on February 15th last year, in a spectacular display of
public morality, 10 million people in five continents marched against the war
on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15th was a weekend.
Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don't stop wars.
George Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming
public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush believes that Iraq can be
occupied and colonised as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, as
Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks
that all he has to do is hunker down and wait until a crisis-driven media,
having picked this crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass
will slip off the best-seller charts, and all of us outraged folks will lose
interest. Or so he hopes.
This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not good enough to be
right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our resolve, it's important to win
something. In order to win something, we all of us gathered here and a little
way away at Mumbai Resistance need to agree on something. That something does
not need to be an over-arching pre-ordained ideology into which we force-fit
our delightfully factious, argumentative selves. It does not need to be an
unquestioning allegiance to one or another form of resistance to the exclusion
of everything else. It could be a minimum agenda.
If all of us are indeed against Imperialism and against the project of neo-
liberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the inevitable
culmination of both. Plenty of anti-war activists have retreated in confusion
since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't the world better off without Saddam
Hussein? they ask timidly.
Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud the U.S. army's
capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore, in retrospect, justify its invasion
and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disembowelling the
Boston Strangler. And that after a quarter century partnership in which the
Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It's an in-house quarrel.
They're business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.
So if we are against Imperialism, shall we agree that we are against the U.S.
occupation and that we believe that the U.S. must withdraw from Iraq and pay
reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage that the war has inflicted?
How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something really
small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance in Iraq against the
occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes the resistance. (Are they old
Killer Ba'athists, are they Islamic Fundamentalists?)
We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.
Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the U.S.
occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially impossible for Empire
to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists
should refuse to serve, workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with
weapons. It certainly means that in countries like India and Pakistan we must
block the U.S. government's plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent to
Iraq to clean up after them.
I suggest that at a joint closing ceremony of the World Social Forum and Mumbai
Resistance, we choose, by some means, two of the major corporations that are
profiting from the destruction of Iraq. We could then list every project they
are involved in. We could locate their offices in every city and every country
across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down. It's a
question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past struggles to
bear on a single target. It's a question of the desire to win.
The Project For The New American Century seeks to perpetuate inequity and
establish American hegemony at any price, even if it's apocalyptic. The World
Social Forum demands justice and survival.
For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war.
)Arundhati Roy
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" Social and economic well-being will become a reality only through the
zeal, courage, the non-compromising determination of intelligent
minorities, and not through the mass." Emma Goldman
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