"...No government's condemnation of
terrorism is credible if it cannot show itself to be open to change by non violent dissent...But instead
.. any kind of
mass political mobilization or organization is being bought off, or broken,
or simply ignored. Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media.. lavish their time, attention, technology, research, and
admiration on war and terrorism. Violence has been deified.
The message this sends is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air a
public grievance, violence is more effective than non violence...It's time to recognize that no amount of nuclear weapons or full-spectrum
dominance or daisy cutters or spurious governing councils and loyal jirgas
can buy peace at the cost of justice. The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with greater
intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others. "
[ also
Audio Visual Presentation of Arundhati Roy Address
by Amy Goodman at Democracy, Now]
On the public and
the sarkar...
I've been asked to speak about "Public Power in the Age of Empire." I'm not
used to doing as I'm told, but by happy coincidence, it's exactly what I'd
like to speak about tonight.
When language has been butchered and bled of meaning, how do we understand
"public power"? When freedom means occupation, when democracy means
neo-liberal capitalism, when reform means repression, when words like
"empowerment" and "peacekeeping" make your blood run cold - why, then,
"public power" could mean whatever you want it to mean. A biceps building
machine, or a Community Power Shower. So, I'll just have to define "public
power" as I go along, in my own self-serving sort of way.
In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In Hindi, we
have sarkar and public, the government and the people. Inherent in this use
is the underlying assumption that the government is quite separate from "the
people." This distinction has to do with the fact that India's freedom
struggle, though magnificent, was by no means revolutionary. The Indian
elite stepped easily and elegantly into the shoes of the British
imperialists.
A deeply impoverished, essentially feudal society became a
modern, independent nation state. Even today, fifty seven years on to the
day, the truly vanquished still look upon the government as mai-baap, the
parent and provider. The somewhat more radical, those who still have fire in
their bellies, see it as chor, the thief, the snatcher-away of all things.
Either way, for most Indians, sarkar is very separate from public. However,
as you make your way up India's social ladder, the distinction between
sarkar and public gets blurred.
The Indian elite, like the elite anywhere in
the world, finds it hard to separate itself from the state. It sees like the
state, it thinks like the state, it speaks like the state.
In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of the distinction
between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into society. This could
be a sign of a robust democracy, but unfortunately, it's a little more
complicated and less pretty than that. Among other things, it has to do with
the elaborate web of paranoia generated by the U.S. sarkar and spun out by
the corporate media and Hollywood. Ordinary Americans have been manipulated
into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge and protector
is their government. If it isn't the Communists, it's al-Qaeda. If it isn't
Cuba. it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the most powerful nation in the
world - with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its history of having waged
and sponsored endless wars, and the only nation in history to have actually
used nuclear bombs - is peopled by a terrified citizenry, jumping at
shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services, or public
health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear.
This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for
further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of
self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the U.S government's
Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia, turquoise, salmon pink.
To outside observers, this merging of sarkar and public in the United States
sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the U.S. government from
the American people. It is this confusion that fuels anti-Americanism in the
world. Anti-Americanism is then seized upon and amplified by the U.S.
government and its faithful media outlets. You know the routine: "Why do
they hate us? They hate our freedoms" . . . etc. . . . etc. This enhances
the sense of isolation among American people and makes the embrace between
sarkar and public even more intimate. Like Red Riding Hood looking for a
cuddle in the wolf's bed.
Using the threat of an external enemy to rally people behind you is a tired
old horse, which politicians have ridden into power for centuries. But could
it be that ordinary people are fed up of that poor old horse and are looking
for something different? There's an old Hindi film song that goes yeh public
hai, yeh sab jaanti hai (the public, she knows it all). Wouldn't it be
lovely if the song were right and the politicians wrong?
Before Washington's illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International poll
showed that in no European country was the support for a unilateral war
higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks before the invasion,
more than ten million people marched against the war on different
continents, including North America. And yet the governments of many
supposedly democratic countries still went to war.
Question is: is "democracy" still democratic?
The question is: is "democracy" still democratic?
Are democratic governments accountable to the people who elected them? And,
critically, is the public in democratic countries responsible for the
actions of its sarkar?
If you think about it, the logic that underlies the war on terrorism and the
logic that underlies terrorism is exactly the same. Both make ordinary
citizens pay for the actions of their government. Al-Qaeda made the people
of the United States pay with their lives for the actions of their
government in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The U.S
government has made the people of Afghanistan pay in their thousands for the
actions of the Taliban and the people of Iraq pay in their hundreds of
thousands for the actions of Saddam Hussein.
The crucial difference is that nobody really elected al-Qaeda, the Taliban,
or Saddam Hussein. But the president of the United States was elected (well
... in a manner of speaking).
The prime ministers of Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom were elected.
Could it then be argued that citizens of these countries are more
responsible for the actions of their government than Iraqis are for the
actions of Saddam Hussein or Afghans for the Taliban?
Whose God decides which is a "just war" and which isn't?
George Bush senior
once said: "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what
the facts are." When the president of the most powerful country in the world
doesn't need to care what the facts are, then we can at least be sure we
have entered the Age of Empire.
So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean anything
at all? Does it actually exist?
In these allegedly democratic times, conventional political thought holds
that public power is exercised through the ballot. Scores of countries in
the world will go to the polls this year. Most (not all) of them will get
the governments they vote for. But will they get the governments they want?
Tide and Ivory Snow...
In India this year, we voted the Hindu nationalists out of office. But even
as we celebrated, we knew that on nuclear bombs, neo-liberalism,
privatization, censorship, big dams - on every major issue other than overt
Hindu nationalism - the Congress and the BJP have no major ideological
differences. We know that it is the fifty-year legacy of the Congress Party
that prepared the ground culturally and politically for the far right. It
was also the Congress Party that first opened India's markets to corporate
globalization.
In its election campaign, the Congress Party indicated that it was prepared
to rethink some of its earlier economic policies. Millions of India's
poorest people came out in strength to vote in the elections. The spectacle
of the great Indian democracy was telecast live - the poor farmers, the old
and infirm, the veiled women with their beautiful silver jewelry, making
quaint journeys to election booths on elephants and camels and bullock
carts. Contrary to the predictions of all India's experts and pollsters,
Congress won more votes than any other party. India's communist parties won
the largest share of the vote in their history. India's poor had clearly
voted against neo-liberalism's economic "reforms" and growing fascism. As
soon as the votes were counted, the corporate media dispatched them like
badly paid extras on a film set. Television channels featured split screens.
Half the screen showed the chaos outside the home of Sonia Gandhi, the
leader of the Congress Party, as the coalition government was cobbled
together.
The other half showed frenzied stockbrokers outside the Bombay Stock
Exchange, panicking at the thought that the Congress Party might actually
honor its promises and implement its electoral mandate. We saw the Sensex
stock index move up and down and sideways. The media, whose own publicly
listed stocks were plummeting, reported the stock market crash as though
Pakistan had launched ICBMs on New Delhi.
Even before the new government was formally sworn in, senior Congress
politicians made public statements reassuring investors and the media that
privatization of public utilities would continue. Meanwhile the BJP, now in
opposition, has cynically, and comically, begun to oppose foreign direct
investment and the further opening of Indian markets.
This is the spurious, evolving dialectic of electoral democracy.
As for the Indian poor, once they've provided the votes, they are expected
to bugger off home. Policy will be decided despite them.
And what of the U.S. elections? Do U.S. voters have a real choice?
It's true that if John Kerry becomes president, some of the oil tycoons and
Christian fundamentalists in the White House will change. Few will be sorry
to see the back of Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or John Ashcroft and their
blatant thuggery. But the real concern is that in the new administration
their policies will continue. That we will have Bushism without Bush.
Those positions of real power - the bankers, the CEOs - are not vulnerable
to the vote (... and in any case, they fund both sides).
Unfortunately the importance of the U.S elections has deteriorated into a
sort of personality contest. A squabble over who would do a better job of
overseeing empire. John Kerry believes in the idea of empire as fervently as
George Bush does.
The U.S. political system has been carefully crafted to ensure that no one
who questions the natural goodness of the military-industrial-corporate
power structure will be allowed through the portals of power.
Given this, it's no surprise that in this election you have two Yale
University graduates, both members of Skull and Bones, the same secret
society, both millionaires, both playing at soldier-soldier, both talking up
war, and arguing almost childishly about who will lead the war on terror
more effectively.
Like President Bill Clinton before him, Kerry will continue the expansion of
U.S. economic and military penetration into the world. He says he would have
voted to authorize Bush to go to war in Iraq even if he had known that Iraq
had no weapons of mass destruction. He promises to commit more troops to
Iraq. He said recently that he supports Bush's policies toward Israel and
Ariel Sharon 100 percent. He says he'll retain 98% of Bush's tax cuts.
So, underneath the shrill exchange of insults, there is almost absolute
consensus. It looks as though even if Americans vote for Kerry, they'll
still get Bush. President John Kerbush or President George Berry.
It's not a real choice. It's an apparent choice. Like choosing a brand of
detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide, they're both owned by Proctor
& Gamble.
This doesn't mean that one takes a position that is without nuance, that the
Congress and the BJP, New Labor and the Tories, the Democrats and
Republicans are the same. Of course, they're not. Neither are Tide and Ivory
Snow. Tide has oxy-boosting and Ivory Snow is a gentle cleanser.
In India, there is a difference between an overtly fascist party (the BJP)
and a party that slyly pits one community against another (Congress), and
sows the seeds of communalism that are then so ably harvested by the BJP.
There are differences in the I.Q.s and levels of ruthlessness between this
year's U.S. presidential candidates. The anti-war movement in the United
States has done a phenomenal job of exposing the lies and venality that led
to the invasion of Iraq, despite the propaganda and intimidation it faced.
This was a service not just to people here, but to the whole world. But now,
if the anti-war movement openly campaigns for Kerry, the rest of the world
will think that it approves of his policies of "sensitive" imperialism. Is
U.S. imperialism preferable if it is supported by the United Nations and
European countries? Is it preferable if UN asks Indian and Pakistani
soldiers to do the killing and dying in Iraq instead of U.S. soldiers? Is
the only change that Iraqis can hope for that French, German, and Russian
companies will share in the spoils of the occupation of their country?
Is this actually better or worse for those of us who live in subject
nations? Is it better for the world to have a smarter emperor in power or a
stupider one? Is that our only choice?
I'm sorry, I know that these are uncomfortable, even brutal questions, but
they must be asked.
The fact is that electoral democracy has become a process of cynical
manipulation. It offers us a very reduced political space today. To believe
that this space constitutes real choice would be na�ve.
The crisis in modern democracy is a profound one.
International
instruments of trade and finance put colonialism to shame...
On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign governments,
international instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of
multilateral laws and agreements that have entrenched a system of
appropriation that puts colonialism to shame. This system allows the
unrestricted entry and exit of massive amounts of speculative capital - hot
money - into and out of third world countries, which then effectively
dictates their economic policy.
Using the threat of capital flight as a
lever, international capital insinuates itself deeper and deeper into these
economies. Giant transnational corporations are taking control of their
essential infrastructure and natural resources, their minerals, their water,
their electricity. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and other financial institutions like the Asian
Development Bank, virtually write economic policy and parliamentary
legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they
take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex
societies, and devastate them.
All this goes under the fluttering banner of "reform."
As a consequence of this reform, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,
thousands of small enterprises and industries have closed down, millions of
workers and farmers have lost their jobs and land.
The Spectator newspaper in London assures us that "[w]e live in the
happiest, healthiest and most peaceful era in human history." Billions
wonder: who's "we"? Where does he live? What's his Christian name?
The thing to understand is that modern democracy is safely premised on an
almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate globalization
is not. Liquid capital is not. So, even though capital needs the coercive
powers of the nation state to put down revolts in the servants' quarters,
this set up ensures that no individual nation can oppose corporate
globalization on its own.
Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only
be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link hands across
national borders.
So when we speak of "Public Power in the Age of Empire," I hope it's not
presumptuous to assume that the only thing that is worth discussing
seriously is the power of a dissenting public. A public which disagrees with
the very concept of empire. A public which has set itself against incumbent
power - international, national, regional, or provincial governments and
institutions that support and service empire.
What are the
avenues of protest available to people who wish to resist empire?
What are the avenues of protest available to people who wish to resist
empire? By resist I don't mean only to express dissent, but to effectively
force change. Empire has a range of calling cards. It uses different weapons
to break open different markets. You know the check book and the cruise
missile
For poor people in many countries, Empire does not always appear in the form
of cruise missiles and tanks, as it has in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam.
It appears in their lives in very local avatars - losing their jobs, being
sent unpayable electricity bills, having their water supply cut, being
evicted from their homes and uprooted from their land. All this overseen by
the repressive machinery of the state, the police, the army, the judiciary.
It is a process of relentless impoverishment with which the poor are
historically familiar. What Empire does is to further entrench and
exacerbate already existing inequalities.
| "Mass resistance movements,
individual activists, journalists, artists, and film makers have
come together to strip Empire of its sheen.
This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate
political groups, with a variety of strategies. But they all recognized that
the target of their anger, their activism, and their doggedness is the same.
This was the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of dissent..." |
Even until quite recently, it was sometimes difficult for people to see
themselves as victims of the conquests of Empire. But now local struggles
have begun to see their role with increasing clarity. However grand it might
sound, the fact is, they are confronting Empire in their own, very different
ways. Differently in Iraq, in South Africa, in India, in Argentina, and
differently, for that matter, on the streets of Europe and the United
States.
Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists, artists, and
film makers have come together to strip Empire of its sheen. They have
connected the dots, turned cash-flow charts and boardroom speeches into real
stories about real people and real despair. They have shown how the
neo-liberal project has cost people their homes, their land, their jobs,
their liberty, their dignity. They have made the intangible tangible. The
once seemingly in-CORP-o-real enemy is now CORP-o-real.
This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate
political groups, with a variety of strategies. But they all recognized that
the target of their anger, their activism, and their doggedness is the same.
This was the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of dissent.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of mass resistance movements in third
world countries today. The landless peoples' movement in Brazil, the
anti-dam movement in India, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Anti-Privatization
Forum in South Africa, and hundreds of others, are fighting their own
sovereign governments, which have become agents of the neo-liberal project.
Most of these are radical struggles, fighting to change the structure and
chosen model of "development" of their own societies.
"..Then there are those fighting formal and brutal neocolonial occupations in
contested territories whose boundaries and fault lines were often
arbitrarily drawn last century by the imperialist powers. In Palestine,
Tibet, Chechnya, Kashmir, and several states in India's northeast provinces,
people are waging struggles for self-determination.
Several of these struggles might have been radical, even revolutionary when
they began, but often the brutality of the repression they face pushes them
into conservative, even retrogressive spaces in which they use the same
violent strategies and the same language of religious and cultural
nationalism used by the states they seek to replace.
Many of the foot soldiers in these struggles will find, like those who
fought apartheid in South Africa, that once they overcome overt occupation,
they will be left with another battle on their hands - a battle against
covert economic colonialism..". |
Then there are those fighting formal and brutal neocolonial occupations in
contested territories whose boundaries and fault lines were often
arbitrarily drawn last century by the imperialist powers. In Palestine,
Tibet, Chechnya, Kashmir, and several states in India's northeast provinces,
people are waging struggles for self-determination.
Several of these struggles might have been radical, even revolutionary when
they began, but often the brutality of the repression they face pushes them
into conservative, even retrogressive spaces in which they use the same
violent strategies and the same language of religious and cultural
nationalism used by the states they seek to replace.
Many of the foot soldiers in these struggles will find, like those who
fought apartheid in South Africa, that once they overcome overt occupation,
they will be left with another battle on their hands - a battle against
covert economic colonialism.
Meanwhile, as the rift between rich and poor is being driven deeper and the
battle to control the world's resources intensifies. Economic colonialism
through formal military aggression is staging a comeback.
Iraq today is a tragic illustration of this process. An illegal invasion. A
brutal occupation in the name of liberation. The rewriting of laws that
allow the shameless appropriation of the country's wealth and resources by
corporations allied to the occupation, and now the charade of a local "Iraqi
government."
For these reasons, it is absurd to condemn the resistance to the U.S.
occupation in Iraq, as being masterminded by terrorists or insurgents or
supporters of Saddam Hussein. After all if the United States were invaded
and occupied, would everybody who fought to liberate it be a terrorist or an
insurgent or a Bushite?
The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against
Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle.
Like most resistance movements, it combines a motley range of assorted
factions. Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists, fed-up collaborationists,
communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled with opportunism, local rivalry,
demagoguery, and criminality. But if we are only going to support pristine
movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity.
This is not to say that we shouldn't ever criticize resistance movements.
Many of them suffer from a lack of democracy, from the iconization of their
"leaders," a lack of transparency, a lack of vision and direction. But most
of all they suffer from vilification, repression, and lack of resources.
Before we prescribe how a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct their
secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up our end
of the resistance by forcing the U.S. and its allies government to withdraw
from Iraq.
The first militant confrontation in the United States between the global
justice movement and the neo-liberal junta took place famously at the WTO
conference in Seattle in December 1999. To many mass movements in developing
countries that had long been fighting lonely, isolated battles, Seattle was
the first delightful sign that their anger and their vision of another kind
of world was shared by people in the imperialist countries.
In January 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 20,000 activists, students, film
makers - some of the best minds in the world - came together to share their
experiences and exchange ideas about confronting Empire. That was the birth
of the now historic World Social Forum. It was the first, formal coming
together of an exciting, anarchic, unindoctrinated, energetic, new kind of
"Public Power." The rallying cry of the WSF is "Another World is Possible."
It has become a platform where hundreds of conversations, debates, and
seminars have helped to hone and refine a vision of what kind of world it
should be.
By January 2004, when the fourth WSF was held in Mumbai, India, it attracted
200,000 delegates. I have never been part of a more electrifying gathering.
It was a sign of the social forum's success that the mainstream media in
India ignored it completely. But now, the WSF is threatened by its own
success. The safe, open, festive atmosphere of the forum has allowed
politicians and nongovernmental organizations that are imbricated in the
political and economic systems that the forum opposes to participate and
make themselves heard.
Another danger is that the WSF, which has played such a vital role in the
movement for global justice, runs the risk of becoming an end unto itself.
Just organizing it every year consumes the energies of some of the best
activists. If conversations about resistance replace real civil
disobedience, then the WSF could become an asset to those whom it was
created to oppose. The forum must be held and must grow, but we have to find
ways to channel our conversations there back into concrete action.
As resistance movements have begun to reach out across national borders and
pose a real threat, governments have developed their own strategies of how
to deal with them. They range from cooptation to repression. I'm going to speak about three of the contemporary dangers that confront
resistance movements:
-
the difficult meeting point between mass movements and
the mass media,
-
the hazards of the NGO-ization of resistance, and
-
the
confrontation between resistance movements and increasingly repressive
states.
Difficult meeting point
between mass movements and the mass media ...
Governments have learned that a crisis-driven media cannot afford to hang
about in the same place for too long. Like business houses need a cash
turnover, the media need crises turnover. Whole countries become old news.
They cease to exist, and the darkness becomes deeper than before the light
was briefly shone on them. We saw it happen in Afghanistan when the Soviets
withdrew. And now, after Operation Enduring Freedom put the CIA's Hamid
Karzai in place, Afghanistan has been thrown to its warlords once more.
Another CIA operative, Iyad Allawi, has been installed in Iraq, so perhaps
it's time for the media to move on from there, too.
While governments hone the art of waiting out crisis, resistance movements
are increasingly being ensnared in a vortex of crisis production, seeking to
find ways of manufacturing them in easily consumable, spectator-friendly
formats.
Every self-respecting peoples' movement, every "issue" is expected to have
its own hot air balloon in the sky advertising its brand and purpose.
For this reason, starvation deaths are more effective advertisements for
impoverishment than millions of malnourished people, who don't quite make
the cut. Dams are not newsworthy until the devastation they wreak makes good
television. (And by then, it's too late).
Standing in the rising water of a reservoir for days on end, watching your
home and belongings float away to protest against a big dam used to be an
effective strategy, but isn't any more. The media is dead bored of that one.
So the hundreds of thousands of people being displaced by dams are expected
to either conjure new tricks or give up the struggle.
Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not
powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse
to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircrafts, when
people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the
globe.
If we want to reclaim the space for civil disobedience, we will have to
liberate ourselves from the tyranny of crisis reportage and its fear of the
mundane. We have to use our experience, our imagination, and our art to
interrogate the instruments of that state that ensure that "normality"
remains what it is: cruel, unjust, unacceptable. We have to expose the
policies and processes that make ordinary things - food, water, shelter and
dignity - such a distant dream for ordinary people. Real pre-emptive strike
is to understand that wars are the end result of flawed and unjust peace.
As far as mass resistance movements are concerned, the fact is that no
amount of media coverage can make up for mass strength on the ground. There
is no option, really, to old-fashioned, back-breaking political
mobilization.
Corporate globalization has increased the distance between those who make
decisions and those who have to suffer the effects of those decisions.
Forums like the WSF enable local resistance movements to reduce that
distance and to link up with their counterparts in rich countries. That
alliance is an important and formidable one. For example, when India's first
private dam, the Maheshwar Dam, was being built, alliances between the
Narmada Bachao Andolan (the NBA), the German organization Urgewald, the
Berne Declaration in Switzerland, and the International Rivers Network in
Berkeley worked together to push a series of international banks and
corporations out of the project. This would not have been possible had there
not been a rock solid resistance movement on the ground. The voice of that
local movement was amplified by supporters on the global stage, embarrassing
and forcing investors to withdraw.
An infinite number of similar, alliances, targeting specific projects and
specific corporations would help to make another world possible. We should
begin with the corporations who did business with Saddam Hussein and now
profit from the devastation and occupation of Iraq.
The hazards of the NGO-ization
of resistance...
It
will be easy to twist what I'm about to say into an indictment of all NGOs.
That would be a falsehood. In the murky waters of fake NGOs set up or to
siphon off grant money or as tax dodges (in states like Bihar, they are
given as dowry), of course there are NGOs doing valuable work. But it's
important to consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.
In India, for instance, the funded NGO boom began in the late 1980s and
1990s. It coincided with the opening of India's markets to neo-liberalism.
At the time, the Indian state, in keeping with the requirements of
structural adjustment, was withdrawing funding from rural development,
agriculture, energy, transport, and public health. As the state abdicated
its traditional role, NGOs moved in to work in these very areas. The
difference, of course, is that the funds available to them are a minuscule
fraction of the actual cut in public spending. Most large funded NGOs are
financed and patronized by aid and development agencies, which are in turn
funded by Western governments, the World Bank, the UN, and some
multinational corporations. Though they may not be the very same agencies,
they are certainly part of the same loose, political formation that oversees
the neo-liberal project and demands the slash in government spending in the
first place.
Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned
missionary zeal? Guilt? It's a little more than that. NGOs give the
impression that they are filling the vacuum created by a retreating state.
And they are, but in a materially inconsequential way.
Their real
contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or
benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. They turn people into dependent victims and
blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between
the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have become the
arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators.
In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people
they work among. They're what botanists would call an indicator species.
It's almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neo-liberalism,
the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly
than the phenomenon of the U.S. preparing to invade a country and
simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation.
In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments
of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to
present their work in a shallow framework more or less shorn of a political
or historical context. At any rate, an inconvenient historical or political
context.
Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress reports
from poor countries and war zones eventually make the (dark) people of those
(dark) countries seem like pathological victims. Another malnourished
Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another Afghan refugee camp, another
maimed Sudanese . . . in need of the white man's help. They unwittingly
reinforce racist stereotypes and re-affirm the achievements, the comforts,
and the compassion (the tough love) of Western civilization. They're the
secular missionaries of the modern world.
Eventually - on a smaller scale but more insidiously - the capital available
to NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the speculative
capital that flows in and out of the economies of poor countries. It begins
to dictate the agenda. It turns confrontation into negotiation. It
depoliticizes resistance. It interferes with local peoples' movements that
have traditionally been self-reliant. NGOs have funds that can employ local
people who might otherwise be activists in resistance movements, but now can
feel they are doing some immediate, creative good (and earning a living
while they're at it). Real political resistance offers no such short cuts.
The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a
well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in.
Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.
Confrontation between resistance movements and increasingly repressive
states - in the USA, the Patriot Act, in India POTA...
This brings us to a third danger I want to speak about tonight: the deadly
nature of the actual confrontation between resistance movements and
increasingly repressive states. Between public power and the agents of
Empire.
Whenever civil resistance has shown the slightest signs of evolving from
symbolic action into anything remotely threatening, the crack down is
merciless. We've seen what happened in the demonstrations in Seattle, in
Miami, in G�thenberg, in Genoa.
In the United States, you have the USA PATRIOT Act, which has become a
blueprint for antiterrorism laws passed by governments across the world.
Freedoms are being curbed in the name of protecting freedom. And once we
surrender our freedoms, to win them back will take a revolution.
Some governments have vast experience in the business of curbing freedoms
and still smelling sweet. The government of India, an old hand at the game,
lights the path.
Over the years the Indian government has passed a plethora of laws that
allow it to call almost anyone a terrorist, an insurgent, a militant. We
have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Public Security Act, the
Special Areas Security Act, the Gangster Act, the Terrorist and Disruptive
Areas Act (which has formally lapsed but under which people are still facing
trial), and, most recently, POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act), the
broad-spectrum antibiotic for the disease of dissent.
There are other steps that are being taken, such as court judgments that in
effect curtail free speech, the right of government workers to go on strike,
the right to life and livelihood. Courts have begun to micro-manage our
lives in India. And criticizing the courts is a criminal offense.
But coming back to the counter-terrorism initiatives, over the last decade,
the number of people who have been killed by the police and security forces
runs into the tens of thousands. In the state of Andhra Pradesh (the pin-up
girl of corporate globalization in India), an average of about 200
"extremists" are killed in what are called "encounters" every year. The
Bombay police boast of how many "gangsters" they have killed in "shoot
outs." In Kashmir, in a situation that almost amounts to war, an estimated
80,000 people have been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply
"disappeared." In the northeastern provinces, the situation is similar.
In recent years, the Indian police have opened fire on unarmed people,
mostly Dalit and Adivasi. Their preferred method is to kill them and then
call them terrorists. India is not alone, though. We have seen similar thing
happen in countries such Bolivia, Chile, and South Africa. In the era of
neo-liberalism, poverty is a crime and protesting against it is more and
more being defined as terrorism.
| "..In India, POTA (the Prevention of
Terrorism Act) is often called the Production of Terrorism Act.
It's a versatile, hold-all law that could apply to anyone from
an al-Qaeda operative to a disgruntled bus conductor..." |
In India, POTA (the Prevention of Terrorism Act) is often called the
Production of Terrorism Act. It's a versatile, hold-all law that could apply
to anyone from an al-Qaeda operative to a disgruntled bus conductor. As with
all anti-terrorism laws, the genius of POTA is that it can be whatever the
government wants. After the 2002 state-assisted pogrom in Gujarat, in which
an estimated 2,000 Muslims were savagely killed by Hindu mobs and 150,000
driven from their homes, 287 people have been accused under POTA. Of these,
286 are Muslim and one is a Sikh.
POTA allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as
judicial evidence. In effect, torture tends to replace investigation. The
South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center reports that India has the
highest number of torture and custodial deaths in the world. Government
records show that there were 1,307 deaths in judicial custody in 2002 alone.
A few months ago, I was a member of a peoples' tribunal on POTA. Over a
period of two days, we listened to harrowing testimonies of what is
happening in our wonderful democracy. It's everything - from people being
forced to drink urine, to being stripped, humiliated, given electric shocks,
burned with cigarette butts, having iron rods put up their anuses, to being
beaten and kicked to death.
The new government has promised to repeal POTA. I'd be surprised if that
happens before similar legislation under a different name is put in place.
If its not POTA it'll be MOTA or something.
When every avenue of non-violent dissent is closed down, and everyone who
protests against the violation of their human rights is called a terrorist,
should we really be surprised if vast parts of the country are overrun by
those who believe in armed struggle and are more or less beyond the control
of the state: in Kashmir, the north eastern provinces, large parts of Madhya
Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Andhra Pradesh. Ordinary people in
these regions are trapped between the violence of the militants and the
state.
In Kashmir, the Indian army estimates that 3,000 to 4,000 militants are
operating at any given time. To control them, the Indian government deploys
about 500,000 soldiers. Clearly, it isn't just the militants the army seeks
to control, but a whole population of humiliated, unhappy people who see the
Indian army as an occupation force.
The Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows not just officers, but even
junior commissioned officers and non-commissioned officers of the army, to
use force and even kill any person on suspicion of disturbing public order.
It was first imposed on a few districts in the state of Manipur in 1958.
Today, it applies to virtually all of the north east and Kashmir. The
documentation of instances of torture, disappearances, custodial deaths,
rape, and summary execution by security forces is enough to turn your
stomach.
In Andhra Pradesh, in India's heartland, the militant Marxist-Leninist
Peoples' War Group - which for years been engaged in a violent armed
struggle and has been the principal target of many of the Andhra police's
fake "encounters" - held its first public meeting in years on July 28, 2004,
in the town of Warangal.
It was attended by about hundreds of thousands of people. Under POTA, all of
them are considered terrorists. Are they all going to be detained in some
Indian equivalent of Guant�namo Bay?
The whole of the north east and the Kashmir valley is in ferment. What will
the government do with these millions of people?
If
governments do not honor non violent resistance, then by default they
privilege those who turn to violence...
There is no discussion taking place in the world today that is more crucial
than the debate about strategies of resistance.
And the choice of strategy
is not entirely in the hands of the public. It is also in the hands of sarkar.
After all, when the U.S. invades and occupies Iraq in the way it has done,
with such overwhelming military force, can the resistance be expected to be
a conventional military one? (Of course, even if it were conventional, it
would still be called terrorist.) In a strange sense, the U.S. government's
arsenal of weapons and unrivalled air and fire power makes terrorism an
all-but-inescapable response. What people lack in wealth and power, they
will make up with stealth and strategy.
In this restive, despairing time, if governments do not do all they can to
honor nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege those who turn
to violence. No government's condemnation of terrorism is credible if it
cannot show itself to be open to change by to nonviolent dissent.
But instead nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed. Any kind of
mass political mobilization or organization is being bought off, or broken,
or simply ignored.
Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media, and let's not forget the
film industry, lavish their time, attention, technology, research, and
admiration on war and terrorism. Violence has been deified.
The message this sends is disturbing and dangerous: If you seek to air a
public grievance, violence is more effective than nonviolence.
As the rift
between the rich and poor grows the unrest will only escalate...
As the rift between the rich and poor grows, as the need to appropriate and
control the world's resources to feed the great capitalist machine becomes
more urgent, the unrest will only escalate.
For those of us who are on the wrong side of Empire, the humiliation is
becoming unbearable.
Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each
of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their
screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S.
soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small
towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis
of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that
will never be theirs.
The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the
politicians, the judges and generals look down on us from on high and shake
their heads sternly. "There's no Alternative," they say. And let slip the
dogs of war.
Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and Chechnya,
from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of Kashmir, from
the hills and plains of Colombia and the forests of Andhra Pradesh and Assam
comes the chilling reply: "There's no alternative but terrorism." Terrorism.
Armed struggle. Insurgency. Call it what you want.
Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators, as well
as its victims. But so is war. You could say that terrorism is the
privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war. They are
people who don't believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use
of violence.
Human society is journeying to a terrible place.
Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It's called justice.
It's time to recognize that no amount of nuclear weapons or full-spectrum
dominance or daisy cutters or spurious governing councils and loyal jirgas
can buy peace at the cost of justice.
The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with greater
intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others.
Exactly what form that battle takes, whether its beautiful or bloodthirsty,
depends on us.
|
