Lachlan Malloch, Sydney
Indian writer and anti-globalisation campaigner Arundhati Roy exhorted a packed Seymour Centre audience on the evening of November 3 to bring home the resistance to the US-led occupation of Iraq by boycotting the products of companies that have profited from the invasion of Iraq. She was delivering this year's Sydney Peace Prize Lecture.
"There have to be targeted acts of real civil disobedience with real consequences", she told the Seymour Centre audience. "You could make a list of those corporations which have profited from the invasion of Iraq and have offices here in Australia. You could name them, boycott them, occupy their offices and force them out of business. If it can happen in Bolivia, it can happen in India. It can happen in Australia. Why not?"
As well as delivering the Seymour Centre public lecture, Roy spoke at a $38 per head reception in the Art Gallery of NSW on November 5.
Sandwiched between these two engagements was the award ceremony itself — a $350 a head "black tie" dinner. Perversely then, the official recognition of Arundhati Roy as an advocate of the world's poor and oppressed was attended by plenty of silvertails from Sydney's wealthy establishment and none of the activists who have been inspired by her books and seek to act on her ideas.
Roy insisted that the occupation of Iraq be seen not only as a military aggression, but as the wholesale plundering of the Iraqi people's national resources. Last year's invasion was "one of the most cowardly wars ever fought ... in which a band of [nuclear-armed] nations rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of having nuclear weapons, used the UN to force it to disarm, then invaded it, occupied it and are now in the process of selling it".
It was on this last point, of the occupying powers' "selling Iraq", that Roy had most to say. "If we can find it in ourselves to peep behind the curtain of blood, we would glimpse the pitiless transactions taking place backstage."
She told a media conference earlier on November 3: "Iraqi laws are being re-written, Iraqi infrastructure is being sold to foreign multinationals that are now allowed to expatriate 100% of the profits. Once Iraq has been sold, then democracy becomes meaningless. It's a process of 'hollowing out' of what we think of as democracy. And once it's been hollowed out, then of course you're going to say, 'We must have elections' because they're meaningless!
"Therefore ... our fight is not just for the armies to pull out, but also for these companies [Bechtel, Halliburton, etc.] to pull out."
Green Left Weekly asked her what she thought was the significance of the Iraqi resistance for other movements around the world fighting occupation and exploitation. She was in no doubt that the fight unfolding in Iraq is globally significant.
"Iraq marks the beginning of a new cycle. You have, broadly speaking, two kinds of resistance movements in the world today. One are those which are fighting classical neo-colonial struggles such as Kashmir, Iraq, Chechnya, Tibet... The other are the anti-globalisation struggles in countries like South Africa, all of South America, India.
"In Iraq you see the culmination of the two, how the project of neoliberalism now needs military aggression to take over. Today, Iraq is engaging the forces of Empire directly, which means it's hard for [the US rulers] to now go into Iran or Syria, because they are occupied in Iraq and in Afghanistan."
In accepting the Sydney Peace Prize, Roy made it clear that she was not interested in a morally vacuous notion of "peace". Instead, she is a fierce partisan of people's struggles for the "expansive, magnificent concept of justice".
"It might seem ironic that a person who spends most of her time thinking of strategies of resistance and plotting to disrupt the putative peace is given a peace prize", she said. "To me there cannot be peace without justice and there cannot be justice without resistance. And there cannot be justice if you do not name and expose the institutions that are perpetrating injustice, otherwise you just mouth platitudes — it can be meaningless.
"Invaded and occupied Iraq has been made to pay out 200 million dollars in 'reparations' for lost profits to corporations like Halliburton, Shell, Mobil, Nestle, Pepsi, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Toys R Us. That's apart from its US$125 billion sovereign debt forcing it to turn to the IMF, waiting in the wings like the angel of death, with its structural adjustment program."
The full text of Arundhati Roy's Sydney Peace Prize Lecture is available at < http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/newsevents/A HREF="mailto:articles/2004/nov/04_arundhatispeech.shtml"><articles/2004/nov/04_arundhatispeech.shtml>.
From Green Left Weekly, November 17, 2004.
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