PHA-Exchange> Arundhati Roy's speech at WSF

[Anant Bhan]

Dear friends,

Sending Arundhati Roy's speech for those of you who missed it or were 
not able to make it to WSF.

Warm Regards,

Anant.

Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?A Global Resistance to Empire-  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' ó 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 ó 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 ó 
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 ó 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) ó 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 
--------------------------------------- [1] Mumbai conference calls for 
boycott of America, Inc. author: Antonio Gramsci Activists in India 
[including Arundhati Roy] and elsewhere are spearheading a call for an 
international boycott of corporate America, starting with the ten biggest 
donors to the George Bush Jr campaign. [2]
 http://www.motherearth.org/USboycott/index.php Bush BoycottWebsite 
[Comprehensive site] [3] 
http://india.indymedia.org/en/2004/01/208844.shtml Athousand issues 
during a week of workshops, protests, and events A major theme by many 
activists is how to defeat Bush in 2004 and a broader call for a boycott 
campaign against US corporations which benefit from the occupation of 
Iraq. 

Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?
A Global Resistance to Empire-  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' ó 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 ó 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 ó 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 ó 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) ó 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 

--------------------------------------- 

[1] Mumbai conference calls for boycott of America, Inc. author: 
Antonio Gramsci 

Activists in India [including Arundhati Roy] and elsewhere are 
spearheading a call for an international boycott of corporate 
America, starting with the ten biggest donors to the George Bush Jr 
campaign. 

[2] http://www.motherearth.org/USboycott/index.php Bush Boycott 
Website [Comprehensive site] 

[3] http://india.indymedia.org/en/2004/01/208844.shtml A thousand 
issues during a week of workshops, protests, and events A major theme 
by many activists is how to defeat Bush in 2004 and a broader call 
for a boycott campaign against US corporations which benefit from the 
occupation of Iraq. 







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