Through his op-ed column in the October 26 Sydney Morning Herald, Liberal Party historian and apologist for imperialism Gerard Henderson attempted to discredit the awarding of the Sydney Peace Prize to Indian writer and campaigner for global justice Arundhati Roy.
Last year, the small but noisy Zionist lobby tried to discredit the awarding of the prize to Palestinian leader Dr Hanan Ashrawi. To its credit, the Sydney Peace Foundation stood its ground and the Palestinian national liberation struggle received some long overdue — but limited — recognition.
And so it will be with Arundhati Roy, who will be in Sydney this week to accept the award. The likes of Henderson may be dismayed to find that, as Andrew Denton noted on the ABC's Enough Rope program on October 18, "the more Roy's shouted down, the louder her voice gets".
Henderson devoted his weekly column in the October 26 SMH to condemning the recognition of Roy's work by the foundation in a hypocritical article titled "Activist with a conflict of interests". The article also ran in the Melbourne Age, under the heading "The mockery of a peace prize".
Ostensibly, Henderson was complaining about the fact that Roy has publicly stated that she supports Iraqis' resistance to the foreign military occupation of their country. But scarcely beneath the surface was Henderson's broader agenda — to discredit all those who were prominent in the global opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq last year.
Henderson was a supporter of the "coalition of the willing" and doesn't resile from this, despite the exposure of government lies that justified the invasion.
Doesn't such support for an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation disqualify Henderson from all serious commentary on the issue of peace?
Arundhati Roy is not an Australian, but she has voiced majority Australian opinion by eloquently opposing the invasion of Iraq. To her great credit she has continued to support the cause of peace in Iraq by advocating the ousting of the root cause of the conflict consuming the country — the foreign military occupation. Anything less would be a betrayal of not only the Iraqi people, but of the worldwide anti-war movement too.
Roy was born in 1961 and grew up in Kerala, southern India. She was raised by her mother who was considered unacceptable in her tight-knit Syrian Christian village community because she married an outsider, a Bengali man.
Roy lived an impoverished life before studying architecture in New Delhi. She spent five years writing a novel about life in a Kerala village — The God of Small Things, which won the 1997 Booker Prize.
Roy became a passionate advocate of the Save the Narmada Movement (NBA), standing shoulder-to-shoulder with poor villagers in central India, donating the equivalent of her Booker Prize money to the NBA. The Narmada Valley was being savaged by a long-term government project to build 3200 dams along the Narmada River, altering its course 90 degrees and displacing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Their villages and homes were to be submerged in the name of "the greater common good".
Having begun to champion the cause of the oppressed, there was no turning back for Arundhati Roy. Once you've seen certain things, she says, "you can't un-see them".
Roy has developed into a leading voice in the global anti-war movement, undoubtedly one of our most eloquent. And in no uncertain terms she has championed the cause of non-violent, mass political action, deploring terrorism at every turn.
In a speech entitled "Public Power in the Age of Empire" that she gave in San Francisco on August 16, Roy explained that "it is absurd to condemn the resistance to the US occupation in Iraq, as being masterminded by terrorists... After all if the United States were invaded and occupied, would everybody who fought to liberate it be a terrorist?", adding that the "Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle."
But there's an even more fundamental question at play here, which represents a key debate in the global anti-war movement. In Henderson's words, "Is it possible to be anti-war while advocating the cause of one side in a military conflict?"
Our starting point in answering this question must be to recognise every nation's basic democratic right to self-determination, to national sovereignty.
It's hypocritical to say, like Henderson does, that you're in favour of this right while at the same time as denouncing those members of a nation under foreign occupation for taking up arms against the occupying army.
Siding with such a resistance movement does not mean endorsing every action it carries out in an attempt to defeat the foreign occupation forces or endorsing the political views of any individual or group involved in such a resistance movement.
As Roy explained in her August 16 speech: "Like most resistance movements, [the Iraqis] combine 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 were to only support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity.
"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 US and its allied governments to withdraw from Iraq."
We must also recognise that people who bravely resist US military occupations are actually doing the cause of peace a favour. The sustained and successful armed resistance of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front made the US establishment back off from direct foreign military intervention for nearly a decade after Washington's decisive defeat in Vietnam.
The message for the subjects of the US empire is clear: don't turn the other cheek unless you want it beaten.
And so it is with today's Iraqi resistance. The US rulers are once again being made to think twice before they blaze their unwelcome, illegal, violent and arrogant way into any other country.
"In Roy's body of work", Henderson wrote, "there is scarcely a suggestion that the West ever did anything correct."
Perhaps anticipating such a complaint from the defenders of imperialism like Henderson, in David Barsamian's book The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy, she comments: "Those of us who come from former colonies ... think of imperialism as rape... Racism plays the same part today as it did in colonial times. There isn't any difference. I mean, the only people who are going to argue for the good side to imperialism are white people, people who were once masters, or Uncle Toms. I don't think you're going to find that argument being made by people in India, or people in South Africa, people in former colonies."
The Sydney Peace Prize is to be given to Roy because her writings and speeches help Sydneysiders and people all over the world understand the causes of violence, so that we can act to eradicate those causes. The Peace Prize is given on behalf of us. It should never try to represent the Sydney that Gerard Henderson lives in. As John Pilger said last year, with this movement we have become the overwhelming majority, it is us who are the moderates.
From Green Left Weekly, November 3, 2004.
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