Is it for Freedom?

What We Call Peace is Little Better than Capitulation to a Corporate Coup

This is an edited extract from the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in Sydney, Australia. Arundhati Roy (born November 24, 1961) is an Indian novelist, activist and a world citizen. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel The God of Small Things. Although this speech is three years old, I have chosen to post it here because it not only holds true today, it also offers the reader/listener the opportunity to think deeply about their own thought processes.


Sometimes there's truth in old cliches. There is no real peace without justice. And without resistance, there will be no justice. Today, it is not merely justice itself, but the idea of justice that is under attack.


The assault on vulnerable, fragile sections of society is so complete, so cruel and so clever that its sheer audacity has eroded our definition of justice. It has force us to lower our sights, and curtail our expectiation. Even among the well-intentioned, the magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of "human rights".


This is an alarming shift. The difference is that notions of equality, of parity, have been pried loose and eased out of the equation. It's a process of attrition. Almost unconsiously, we begin to think of justice for the rich and human rights for the poor.
Justice for the corporate world, human rights for its' victims. Justice for Americans, human rights for the Afghans and Iraqis. Justice for the Indian upper castes, human rights for Dalits and Adivasis (if that). Justice for white Australians, human rights for aborigines and immigrants (most times, not even that)


It is becoming more than clear that violating human rights is an inherent and necessary part of the process of implementing a coercive and unjust political and economic structure on the world. Increasingly, human rights violations are being portrayed as the unfortunate, almost accidental, fallout of an otherwise acceptable political and economic system. As though they are a small problem that can be mopped up with a little extra attention from some non-governmental organization.


This is why in areas of heightened conflict-in Kashmir and in Iraq for example, human rights professionals are regarded with a degree of suspicion. Many resistance movements in poor countries which are fighting huge injustice and questioning the underlying principles of what constitutes "liberation" and "development" view human rights non-government organizations as modern-day missionaries who have come to take the ugly edge of imperialism-to difuse political anger and to maintain the status quo.

It has been only a few weeks since Australia re-elected John Howard, who, among other things, led the nation to participate in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

That invasion will surely go down in history as one of he most cowardly wars ever. It was a war in which a band of rich nations, armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of having nuclear weapons, used the United Nations to force to disarm, then invaded it, occupied it, and are now in the process of selling it.

I speak of Iraq, not because everybody is talking about it, but because it is a sign of things to come. Iraq marks the beginning of a new cycle. It offers an opportunity to watch the corporate-military cabal that has come to be known as "empire" at work. In the new Iraq, the gloves are off.

As the battle to control the world's resources intensifies, economic colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback. Iraq is the logical culmination of the process of corporate globalization in which neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism have fused.. If we can find it in ourselves to peep behind the curtain of blood, we would glimpse the pitiless transactions taking place backstage

Invaded and occupied Iraq has been made to pay out $US200 million in "reparations" for lost profits such as Halliburton, Shell, Mobil, Nestle, Pepsi, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Toys are us. That's apart from its $US125 billion sovereign debt forcing it to turn to the IMF, waiting in the wings like the angel of death, with its structual adjustment program (though in Iraq there don't seem many structures left to adjust).

So what does peace mean in this savage, corporatized, militarized world? What does peace mean to people in occupied Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Tibet and Chechnya? Or to the Aboriginal people of Australia? Or the Kurds in Turkey? Or the Dalits and Adivasis of India? What does peace mean to women in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan? What does it mean to the millions who are being uprooted from their lands by dams and development projects? What does peace mean to the poor who are being actively robbed of the resources? For them peace is war.

We know very well who benefits from war in the age of empire. But we must also ask ourselves who benefits from peace in the age of empire? War mongering is crimianal. But talking of peace without talking of justice could easily become advocacy for a kind of capitualation. And talking of justice without unmasking the institutions and the systems that perpetuate injustice is beyond hypocritical.

It's easy to blame the poor for being poor. It's easy to believe that the world is being caught up in an escalating spiral of terrorism and war. That's what allows George Bush to say, "You're either with us or with the terrorists." But that is a spurious choice. Terrorism is only the privatisation of war. Terrorists are the free-marketers of war. They believe that the legitimate use of violence is not the sole prerogative of the state.

It is mendacious to make moral distinction between the unspeakable brutality of terrorism and the indiscriminate carnage of war and occupation. Both kinds of violence are unacceptable. We cannot support one and condemn the other.