Activist with a conflict of interests

This peace prize recipient is an advocate of violent resistance in Iraq, writes Gerard Henderson.

Is it possible to be anti-war while advocating the cause of one side in a military conflict? Can a person be committed to non-violence while supporting an armed resistance movement? According to Professor Stuart Rees, the director of the Sydney Peace Foundation, the answer to both questions seems to reside in the affirmative.

That's why the foundation has decided to award the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize to the Indian writer/activist Arundhati Roy. This follows the decision to give last year's $50,000 prize to the controversial Palestinian political activist Dr Hanan Ashrawi. This award is the best known of its kind in Australia. It is funded by the City of Sydney (that is, ratepayers/taxpayers) with a self-declared view of benefiting "Australians and people across the globe".

Roy will receive her gong at what is referred to on the foundation's website as a "gala ceremony" in Sydney on Thursday, November 4. In the lead-up to this gig, there has been significant media coverage. Most notably, an uncritical interview of Roy by Andrew Denton on the ABC TV Enough Rope program and a profile by Jennifer Byrne. In the latter piece, Roy engaged in her familiar (verbal) attack on such Western leaders as Tony Blair, George Bush and John Howard. She has previously described the US president as a "terrorist" and she told The Bulletin that Howard is "part of a grotesque, disgusting cabal" and "pathetic".

In response to a question about Bush, Roy advised Denton that "we don't have to choose between a malevolent Mickey Mouse [Bush] and the mad mullahs". She then commented, with respect to Iraq, that "we don't have to support the Mahdi Army [Moqtada Al-Sadr's militant Shiite group] but we have to become the Iraqi resistance". She added that "activists and resistance movements need to understand that Iraq is engaging in the front lines of empire and we have to, you know, we have to throw our weight behind the resistance". Yes, we know.

Denton did not ask a follow-up question. Pity. For elements of the resistance in Iraq are engaged in a war - against the United Nations-endorsed Iraqi government and its backers in the multinational force (principally the US and Britain along with some 30 nations, including Australia). And elements of the Iraqi resistance have also engaged in acts of terrorism against unarmed civilians - Iraqis and foreigners alike. This terrorism has led to the murder of the senior UN official Sergio Vieira de Mello and to the recent kidnap of Care International's Margaret Hassan. Many of the terrorist cells in Iraq are controlled by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian born al-Qaeda revolutionary.

In her Enough Rope interview, Roy did not choose to qualify her statement that "we have to throw our weight behind the resistance" in Iraq. This is consistent with the position of many leading international leftists. John Pilger has declared that, on this issue, "we cannot afford to be choosy - we have no choice now but to support the resistance". A similar call has been made by Tariq Ali. Likewise Michael Moore, who has equated the Iraqi resistance with the Minutemen who fought against the British in the American War of Independence.

Like Roy, Pilger, Ali and Moore support the Iraqi resistance. However, unlike Roy, neither seems likely to win an international peace award. Yet, with Professor Rees and the Sydney Peace Prize, you never really know.

Before the 2004 federal election, Rees played a prominent part in organising the self-important "Statement from concerned representatives of Australian universities". This consisted of a declaration by "418 university professionals" - all of whom stated "we have to be trustworthy" and pronounced that "the same standards should be expected of everyone in public life". Rees appeared on SBS TV, on the evening of the release of the statement. He was not asked, and he did not explain, how a few hundred professionals could speak on behalf of Australia's tertiary institutions.

While in self-declared "trustworthy" mode, Rees might explain how it has come to pass that a supporter of the resistance in Iraq is to be given a 2004 Sydney Peace Prize. Especially since the foundation's criteria requires a commitment to "the philosophy and principles of non-violence". After all, Rees's pre-election statement, which was interpreted as an attack on the Howard Government, called for "the highest possible standards of integrity and accountability".

Roy is an internationally recognised social commentator with a significant fan club around the world. She is welcome to visit Australia, to address Australian audiences and to appear on the Australian media. However, judged on her own comments, she should not be the recipient of a peace prize.

Iraq aside, Roy's own non-fiction is anything but peaceful. Her most recent book, The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (Flamingo, 2004), is essentially a rant against the West. She compares Taliban justice to the judicial systems prevailing in India and the US. She maintains that "a world run by a handful of greedy bankers and CEOs who nobody elected can't possibly last". And, following the leftist Noam Chomsky, she suggests that "we are all voluntary inmates" in a giant "lunatic asylum".

In Roy's body of work there is scarcely a suggestion that the West ever did anything correct. Or that the less-developed world (in parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East) might be responsible, in part at least, for its own economic condition.

Last September Moeletsi Mbeki (the head of the South African Institute of International Affairs and younger brother of president Thabo Mbeki) gave a speech in Durban in which he commented that "the average African is poorer than during the age of colonialism". Mbeki also accused the continent's post-colonial rulers of neglecting development and wasting money. Yet, according to Roy's world-view, virtually all our problems have been caused by what she terms the West's "Empire".

Pre-eminently, Roy is a controversialist. That's why it is possible to support some of her favourite causes while opposing others. Yet the fact remains that next week Roy will receive a high-profile Australian peace prize for a commitment to non-violence in word and deed - while supporting the Iraqi resistance which is targeting Australians, military and civilians alike in Iraq.

The article appeard in both the Melbourne "Age" and the "Sydney Morning Herald" 28th October. To view the full piece Click here