gone
11-01-2004, 08:09 PM
Pasted from Aotearoa Indymedia:
Last year, the small but noisy Zionist lobby tried to discredit the awarding of the Sydney Peace 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. [..]
by Lachlan Malloch - see also his current review of:
The Chequebook and the Cruise-Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy (by David Barsamian)
+ Arundhati Roy to donate all the US$50,000 to Aborigines
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.
[..] 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 @ http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/back/2004/605/
+
Arundhati Roy’s blaze of light
The Chequebook and the Cruise-Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy
By David Barsamian
Harper Perennial, 2004
178 pages, $22.95 (tpb)
Review by Lachlan Malloch
Arundhati Roy is usually introduced as “the Indian writer who won the 1997 Booker Prize”, before her activist achievements are listed. The four interviews that make up The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile - more a political pamphlet than a book - confirm, however, that Roy is an eloquent and insightful fighter in today’s global justice movement.
These interviews, conducted between February 2001 and May 2003 by US-based journalist David Barsamian, explore several themes about life for the mass of the world’s people under modern-day imperialism. Reading them together is a smooth ride: we’re guided by Barsamian’s probing, progressive spotlight and accompanied all the way by Roy’s insistent, persuasive prose.
The first theme is the profoundly undemocratic nature of the world economic system, especially as it impacts on people in the Third World. The official development debate, as conducted by the World Bank, the IMF and company, is a “scam”, says Roy, amounting to nothing more than advancing the re-colonisation of the Third World.
In 2001 she told Barsamian: “The distance between power and powerlessness, between those who make decisions and those who have to suffer those decisions, has increased enormously. It’s a perilous journey for the poor - it’s a pitfall filled to overflowing with lies, brutality and injustice. Sitting in Washington or Geneva in the offices of the World Bank or the World Trade Organisation, bureaucrats have the power to decide the fate of millions. It’s not only their decisions we’re contesting. It’s the fact that they have the power to make those decisions. No one elected them. No one said they could control our lives.”
It’s clear that living and working in India, at globalisation’s grinding coalface, places Roy at a vantage point. And there is so much to learn from her reflections on Indian politics. In the book, Roy explores the history of the Indian government’s project to build 3200 dams in the Narmada Valley and the mass protest opposition, which she has been a part of.
Roy’s commentary on the rise and ugliness of Hindu chauvinism in India also stands out as compelling reading.
Roy constantly reminds us that it’s women who, in many ways, bear the brunt of globalisation, making feminism a touchstone of the global resistance. Hers is a fierce, uncompromising, independent, intellectual feminism. It’s a pleasure to read how she rallies her fellow women, especially in the deeply sexist Indian context, to retain what they want from tradition while gaining what they need from modernity.
While I read this book, I pondered why Arundhati Roy’s work should be so attractive to us.
It’s not just that she unleashes her prodigious weaponry of metaphors to unmask imperialism and inspire our resistance - although that’s a great asset for the left. The title of this collection is a fine example, referring to the two primary ways in which imperialism keeps the Third World subjugated.
It’s not just that she has chosen to continue to give a voice to the oppressed rather than ‘sell out’ and pursue the purely financial rewards promised by the Booker Prize. That too is exemplary morality.
Perhaps Roy’s greatest qualities are the ones she obviously shares with Pilger. First, she’s an activist journalist, finding and telling the truth by taking sides in the struggles of the world’s oppressed.
Second, her sense of humour and alertness to the absurd rescue some of our sanity, by helping us laugh at an insane world.
In another way still she recalls a little of the old Italian man in Catch 22 during the Second World War. He pities the US empire because he’s calmly confident that humanity will endure, outlasting an empire whose internal contradictions and greedy overreach will eventually see its power drain away.
Roy’s unshakeable belief in the power of collective action - in the solidarity of the oppressed - is an example of what the anti-war movement needs in large doses. In Chequebook she articulates this in terms of breaking mass liberal illusions in the way the US war in Iraq might have been averted:
“Isn’t there a flaw in the logic of that phrase - ‘speak truth to power’? It assumes that power doesn’t know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth. Enron knows what it’s doing. We don’t have to tell it what it’s doing, we have to tell other people what it’s doing”.
How prescient that passage was for the recent theatrics of Australian politics! In one fell swoop it nails all the fake soul-searching and hand-wringing that’s been going on about “intelligence failures” supposedly leading the Australian government to lie to the people about the reasons for going to war against Iraq.
Our smooth ride with Roy and Barsamian further gathers pace towards the end of the book, as they begin to touch on the ways forward for our movement.
The global anti-war marches of February 2003 were magnificent, Roy says, but only ever symbolic. She implores us not only to grow, but more importantly to punch our way through into real civil disobedience. It’s the only way the powerful few will ever take notice of us. Roy chides the naivety in thinking that simply “giving up a Sunday” - even if it was millions of us doing it - was ever going to stop a juggernaut with such force as the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
This sort of perspective undoubtedly places her on the radical wing of the anti-war movement.
But a yet unanswered question for those of us following Roy’s work, especially as it relates to the World Social Forum process, is whether her proven capacity to change and to learn as she leads will eventually see her become aligned with a particular revolutionary party or socialist political current.
There are many of us who believe such a cross-over is not only possible, but truly urgent for all the leaders of today’s global resistance movement.
[Lachlan Malloch is a member of the Socialist Alliance in Sydney, Australia.]
------------------------------------------------------------
from
http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/calendar/
http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/calendar/xxxsydn.htm
Launch of Arundhati Roy's The Chequebook & the Cruise Missile. Fri Nov 5, 10.30am. Art Gallery of NSW, The Domain Rd. $38/$30. Ph (02) 9225 1878.
------------------------------------------------------------
From Green Left Weekly, November 3, 2004 @ http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/back/2004/605/
+
Arundhati Roy to donate US$50,000 to Aborigines
SYDNEY — In an interview printed in the October 14 Bulletin magazine, Indian writer and anti-globalisation campaigner Arundhati Roy, comparing Australia's Aborigines to India's Lalit (Untouchables), said she wanted to donate her $50,000 Sydney Peace Prize to Aboriginal political activities.
Untouchability, Roy said, “is one of the most cruel forms of discrimination, but one thing that didn't happen to them was the attempt to genocidally wipe them out, which happened in Australia.
“I don't want to give the money to Aboriginal communities as some act of charity. I want to give it to people who are involved with political work there... there's no complicated reason, it's just a straightforward political fight for survival and for right.”
The 1997 Booker Prize winner for her novel God of Small Things is due to accept the award on November 4.
“It is funny, I've spent so much time in South Africa recently and the white South Africans have a fascination for Australia. So, I was talking to some black friends and they laughed and said, ‘Yeah, it's because they think the Australians got it right. They just killed the blacks. The South Africans let us survive.'”
From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004 @ http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/back/2004/603/
[ November 01, 2004, 08:11 PM: Message edited by: gelfer ]
Last year, the small but noisy Zionist lobby tried to discredit the awarding of the Sydney Peace 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. [..]
by Lachlan Malloch - see also his current review of:
The Chequebook and the Cruise-Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy (by David Barsamian)
+ Arundhati Roy to donate all the US$50,000 to Aborigines
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.
[..] 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 @ http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/back/2004/605/
+
Arundhati Roy’s blaze of light
The Chequebook and the Cruise-Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy
By David Barsamian
Harper Perennial, 2004
178 pages, $22.95 (tpb)
Review by Lachlan Malloch
Arundhati Roy is usually introduced as “the Indian writer who won the 1997 Booker Prize”, before her activist achievements are listed. The four interviews that make up The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile - more a political pamphlet than a book - confirm, however, that Roy is an eloquent and insightful fighter in today’s global justice movement.
These interviews, conducted between February 2001 and May 2003 by US-based journalist David Barsamian, explore several themes about life for the mass of the world’s people under modern-day imperialism. Reading them together is a smooth ride: we’re guided by Barsamian’s probing, progressive spotlight and accompanied all the way by Roy’s insistent, persuasive prose.
The first theme is the profoundly undemocratic nature of the world economic system, especially as it impacts on people in the Third World. The official development debate, as conducted by the World Bank, the IMF and company, is a “scam”, says Roy, amounting to nothing more than advancing the re-colonisation of the Third World.
In 2001 she told Barsamian: “The distance between power and powerlessness, between those who make decisions and those who have to suffer those decisions, has increased enormously. It’s a perilous journey for the poor - it’s a pitfall filled to overflowing with lies, brutality and injustice. Sitting in Washington or Geneva in the offices of the World Bank or the World Trade Organisation, bureaucrats have the power to decide the fate of millions. It’s not only their decisions we’re contesting. It’s the fact that they have the power to make those decisions. No one elected them. No one said they could control our lives.”
It’s clear that living and working in India, at globalisation’s grinding coalface, places Roy at a vantage point. And there is so much to learn from her reflections on Indian politics. In the book, Roy explores the history of the Indian government’s project to build 3200 dams in the Narmada Valley and the mass protest opposition, which she has been a part of.
Roy’s commentary on the rise and ugliness of Hindu chauvinism in India also stands out as compelling reading.
Roy constantly reminds us that it’s women who, in many ways, bear the brunt of globalisation, making feminism a touchstone of the global resistance. Hers is a fierce, uncompromising, independent, intellectual feminism. It’s a pleasure to read how she rallies her fellow women, especially in the deeply sexist Indian context, to retain what they want from tradition while gaining what they need from modernity.
While I read this book, I pondered why Arundhati Roy’s work should be so attractive to us.
It’s not just that she unleashes her prodigious weaponry of metaphors to unmask imperialism and inspire our resistance - although that’s a great asset for the left. The title of this collection is a fine example, referring to the two primary ways in which imperialism keeps the Third World subjugated.
It’s not just that she has chosen to continue to give a voice to the oppressed rather than ‘sell out’ and pursue the purely financial rewards promised by the Booker Prize. That too is exemplary morality.
Perhaps Roy’s greatest qualities are the ones she obviously shares with Pilger. First, she’s an activist journalist, finding and telling the truth by taking sides in the struggles of the world’s oppressed.
Second, her sense of humour and alertness to the absurd rescue some of our sanity, by helping us laugh at an insane world.
In another way still she recalls a little of the old Italian man in Catch 22 during the Second World War. He pities the US empire because he’s calmly confident that humanity will endure, outlasting an empire whose internal contradictions and greedy overreach will eventually see its power drain away.
Roy’s unshakeable belief in the power of collective action - in the solidarity of the oppressed - is an example of what the anti-war movement needs in large doses. In Chequebook she articulates this in terms of breaking mass liberal illusions in the way the US war in Iraq might have been averted:
“Isn’t there a flaw in the logic of that phrase - ‘speak truth to power’? It assumes that power doesn’t know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than the powerless know the truth. Enron knows what it’s doing. We don’t have to tell it what it’s doing, we have to tell other people what it’s doing”.
How prescient that passage was for the recent theatrics of Australian politics! In one fell swoop it nails all the fake soul-searching and hand-wringing that’s been going on about “intelligence failures” supposedly leading the Australian government to lie to the people about the reasons for going to war against Iraq.
Our smooth ride with Roy and Barsamian further gathers pace towards the end of the book, as they begin to touch on the ways forward for our movement.
The global anti-war marches of February 2003 were magnificent, Roy says, but only ever symbolic. She implores us not only to grow, but more importantly to punch our way through into real civil disobedience. It’s the only way the powerful few will ever take notice of us. Roy chides the naivety in thinking that simply “giving up a Sunday” - even if it was millions of us doing it - was ever going to stop a juggernaut with such force as the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
This sort of perspective undoubtedly places her on the radical wing of the anti-war movement.
But a yet unanswered question for those of us following Roy’s work, especially as it relates to the World Social Forum process, is whether her proven capacity to change and to learn as she leads will eventually see her become aligned with a particular revolutionary party or socialist political current.
There are many of us who believe such a cross-over is not only possible, but truly urgent for all the leaders of today’s global resistance movement.
[Lachlan Malloch is a member of the Socialist Alliance in Sydney, Australia.]
------------------------------------------------------------
from
http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/calendar/
http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/calendar/xxxsydn.htm
Launch of Arundhati Roy's The Chequebook & the Cruise Missile. Fri Nov 5, 10.30am. Art Gallery of NSW, The Domain Rd. $38/$30. Ph (02) 9225 1878.
------------------------------------------------------------
From Green Left Weekly, November 3, 2004 @ http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/back/2004/605/
+
Arundhati Roy to donate US$50,000 to Aborigines
SYDNEY — In an interview printed in the October 14 Bulletin magazine, Indian writer and anti-globalisation campaigner Arundhati Roy, comparing Australia's Aborigines to India's Lalit (Untouchables), said she wanted to donate her $50,000 Sydney Peace Prize to Aboriginal political activities.
Untouchability, Roy said, “is one of the most cruel forms of discrimination, but one thing that didn't happen to them was the attempt to genocidally wipe them out, which happened in Australia.
“I don't want to give the money to Aboriginal communities as some act of charity. I want to give it to people who are involved with political work there... there's no complicated reason, it's just a straightforward political fight for survival and for right.”
The 1997 Booker Prize winner for her novel God of Small Things is due to accept the award on November 4.
“It is funny, I've spent so much time in South Africa recently and the white South Africans have a fascination for Australia. So, I was talking to some black friends and they laughed and said, ‘Yeah, it's because they think the Australians got it right. They just killed the blacks. The South Africans let us survive.'”
From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004 @ http://www.GreenLeft.org.au/back/2004/603/
[ November 01, 2004, 08:11 PM: Message edited by: gelfer ]