arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Dear comrades

One year ago thousands of people gathered from across the world in Brasil, in Porto Alegre, and declared that another world is possible. But a few thousand miles north of us George Bush and his men were meeting in the White House in Washington and they were thinking the same thing. They too thought another world is possible.

Our project was the World Social Forum and their project was the Project for a 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 new imperialism, about the good sides of imperialism. And the need for a strong empire to police and rule the world. An unruly world like you who needs American policemen.

These missionaries want order at the cost of justice, they want discipline at the cost of dignity and they want economic domination and essendency at all costs. Occasionaly some of us are invited to debate these issues on the neutral platform of the corporate media. What are we supposed to say? Debating imperialism would be like debating the pro’s and contra’s of rape. What are we supposed to say? That we really miss it?

So for the first time in history, a single empire that has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world in an afternoon, has complete unipolar, economic and military hegemony. And there isn’t a single country on gods earth today that isn’t caught in the crosshead of the American cruis missiles or the IMF checkbook. Argentina is the model if you want to be the posterboy of new modern capitalism and Iraq is the black sheep.

Poor countries are new strategic value to the empire and those with the greatest natural ressources are list to allow those corporate machine to take those ressources. What would happen supposing India for example was chosen as a target for a ‘just war’.

The fact that about 80.000 people, mostly muslims, have been killed in Tashmir in the last 12 years mostly by Indian security forces. The fact that only, year before last, 2000 muslims were killed on the streets of Gujarat, women were raped, children were brutalised and 150.000 muslims were driven from their home while the police watched, while the administration did nothing, and the Indian governement that was in power when this happened was reelected to office. All this would become world headlines for a new war on India.

Next we know, our cities would be levelled by cruise missiles, our villages totaly fenced by razor wire and American soldiers patroling. But as long as our markets are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Haley-Burton and Artur-Henderson are given a free hand our democraticaly elected leaders can fearlesly blow the lines between democracy, majoritiarism and fascism.

It is wrong to think that a governement’s victims are only the ones that it choose and imprisons. There are displaced and dispossed people in the millions in this country. Bigdam (?) alone has displaced 23 million people in the last 55 years. Every time the poor people protest, very often the police firing and the minute police firing they are called militants. Then while we have thousands of people arrested under the prevention of terrorism act, now what’s happening in this country is that poverty and terrorism are becoming the same thing. Is it a crime to be poor in the era of corporate globilisation?

Like old imperialism, new imperialism relies for its succes on a network of corrupt, brutal elites who service empire. Whe all know here in Bombay the story of Enron. But unlike in the old days you don’t have old racism, you have ‘new’ racism. And you have ‘new’ genocide. In the era of economic interdependence ‘new’ genocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. Which means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people.

In Iraq the sanctions killed more people than Saddam Houssein did. Half a million children died. In the new era you don’t need apartheid, becaus you have the IMF, the WTO and the Worldbank. You have a system of finance where a garment or a product made in a country like, let’s see Bangladesh, is taxed 20 times more when it’s enterred America than if it was made in England or Europe, or some other rich country.

So after half a century of being plundered by colonial regimes, all the poor countries today pay back 382 trillion USD a year to those countries that plunder them in the first place. So for all these reasons, what happened in Cancun was very important and what it taught us was the importance of globalised resistance. We must understand that no single country alone can stand up to corporate globalisation. It doesn’t matter if that country is headed by Nelson Mandela. It doesn’t matter if that country is headed by Lula.

So the point is: what do we do now? We are gathered here some of the best minds in the world at the World Social Forum discussing what to do for a better world. But it’s not enough any longer to talk about it. If all of us gathered here and at the Mumbai Resistance are really against imperialism, if we are really against neo-liberalism, then I think we should turn our gaze on Iraq. Because Iraq is the culmination of both imperialism and neo-liberalism.

And George Bush believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonised like Afghanistan has been, like Tibet has been, like Chechnia has been, like East-Timor once was and Palestine still is. He thinks “we should just wait and all of us would go home.” But I think we need a global victory here. It’s not good enough for us to be right. It’s not good enough for us to keep saying (slogan in het Hindi). We need to win something. And in order to win something we need to agree about something. Even if it’s a small simple thing.

So I think if we are against imperialism, if we are against neo-liberalism, then we must not just support the resistance in Iraq, we must become the resistance in Iraq. So I suggest that at a joint closing ceremony of the World Social Forum and Mumbai Resistance we pick, by some means two American companies that have profited from the destruction of Iraq. We put out a list of their offices all over the world, we put out a list of everey project across the world that they are handling. And we shut them down. We gotta do this.

It’s a question of bringing our collective wisdom to bear on one single project, the project of a new American century seeks to perpetrate inaquiting and establish American hegemony of any any price. The Worl Social Forum demands justice and survival. For these reasons we must consider ourselves at war.

Thank you