The new global anti-war movement

Red Pepper, December 2001

It’s been widely observed that the US-led global alliance ‘against terrorism’ is a motley assemblage, bound together by expedience rather than principle. Some would say the same about the global anti-war alliance now being constructed to oppose it. Diversity is certainly the hallmark of this emergent movement, but it is both bound together and in some instances profoundly divided over principles. As for expedience, at the moment, those seeking its security – witness flocks of mainstream politicians in many countries – are giving the anti-war movement a wide berth.

Since the US attack on Afghanistan commenced on 7 October, there have been large scale protests in most major European cities, notably 50,000 in Berlin and 50,000 on 13 October in London. None of these, however, achieved the resonance, intensity or publicity of the ‘anti-American’ protests organised by Islamists in Indonesia, Palestine, Kashmir and Pakistan.

The US-British bombardment of Afghanistan has been a gift for the jehadi elements, but their mortal enemies – the secular left – have been far from silent. In Lahore in the last week of September, 500 women took to the streets chanting, “No to terrorism, no to war! Not to Taliban, no to Bush!”. We didn’t see this image on our television screens – probably because it would undermine the current simplistic equations. “We in Pakistan have been the victims of this terrorism for the last 15 years and will continue to be in the near future,” writes a NGO activist and veteran of the campaign against Zia’s military dictatorship. “However I do not think that this war is the solution. There is genuinely a strong voice in Pakistan on peace though we are caught between the devil and the deep sea, as any public debate if not conducted seriously brackets you immediately with the pro-Taliban forces. But it does not mean that one should not speak. We condemn the terrorism of the Taliban, the US and it’s allies, especially Britain.”

Nowhere outside the USA and Afghanistan has the impact of 11 September proved more dramatic than in Pakistan. In what seemed the blink of an eye, the alliance between the military and right-wing Islamist organisations – an alliance initially fostered by the US government, and which over the past two decades has poisoned every aspect of public life in Pakistan – was snapped. Musharraf’s military dictatorship chose the carrot over the stick, and the Pakistani elite seem convinced that the embrace of the USA will strengthen their hand, politically and economically.

In Pakistan, the jehadis have long enjoyed the advantage of street muscle, and they have sought to deploy it in the anti-US demonstrations. Some elements used these protests as cover for attacks on secular NGOs and aid agencies, with police and military units looking on, impassive. Asked if he recognised any ethical difference between these attacks and the US bombing of Red Cross shelters in Afghanistan, Irfan Mufti, an activist in the Citizen’s Peace Committee, which has brought together trades unions, human rights campaigners, women’s organisations and NGOs, answered flatly, “None”.

In doing so, Mufti speaks for what a number of commentators have dubbed Pakistan’s ‘silent majority’ – the millions deeply suspicious of both the Taliban’s version of Islamic rule and the US military action. On 6 November, 5000 attended a rally against both war and fundamentalism in Rawalpindi. According to the daily Dawn (7 November) placards read, “War is not an answer to violence”, “Justice, not revenge”, “We condemn bigotry and revenge in all aspects”, “Justice, yes; retaliation no”.

In a statement, the participants said, “the US-led military response to the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington has plunged the world into a cycle of violence with no definite end in sight.” Similar secular peace demonstrations – emphasising opposition to US military action, support for human rights and an internal solution for Afghanistan – have now been held in all the major cities, including Quetta, which for some days after 7 October witnessed street battles between jehadi-mobilised youth and military units.

The crisis has penetrated into distant southern Punjab, to a church in the semi-desert city of Bahawalpur, where 16 people were gunned down. No one doubts these murders were the work of one of the sectarian jehadi groups that before Zia’s time – and the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan – were unknown in this Sufi-influenced region. Now, like Bush and Blair, they carry their ‘clash of civilisations’ into civilian life, including places of worship. And it is left to the secular peace activists to remind the world that the poverty-stricken Christian community in Pakistan is the subject not only of jehadi terror but also of state persecution, forced to vote in a separate electorate and hounded under blasphemy laws.

Across the border in India, their counterparts will add that under the right wing Hindu nationalist BJP-led government, violent attacks on Christians and other minorities have proliferated. In the US and Britain, the fact that a Hindu ‘fundamentalism’ – as authoritarian and menacing as any of its counterparts in other religions – actually commands state power in the second most populous nation on earth is rarely acknowledged. But in India its hand has been felt ever more heavily since 11 September. The BJP and the Indian elite in general have been among the most ardent champions of the US-led ‘war on terrorism’ – but, frustratingly for them, because the US needs Pakistan more at the moment, they have not yet received the payback they believe they are due. In the meanwhile, they are using the crisis to pursue their strategic offensive against ‘Islamic terrorism’ at home and abroad, and to boost their drive to ‘Hinduise’ (and militarise) Indian society. The government has banned radical Islamic student groups and arrested their leaders. It is now trying to push through a new Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance, giving police even more arbitrary powers to harass and detain anyone dubbed supportive of ‘terrorism’.

Since the nuclear tests of 1998 – now, like their Pakistani counterparts, given a belated seal of approval by the USA – a broad-based citizens’ movement against nuclear weapons has been taking shape in India. Along with the traditional left parties, that movement is now mobilising against the US-British military action, holding vigils, meetings and marches across the country. For the left and peace movement in India, opposing the war is an unavoidable part of a long-term struggle against communalism and aggressive nationalism. Writer Praful Bidwai describes it as “a ‘rainbow coalition’ that encompasses artists and scholars, students and researchers, writers and trade unionists, school teachers and theatre-people, human-rights activists and feminists.”

Bidwai stresses that, in addition to objecting to the injustice of the US-led military action, the Indian activists have other related concerns. “First, the connection between the Afghanistan war and the war ‘within’ – being waged by the Hindutva forces to communalise society.” Bidwai cites the recent incursion by Hindu extremists into the demolished mosque in Ayodhya and their desecration of the Taj Mahal, as well as the intensification of the war in Kashmir as “all part of this dangerous agenda, related to the BJP’s cynical electoral calculus.”
Secondly, Bidwai argues that “September 11 exposed the colossal stupidity of relying upon massive military force alone for security. South Asia’s unique nuclear hostility makes it the world’s most dangerous region. India and Pakistan, locked in a half-century-long Hot’n’Cold war, have plenty of these horror weapons, but few safeguards against their accidental or unauthorised use.”

Such awesome global realities rarely intrude on public discussion in the USA, where the terrain poses daunting challenges for anti-war activists. Since 7 October there have been actions for peace in at least fifty towns and cities – not only New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston but also Salt Lake City, Sioux Falls and Albuquerque. There have been teach-ins at college campuses across the country. Opinion polls have begun to register a small swing away from military action. Nonetheless, the atmosphere remains hostile. This should surprise no one. The experience of September 11 was without precedent for people in the USA. Something like an act of war was committed against thousands of civilians in the continental US – a land mass that had been previously seemed immune to attack. To add to the frustration and confusion, this act of war did not quite conform to any of the scenarios conventionally associated with war (not least a discernible national enemy). What’s worse, thanks to a corporate-sponsored media and political elite, the US people have been denied the tools necessary to make sense of what has happened to them – objective information about the role their country plays in the world, and a democratic arena in which dissident voices can be heard.

Nonetheless, even among those Americans aware of their government’s long-standing hypocrisy on the issue of ‘terrorism’, large numbers have looked to military retaliation to secure ‘justice’ for the victims of 11th September. Christopher Hitchens’ polemics against his former allies have been short on logic and riddled with a fundamentalist obsession with ‘evil’, but there’s no doubt he’s speaking for many on the US liberal-left.

The facile acceptance of both Afghan civilian casualties and US imperial prerogatives by erstwhile radicals has bewildered (and infuriated) anti-war activists, though some see it as part of a larger pattern. Between the end of the powerful anti-apartheid and Nicaragua solidarity movements of the 80s and the emergence of a new generation of radicals in Seattle, foreign policy interests were confined to minute minorities. In particular, criticism of US policies in the middle east – Palestine and Iraq, above all – remained marginalised.

This is not just about the influence of the Israel lobby. If its cause were not in accord with the strategic interests of the US corporate elite, it would have counted for much less. The responses to the ‘war against terrorism’ testify not only to the legitimisation of Islamophobia , but more importantly to the pervasive influence of American exceptionalism. Sometimes this takes the form of an insistence on the unique and sacrosanct achievement of US democracy, for all its flaws, and the rights and responsibilities presumed to go with this achievement. In other quarters it assumes the guise of a tactical argument: nothing must be said or done that excludes progressives from what appears to be the national consensus that ‘something must be done’. Most depressingly, it also takes the form of a flagrant double standard towards human life outside the country’s borders.

Despite the disdain of liberal pundits and the indifference of the mass media, US anti-war activists have sustained initiatives in most locales, though unity and co-ordination have proved elusive. Across Europe, the anti-globalisation movement has flowed swiftly into the anti-war movement. In the USA, there is greater hesitation. In addition, following 11 September, US labour unions, key components of the anti-globalisation campaign since Seattle, have backed off from any protest that might remotely be construed as ‘anti-American’. Even more than at the height of the Cold War, US union leaders are making a point of standing with the US government.

Undeterred, a small group of union activists – including healthworkers, teachers, taxi drivers, legal aid attorneys and public servants – have formed ‘New York City Labor Against the War’. Describing themselves as the trade unions of “Ground Zero New York”, the campaigners oppose military action, declaring: “It is wrong to punish any nation or people for the crimes of individuals – peace requires global social and economic justice.” They also emphasise opposition to racism and attacks on civil liberties, and resistance to the job cuts and austerity measures being imposed by employers. Similar labour groups have been formed in Washington and San Francisco.

Between 11 September and 1 November there were more than half a million jobs lost in the USA. At the same time, Bush and the Congress handed some $200 billion – five times the annual operating budget of New York City – to the rich and the giant corporations. The grip of jingoism is powerful among the US working class, but so is scepticism about the US government. There is a creeping suspicion that working people are being asked to pay a disproportionate price for the war. Already, among black people, opposition to the military attacks runs at twice the average rate. The longer the war drags on, the harder it will be for the media to maintain the illusion that it has anything to do with the perpetrators of the attacks on New York and Washington.