American war and its impacts

It started in a small way. In October 2001, a score of Asian social action groups, their
coalitions and NGOs met in Hong Kong and agreed to establish an Asian regional
peace network titled the Asian Peace Alliance (APA). [1] We were reacting to the massive
US military invasion of Afghanistan, enraged by the showering of bombs on the Afghan
people by the world’s richest and strongest military power. We wanted an Asian people’s concerted response.

There was a keen sense of crisis over the US military attack on Afghanistan. We
were indignant about the American arrogance to call it a war to defend civilisation,
disgusted with the conceit and hypocrisy of dropping ‘humanitarian aid’ packages
together with lethal bombs. We strongly disapproved of the 9 / 11 attacks, but concurred that the most serious danger to peace and lives of the people came from the way the United States was reacting to ‘terrorism’.

At the same time, we felt that organising effective peace action in Asia vis-à-vis
the US war was not an easy task. In countries such as Indonesia and Pakistan, with large
Muslim populations, Islamic fundamentalists had promptly and visibly taken to the
street shouting anti-American slogans and carrying Bin Laden’s portraits. Friends from
Indonesia reported that it was difficult to stage independent civic peace action without
falling into the Bush trap, “with us or with the terrorists”. The Islamist demonstration
was more forceful and photogenic, and media would either identify any peace action
with the Islamists or simply ignore it.

War had been brought into a series of Asian countries. Pakistani friends then
reported that under the Musharraf regime that pledged to support Bush, the rule of
law had been obliterated. American FBI agents were running rampant, randomly
arresting people as terrorist suspects, including tenant farmers and protesting landlords.

By that time, the war had already spread to the Philippines, opening the ‘second front’
of the American ‘war on terrorism’. The US had sent its special military units to Mindanao and Basyylan islands allegedly for joint exercises with the Philippine military for the purpose of wiping out a small band of Islamist-turned bandits, whom the US branded as Al Qaeda-connected terrorists. [2] The whole locale was overwhelmed by massive presence of the US-Filipino military, shrouding the local communities with a climate of terror. This situation created serious obstacles to the peace processes with Muslim forces that had been promoted patiently by local voluntary groups. In the fall of 2001, opinion polls showed that public opinion in Manila was still overwhelmingly supportive of Bush and his ‘war on terrorism’.

The nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir issue
was already serious and peace movements were preoccupied with it. In East Asia, the
keenest social movement concern of South Korea was with national reunification, hopes
for which, raised with the 2000 North-South summit, were eclipsed as Bush shifted
the American North Korea policy from normalisation to hostility. In Japan, the hottest
issue was the wartime legislation pushed forward by the centre-right government to
break the constraints of the pacifist Constitution riding on the Bush crusade.

Situations, concerns, histories, and cultures varied by country and sub-region.
Movement groups were fully preoccupied with their respective national issues. Given this diversity of concerns and issues, what could it mean to bring into being an Asian people’s
peace alliance rooted in the diverse Asian realities that is capable of confronting the
imperial war of global pacification ? What is the new context in which Asian peoples can
emerge as forceful peacemakers effectively exercising their influence on the global centres
of power ? Answering these questions was a challenge faced and accepted by all of us.

 Peace Re-defined

By the time APA held its founding assembly in August-September 2002, we began to
understand what it meant to take this challenge. No longer in the guise of retaliatory
war against terrorism, the United States was now claiming its right to rule the world as
it pleased, feeling free to name sovereign states it handpicked as members of an ‘axis of
evil’ - on which the US had the right to pre-emptively attack and destroy.
Titled ‘Kalinaw - Asian People Speak up for Peace !’ the APA assembly was
convened at this stage of the Bush war.3 Held in the University of the Philippines
campus in Quezon City, northern part of greater Manila, Philippines
(August 29-September 1, 2002), it drew 140 activists from 17 countries and 95
organisations. For months prior to its opening, the Philippines host committee
worked hard to make it an event rooted in the local movements, and succeeded. In
the Philippines, two major peace coalitions had already been set up, and including
them, almost all major movement trends came together not only to host it but also
to actively participate.

The assembly was a real activists’ workshop not de-limited by institutional
interests, and with all participants speaking up freely on an equal footing. The prevailing
atmosphere was an intense urge for action in response to people’s actual needs and
concerns. As the assembly proceeded, it became an arena where Asian people’s suffering
was put centre stage, shared and thrashed out. We experienced a process in which national and local pieces fell into a full picture of an Asia placed under the US Empire
and its war scheme.

The assembly had three agenda items: 1) The World under the War on Terrorism
2) Overcoming Conflicts and Violence among People, and 3) Hopes and Strategies.
Workshops examined issues such as militarisation, nuclearisation and the role of the
US; war and the economy; the erosion of international standards; media and public
discourse; internal conflicts and peace processes; gender and violence in multi-ethnic
communities; religion, ethnicity, and the search for peace amidst a world at war; and
the role of social movements.

Although we spent 60 percent of our time and energy discussing Asia’s own
problems and issues, we also discussed the American war and the assembly took a
clear position on the Bush war itself. All speakers, analysing the post-9 / 11 situation
from different angles, concurred that the Bush war was the attempt to establish
imperial rule over the world. We agreed that violence against civilian population
such as the 9/11 attacks had nothing to do with any people’s cause, and were
conveniently used by the imperial centre to justify its global pacification scheme.
We agreed that Bush’s global war was integral to the neoliberal globalisation processes
that were wreaking social, economic, cultural and environmental havoc on the world
community, hitting at its most vulnerable segments.

But there was more to it. Listening to, and participating in the discussion, I
began to ask myself, and imagine, what the scene would be if a peace conference of this
kind were being held in Canada, Australia, or somewhere in the North. The basis and
premise of discussion, in fact, the implication of the very word, ‘peace’, would be used
significantly, if not totally, differently. The reasoning would be much simpler. Probably
American policy and ‘terrorism’ would be discussed more straightforwardly. We would
criticise them against our shared criteria and values and come up with a short resolution
and plan of action. We would be grasping the war situation as external to us and
responding to it to remove it. Differences of views would certainly exist but they would
be resolved using the same, shared frame of reference, and the frame would stay intact.

I felt that the whole process would be much simpler because we would not be discussing
ourselves as much as we did in Manila. We would be discussing peace, but to simplify
peace largely would mean a return to the status quo ante.

In Manila, those of us who came from the vast expanse of Asia - South, South
East and East - a different procedure was necessary to discuss the Bush war. We had
to discuss ourselves as much as we discussed Bush. We had to examine the painful
realities of the India-Pakistan nuclear confrontation, the rampant Hindu, Muslim and
other fundamentalisms, other sectarian violence destroying communities such as the
Gujarat massacre, military repression on separatist movements, constant human rights
violations by the military, police and private agencies, economic violence wielded on
the large bulk of the population in the name of neoliberal globalisation, refugees of
all kinds, and notably patriarchy underlying all these cruelties.

In many Asian settings, vast numbers of people are deprived of peace and security. For them, peace is needed to create the here and now and not a state that
existed before. In other words, peace means creating new relationships and situations
out of almost hopeless realities.

I know that in essence, peace is not simply the status quo but the creation of new
social, human and cultural relationships - in societies of the North and the Asian South.

In fact, the difference between them is a matter of degree. But in actual terms, the degree
matters and makes the approaches asymmetrical. The situation where peace should be
emphatically understood as a change from the status quo is certainly a negative situation for
the people captive in it. But peace in our sense, at once can carry a positive significance, if we
take its challenge, because it involves radical transformation of societies and cultures. This is
a crucial dimension of peace often missed in the northern peace movement.

The Bush war has been grafted on to this peaceless structural setting, transfiguring
it, making it more violent and repressive, and multiplying the suffering of the already
suffering people. Reflecting this over determined complexity of Asia, the founding declaration
of the APA points out the relationship between the Bush war and Asia as follows :

In the past year, the peoples of Asia have experienced a significant rise in their already
high levels of insecurity. From Korea in the East to Palestine in the West, from Central
Asia in the North to Indonesia in the South, wars, conflicts and rising tensions have been
our shared reality. The common source of our heightened insecurity is unmistakable : the
winds of war unleashed by the United States in its pursuit of the so-called campaign
against terror. This is based on a militarism that links physical coercion and patriarchy as
the currency of power. [4]

The Bush war has conspired with local situations to make more vicious the ‘already
high levels of insecurity’ that are accelerating militarisation and reinforcing antidemocratic
forces all over Asia. The Declaration gives a glimpse into what I might call
the “nexus of evil” that has grown between the global war machinery and local nodes of
power after the Bush intervention. Let me continue to quote from it :

Confident of Washington’s backing, Pakistani dictator Musharraf flouts rising demands
for democracy, consolidates his repressive regime, and massacres unarmed landless
peasants and fisherfolk. Taking advantage of Washington’s rhetoric, the Hindu chauvinist
government in New Delhi labels the Pakistani government ‘terrorist’ in order to close off
any peaceful resolution of the Kashmir issue and cover up its culpability in the barbaric
pogroms that its own followers have carried out against Muslims. George W Bush’s
naming of North Korea as part of the ‘axis of evil’ has effectively scuttled the move
towards rapprochement between the two Koreas and set back their eventual reunification.

The US push to enlist Japan in the anti-terror coalition has resulted in the Koizumi
government compounding the violation by previous governments of the Japanese
constitution by sending Japanese Self Defence forces to the Indian Ocean to support
Washington’s war on Afghanistan. In addition, the emergency military bill has been
promoted. These moves have stoked legitimate fears of Japan’s re-militarisation. In the
Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has effectively overturned the Filipino
people’s decision a decade ago to kick out the US military bases by allowing US troops to return in force via the Visiting Forces Agreement. In the name of the war against terror, the Pentagon has renewed its aid to the Indonesian military, an institution notorious for its violation of human rights. In Malaysia, Mahathir has been emboldened to carry out more repression under the draconian Internal Security Act (ISA).

Another case of the nexus of evil and escalation of violence under the global war on
terrorism, is witnessed in an urgent letter from an Indonesian activist / scholar to her
Asian friends, about the aftermath of the bomb explosions in Bali in October 2002 :
...this terrible incident occurred when President Bush is persuading many countries to
join him to launch a “holy” war against Iraq, and unfortunately, the Bali event became
food for his campaign. This event happened during the time when the US and the
neighboring countries under US influence, had just been pressuring Indonesia to tighten
its control over the radical Muslim elements in the country.

Does stopping terrorism mean increasing state repressive power ? Politically there is
global pressure on the Indonesian government to be more repressive. The government
has hurriedly issued an anti-terrorist bill. Internationally this is considered an important
requirement to make Indonesia a safer place for entry...The Urban Poor Consortium is
now starting to mobilise a movement against this bill...What many pro-democracy
activists fear is that the bill will increase ‘state terrorism’ instead. [5]

 Peace Building

Building peace movements in Asia in the midst of this reality is a difficult but extremely
challenging task. Peace movements that directly address global peace like in the North
do not exist in most parts of Asia (with the exception of Japan with a long post-war
history of anti-nuclear bomb movement). But there is great potential of the power of
the people in Asia, whose occasional explosions from South Korea to Indonesia have
brought about regime changes in the past couple of decades.

The Asian people’s response to the war-making Empire would come as a
comprehensive movement transforming the local and national repressive, exploitative,
patriarchal, and violence-ridden relationships, and resisting and undermining the global
imperial regime. In urbanised parts of Asia with growing middle class populations,
traditional peace movements will emerge directly addressing world peace issues, and
that will play an important role in broadening the vistas of national movements. But
generally, the challenge is to let comprehensive Asian people’s alliances emerge, resolving
their issues autonomously and confronting and ultimately liquidating the global-tolocal
imperial meshes of power.

Why then is it a peace movement, instead of general people’s movement against
the global regime ? Because it represents intense efforts to bring into the various social
movements, communities, families, and societies as well as global relations, distinct
elements and cultures of peace and justice - de-militarisation of society, non-violent
ways of resolving conflicts, and elimination of exploitative, repressive, patriarchal, and
exclusive power relationships. The APA founding declaration thus stated :

The dominant militarist, statist and masculinist theory and regime of ‘national security’
and ‘international security’, in short, must be replaced by one that is de-militarised,
peace-loving, feminist, universal, and people-centred.

 People’s Alliances for Peace

For the Asian peace movement to emerge, we are faced by the problematic that has
been well expounded by Hardt and Negri, that of incommunicability and lack of a
common language. The excesses and exclusivity of national political languages, or
the national perceptual frames entrenched in Asian countries - while reflecting the
historical rootedness of social movements - can also serve to narrow vistas and
prevent a whole view of the landscape, unless encouraged to interact with one another.

Some examples of these are notions of national reunification for Korea, the peace
constitution for Japan, and national democracy for the Philippines. In the same vein,
the Indian understanding of themselves as the world’s largest democratic country,
though nothing wrong in itself, sometimes serves as an obstacle to imagining the
world beyond South Asian borders. These are the particular movement values and
assets established through years of struggles and should not be cast away or replaced
by a simple, cosmopolitan language. But it should be recognised that these do not
provide the basis of trans-border alliances. To the contrary, they can keep us confined
to the bilateral interpretation of events that the United States has been conveniently
manipulating to maximise its strategic benefits. The Asian Peace Alliance will play its
role in letting a new common language emerge through joint action, interaction,
and exchanges as do the World and Asian Social Forum movement.

We are at the beginning of a long and challenging process of formation of global
people’s alliances, focusing our efforts on Asia. Under the impact of the American war
with all its direct and dire consequences befalling us, we have stepped into this dynamic
process. Asian social movements participated actively in the unprecedented international anti-Iraq war mobilisation on February 15-16, 2003 by holding street demonstrations in a number of cities. Compared with mobilisation in the West, the sizes of Asian demonstrations were small, but as the global situation develops, we will see fresh swells of a new type of peace movement arise throughout Asia.

Notes

1. The conveners of the Hong Kong consultation were the Asian Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA), Hong Kong, and Focus on the Global South, Bangkok. The Tokyo-based People’s Security Forum that had convened in 2002 - together with Focus and Okinawan groups - the Okinawa International Forum on People’s Security in Okinawa, was also active in promoting the idea.

2 In March 2002, a 14-member Focus-APA fact-finding mission visited the war-affected areas of Basyylan and Mindanao. A full report of its findings is available from www.focusweb.org.

See, on ESSF website: Report of the International Peace Mission to Basilan, Philippines, 23-27 March 2002

3 The full documentation of the APA assembly and its activities, including the Founding
Declaration, is available from www.yonip.com/YONIP/APA. ARENA in Hong Kong currently serves as the APA secretariat (arena asianexchange.org).

4 Asian Peace Alliance, October 2001.

5 Ibid.