EDITOR: BDS is high on the cultural agenda
As the campaign against Israel’s continued occupation and its atrocities is strengthening, the issue of cultural boycott is coming to the fore in many contexts. Below is a piece by Gillian Slovo, going some way towards suggesting there is a place for sucha boycott ion the case of Palestine, but not quite going the whole way. As president of PEN, she is somewhat limited in the positions she may adopt, I reckon.
Should writers heed calls for boycotts?: The Guardian
‘Calls for cultural boycotts pose a special challenge for me. After all, I am a product of my South African heritage’
At last weekend’s PEN International conference on writers in prison, a Sri Lankan journalist, Lokeesan Appuththurai, described how, during the Sri Lankan government’s 2009 onslaught against the Tamils, the only safe way to get a report out was to switch on your mobile phone, rapidly type and send – and then, just as rapidly, switch off. And there was one other essential precaution to take if you wanted to stay alive: you had to make sure to keep on the move. If you didn’t, the Sri Lankan military would use your mobile signal to fix your coordinates and bomb you. “We don’t need a writers in prison committee in Sri Lanka,” Appuththurai ended his speech, “because in my country they don’t put writers in prison. They just kill them.”
No wonder then, that Sri Lanka’s Galle literary festival has come under scrutiny. A recent call by the French-based organisation Reporters Sans Frontières to boycott this year’s festival was signed by a list of high-profile names that included Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy and Tariq Ali. The festival, they said, gave “legitimacy to the Sri Lankan government’s suppression of free speech”.
The festival organisers were quick to rebut this charge. Theirs was a private initiative, they said, privately funded, and, rather than suppressing speech, it provided a forum for discussion. The opening session of this year’s festival, titled After Shock, was a debate about the legacy of civil wars, including Sri Lanka’s. The festival organisers seemed to have won the argument: among the invitees from all over the world, South Africa’s Damon Galgut was the lone boycotter.
Calls for cultural boycotts such as this one pose a special challenge for me. I am, after all, the new president of English PEN, whose work is focused not only on the defence of persecuted writers but also on the expansion of cultural engagement. At the same time I am a product of my South African heritage and of an early political engagement framed by the boycotts that helped to bring down the apartheid regime.
I lived through so many years of boycotting South Africa that I had to train myself out of the habit of rejecting Outspan oranges. And it wasn’t only South African goods we shunned. There was rugby and cricket, with the worldwide Stop the Tour protests that hit sports-mad white South Africa where it really hurt. And there were cultural boycotts that saw actors refusing to play on segregated stages, writers refusing to go on tour, and academics refusing inter-university collaborations. When, at his inauguration as president, Nelson Mandela articulated his country’s relief that it would no longer be the “skunk” of the world, it was a sign that these boycotts had, in their own small way, helped to make the change.
So I was uneasy during a recent Radio 4 Front Row programme, when I was booked to discuss the issue of cultural engagement and boycott with the Sri Lankan writer and artist Roma Tearne. Ours was the most sisterly of debates. We started out on the Galle Festival, with Tearne arguing that, although she wouldn’t stop writers from going, she would never go herself because there would be no space for open discussion. I, who had been to Galle the previous year, countered with my experience of an audience – albeit an elite audience, as is the case for most literary festivals – that was ravenous to talk politics and, in particular, to talk Sri Lankan politics. And then, inevitably, our conversation turned to Ian McEwan.
McEwan had recently been awarded the Jerusalem prize, given to writers whose work deals with themes of individual freedom in society. Like Margaret Atwood, who had previously ignored appeals not to accept the Dan David prize that was given by Tel Aviv University, McEwan refused calls to boycott his prize, choosing instead to weave into his acceptance speech an acknowledgment of the injustice of the evictions, demolitions and purchases of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and to donate money to an organisation that brings together Israeli and Palestinian former fighters.
As we discussed McEwan’s decision, Tearne and I switched sides. She supported McEwan’s decision and I demurred. To my mind, accepting a prize from Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, who has presided over the evictions, demolitions and compulsory purchases that McEwan condemned, risked normalising these policies. McEwan had struck a blow for freedom of expression, and yet, if that expression is used by others to justify the unjustifiable, how free then is it?
Tearne and I are not the only ones to puzzle over the complexities of the issue. As they walked me to the lift, the show’s producers said they’d had trouble finding writers to discuss the subject on air, not only because writers never like criticising other writers, but because many of us find ourselves pulled in conflicting directions. The call for the Galle boycott, for example, gained strength during the Jaipur literary festival. Yet if Galle is to be boycotted because of the Sri Lankan government’s abuse of human rights, then do India’s actions in Kashmir make Jaipur a suitable case for boycott? Does the exploitation of workers in Dubai make its film festival a no-go area? Does Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq mean that England’s many literary events should be shunned? A week tomorrow I will be debating the issue with Rachel Holmes and Romesh Gunesekera during PEN’s Free the Word festival in London.
The South African cultural boycott didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was called for by the African National Congress, which represented the majority of South Africans, and it ran alongside a United Nations condemnation of apartheid, a worldwide protest movement and economic sanctions. That, it seems to me, is the way to go. It is easy enough to embarrass a writer – many of us feel keenly the injustices around us – into making a grand gesture. Better perhaps to campaign effectively for real change . This might include putting pressure on global companies to make it more difficult for a government such as that in Sri Lanka to use mobile phone signals to kill its opponents.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu Supports UA NMM Divestment Campaign, Mock Wall: Nomoredeaths
Wednesday 30 March 2011
Dear University of Arizona Community,
I am writing today to express my wholehearted support of the students in No Más Muertes/No More Deaths humanitarian/migrant-rights group and their institutional statement advocating divestment or business severance from the Caterpillar and Motorola corporations. I appreciate their insistence for your school to terminate this relationship on the grounds of these companies providing military-style technology and assistance to U.S. forces committing systematic abuses in Arizona and nationwide. I also think it is important that the students are highlighting these same companies that provide similar technology and assistance for Israel to use in its illegal military occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands.
When an immigrant is criminalized in Arizona or elsewhere in the U.S. for not having the right papers as he tries to make a living, I stand with him. When a Palestinian man stands for hours at an Israeli military checkpoint in order to get to his job and make a living, I stand with him. And I ask you to stand with me, with them, as the students are at the threshold of a new movement that seeks justice by withdrawing support for injustice.
I am not speaking from an ivory tower. Degradation and humiliation of innocent people harassed over their “legal” status and documentation was prevalent throughout the reign of Apartheid. We lived it—police waking an individual up in the middle of the night and hauling him/her off to jail for not having his/her documents on hand while s/he slept. The fact that they were in his/her nightstand near the bed was not good enough.
In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who, through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime. Students played a leading role in that struggle, and I write this letter with a special indebtedness to and earnest gratitude for your school, the University of Arizona, for its role in advocating equality in South Africa and promoting corporate ethical and social responsibility to end complicity in Apartheid.
The same issue of equality is what motivates the students’ divestment movement today, linking the issues of immigrant/indigenous rights in the U.S. and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The movement students are leading in Arizona to better the conditions there and in Palestine is politically refreshing and should be an inspiration to us all.
It was with immense joy that I learned of the massive mock apartheid wall the students erected through your campus to bring these issues to the forefront. The students cleverly label their mock border wall “Concrete Connections” to symbolize the intersection of interests that guide U.S. policy in militarized Arizona and in Israeli-occupied Palestine.
I was reminded of how similarly touched I was when I visited American campuses like yours in the 1980s and saw students creating mock shanty towns and demonstrating in the baking sun to protest the brutal conditions of Apartheid. Is my hope that the creative action by the students will inspire a new movement of mock walls dividing campuses across the U.S. to show how the militarized border not only runs along Arizona and the Southwestern region but everywhere in the United States where communities of immigrants, indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities are raided, abused or exploited. Such demonstrations can also show that in every corner of the United States sits the potential to help end the Israeli occupation by withdrawing U.S. funding and support which makes it possible.
The abuses faced by people in Arizona and in Palestine are real, and no person should be offended by principled, morally consistent, non-violent acts to oppose them. It is no more wrong to call out the U.S. governments—at the federal and Arizona state levels—for their abuses in Arizona and throughout the country than it was to call out the Apartheid regime for its abuses. Nor is it wrong to single out Israel for its abuses in the occupied Palestinian territory as it was to single out the Apartheid regime for its abuses.
I am writing to tell you that, despite what detractors may allege, the students are on the right track and are doing the right thing. They are doing the moral thing. They are doing that which is incumbent on them as humans who believe that all people have dignity and rights, and that all those being denied their dignity and rights deserve the solidarity of their fellow human beings.
With these truths and principles in mind, I join with the students in No Más Muertes and implore your school to divest any form of business investment, whether stocks, bonds, or other business agreements, from companies such as Caterpillar and Motorola, as a symbolic gesture of non-participation in conditions and practices that are abominable. To those who wrongly accuse us of unfairness or harm done to them by this call for divestment, I suggest, with humility, that the harm suffered from being confronted with opinions that challenge one’s own pales in comparison to the harm done by living a life under occupation and daily denial of basic rights and dignity.
It is not with rancor that we criticize the Israeli and U.S./AZ governments, but with hope, a hope that a better future can be made for both Israelis and Palestinians—for migrant, indigenous, and all peoples regardless of immigration status; a future in which both the violence of the occupier and the resulting violent resistance of the occupied come to an end, and where one people need not rule over another, engendering suffering, humiliation, and retaliation. True peace must be anchored in justice and an unwavering commitment to universal rights for all humans, regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender, national origin or any other identity attribute, including national citizenship. Students are helping to pave that path to a just peace and they deserve your support. I encourage you to stand firm on the side of what is right.
God bless you.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu (Cape Town, South Africa)