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Listening To Grasshoppers
Genocide, Denial And Celebration
By Arundhati Roy
28/01/08 "Outlook
India " -- - -I
never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that
will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what
he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know
that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been
among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin
in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with
banners saying, “We are all Armenians”, “We are all Hrant Dink”.
Perhaps I’d have carried the one that said, “One and a half
million plus one”.* [*One-and-a-half million is the number of
Armenians who were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire
in the genocide in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The
Armenians, the largest Christian minority living under Islamic
Turkic rule in the area, had lived in Anatolia for more than
2,500 years.]
***
In a way, my battle is like yours. But while in Turkey there’s
silence, in India, there is celebration.
***
I wonder what thoughts would have gone through my head as I
walked beside his coffin. Maybe I would have heard a reprise of
the voice of Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David
Barsamian, telling the story of what happened to her and her
family. She was ten years old in 1915. She remembered the swarms
of grasshoppers that arrived in her village, Dubne, which was
north of the historic city Dikranagert, now Diyarbakir. The
village elders were alarmed, she said, because they knew in
their bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were
right;
the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields was
ready for harvesting.
“When we left…(we were) 25 in the family,” Araxie Barsamian
says. “They took all the men folks. They asked my father, ‘Where
is your ammunition?’ He says, ‘I sold it.’ So they says, ‘Go get
it.’ So he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and
took all his clothes. When he came back there-this my mother
tells me story-when he came back there, naked body, he went in
the jail, they cut his arms…so he die in jail.
And they took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands,
and they shooted, killed every one of them.”
Araxie and the other women in her family were deported. All of
them perished except Araxie. She was the lone survivor.
This is, of course, a single testimony that comes from a history
that is denied by the Turkish government, and many Turks as
well.
I am not here to play the global intellectual, to lecture you,
or to fill the silence in this country that surrounds the memory
(or the forgetting) of the events that took place in Anatolia in
1915. That is what Hrant Dink tried to do, and paid for with his
life.
***
Most genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been
part of Europe’s search for lebensraum.
***
The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many
hours, and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul
their beautiful, mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed
out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly
appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were
expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin who was
wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant.
The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not
my battle, it’s yours. I have my own battles to fight against
other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a
way, the battles are not all that different. There is one
crucial difference, though. While in Turkey there is silence, in
India there’s celebration, and I really don’t know which is
worse.
In the state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim
community in 2002.
I use the word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping with its
definition contained in Article 2 of the United Nations
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide. The genocide began as collective punishment for an
unsolved crime-the burning of a railway coach in which 53 Hindu
pilgrims were burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of
supposed retaliation, 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad
daylight by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist
militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the
administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and
burned alive.
Muslim shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and mosques
were systematically destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven
from their homes.
Even today, many of them live in ghettos-some built on garbage
heaps-with no water supply, no drainage, no streetlights, no
healthcare. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted
socially and economically. Meanwhile, the killers, police as
well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This
state of affairs is now considered ‘normal’. To seal the
‘normality’, in 2004, both Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, India’s
leading industrialists, publicly pronounced Gujarat a dream
destination for finance capital.
[…]
It’s not a coincidence that the political party that carried out
the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the
Committee for Union & Progress.
‘Union’ (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and ‘Progress’
(economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of
genocide.
Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry
about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of
“progress” is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could
the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of
progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of
committing genocide? The mere suggestion might sound outlandish
and, at this point of time, the use of the word genocide surely
unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars
of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe
that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress,
then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large
numbers, in order to get their way.
[…]
“Within an ongoing counterfeit universe,” Robert Jay Lifton
says, “genocide becomes easy, almost natural.”
The poor, the so-called poor, have only one choice: to resist or
to succumb. Bachchan is right: they are crossing over, quietly,
while the world’s not looking. Not to where he thinks, but
across another ravine, to another side. The side of armed
struggle. From there they look back at the Tsars of Development
and mimic their regretful slogan: ‘There Is No Alternative.’
They have watched the great Gandhian people’s movements being
reduced and humiliated, floundering in the quagmire of court
cases, hunger strikes and counter-hunger strikes. Perhaps these
many million Constraining Ghosts of the Past wonder what advice
Gandhi would have given the Indians of the Americas, the slaves
of Africa, the Tasmanians, the Herero, the Hottentots, the
Armenians, the Jews of Germany, the Muslims of Gujarat. Perhaps
they wonder how they can go on hunger strike when they’re
already starving. How they can boycott foreign goods when they
have no money to buy any goods. How they can refuse to pay taxes
when they have no earnings.
Stamp out the Naxals: They have no place in Shining India
People who have taken to arms have done so with full knowledge
of what the consequences of that decision will be. They have
done so knowing that they are on their own. They know that the
new laws of the land criminalise the poor and conflate
resistance with terrorism. (Peaceful activists are
ogws-overground workers.) They know that appeals to conscience,
liberal morality and sympathetic press coverage will not help
them now. They know no international marches, no globalised
dissent, no famous writers will be around when the bullets fly.
Hundreds of thousands have broken faith with the institutions of
India’s democracy. Large swathes of the country have fallen out
of the government’s control. (At last count, it was supposed to
be 25 per cent). The battle stinks of death, it’s by no means
pretty. How can it be when the helmsman of the army of
Constraining Ghosts is the ghost of Chairman Mao himself? (The
ray of hope is that many of the footsoldiers don’t know who he
is. Or what he did. More Genocide Denial? Maybe). Are they
Idealists fighting for a Better World? Well… anything is better
than annihilation.
The Prime Minister has declared that the Maoist resistance is
the “single largest internal security threat”. There have even
been appeals to call out the army. The media is agog with
breathless condemnation.
Here’s a typical newspaper report. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Stamp out the Naxals, it is called.
This government is at last showing some sense in tackling
Naxalism. Less than a month ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
asked state governments to “choke” Naxal infrastructure and
“cripple” their activities through a dedicated force to
eliminate the “virus”. It signalled a realisation that Naxalism
must be stamped out through enforcement of law, rather than
wasteful expense on development.
“Choke”. “Cripple”. “Virus”. “Infested”. “Eliminate”. “Stamp
Out”.
Yes. The idea of extermination is in the air. And people believe
that faced with extermination, they have the right to fight
back. By any means necessary.
Perhaps they’ve been listening to the grasshoppers
This is an abridged version of a lecture delivered by
Arundhati Roy in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate
the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor
of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos.
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