Spreading the news
Nyier Abdou talks to the International Action Centre's Sara Flounders about resistance in the information age
Sara Flounders, a petite and inspiring woman with a gift for punchy sound bites and a wealth of knowledge about the impact of US military interventions -- from Yugoslavia to Columbia and Palestine to Iraq -- is the kind of person who makes you believe in people power. As co-director of the International Action Centre (IAC), a New York-based organisation dedicated to mobilising anti-war protest through grass-roots activism, Flounders doesn't just believe that it is possible to stop a war in Iraq through protest -- she thinks it is the only way it can be done.
Within minutes of talking to Flounders, the often- vilified world of the "corporate media" melts into insignificance, and a vibrant counterculture of spirited activism comes into view. During a recent trip to Cairo, Flounders told Al-Ahram Weekly that a "mass, aroused movement" is not only emerging in the United States, but is mushrooming across continents. "In the United States the media tries to marginalise it. They don't cover it," says Flounders. "Yet, for millions of young people in universities, they're not reading the nationals, they're not [listening to] what network TV is telling them; they're tuning in on the Internet. So they know -- and they have the capacity to know."
Flounders points to parallel movements in Europe, citing the estimated half a million people who turned out for demonstrations in Florence during the European Social Forum. "Regardless of what the governments say, the people know that this is a war for colonial subjugation -- that much more than Iraq is involved; that it will set a precedent that no country has the right to its own resources. The oil of Iraq is to be put directly under the administration of the US military. That's looting; that's piracy, on a grand scale."
The International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition, an outgrowth of the IAC that brings together unions and community organisations, as well as Arab and Muslim organisations and immigrant rights groups to form a broad-based anti-war movement, sponsored the nationwide protests against war in Iraq on Saturday.
"The 'so-called' mainstream in the US and what the networks are projecting can be very different from what is happening [on the ground]," says Flounders. "And this is what ANSWER has been able to tap into, and to draw a response such as we haven't seen before." She says the reason that the international anti-war movement provokes such unease, even within the ruling circles of the US, "is that they know that wars are a high stakes game". Flounders rejects the term "game". "It's not a game at all. It's an outrage, always. And it's a crime, always."
As information becomes more accessible and its delivery more instantaneous, activism is becoming a very different beast from what it once was. But the goal remains the same: to spread ideas that people are either sheltered from, or simply do not want to know. While there may be increasingly direct access to knowledge, the hurdle of mobilising people to seek it remains. Acknowledging this challenge, Flounders warns that global consciousness or awareness, "can also change instantaneously, [especially] in a crisis".
"Wars create revolutionary upheavals," she adds. "The mask of democracy -- of legality, of legitimacy -- can be ripped off in a moment."
Flounders argues that with the US sinking into a growing economic crisis marked by rising unemployment, big budget cuts and major corporate bankruptcies, to debate spending billions of dollars on war in Iraq is outlandish.
"First they said $60 billion on this war," she says, noting that the UN says $40 billion could end world poverty. "So they're debating spending $60 billion... and then other economists came in and said 'No, it's $80 billion.' Then we heard it's $100 billion. Now they're debating $200 billion. Other economists say a trillion dollars for the long-term occupation."
"You know, you can go out in the streets of any city, even any small town, any rural area, and the sentiment if you're handing out leaflets, if you're doing petitioning, the sentiment is so overwhelmingly against the war," says Flounders. "The support for the war is so narrow, is so thin, and the only way they can whip it up is using really fraudulent questions about, you know, US security."
Commenting on the US media, Flounders stresses the gulf between "the reality people face and what they're being told". Most media outlets, she says, are "for the war, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And yet, in every poll, more than half the population is against the war, is apprehensive, has questions... now that's stunning, when you think of that." Asked if she thought this was simply because "war sells", Flounders does not concede the point. "Well, war is no longer selling. That's their problem. That's their problem, you see."
War, of course, does not sell in the Arab world either, although the relative silence can seem conspicuous in light of large-scale demonstrations like those in the US and Britain. Activism, in the Arab world, is something of a different beast altogether, limited not so much by a powerful bias lodged in mainstream media outlets, but by a necessarily quiet "street". But Flounders is adamant that Arab protest -- loud, and even risky protest -- can move mountains in American policy. She notes that the Bush administration projected a war against Iraq more than a year ago, saying that war was on the table as far back as spring of last year, with large troop and ship mobilisations last February and March. "They fully planned to launch the war then." What stopped them, she argues, were the mass protests in the Arab world about Palestine. "The attention was not on Iraq, it was on this heroic Palestinian resistance against overwhelming force," says Flounders. "There were millions and millions of people in the streets, and it became a real political factor in the calculations of the Bush administration."
"Also, that aroused mass movement here in the Arab world inspired a world movement; it was picked up in Europe, in the United States," Flounders adds. ANSWER organised more than a 1,000 people in Washington for Palestine -- a move she maintains was only possible because of the atmosphere of defiance that had spread throughout the region and had begun to seep into world consciousness. "It shows you how quickly the political moods in this period are contagious -- solidarity is contagious, and it's what the powers-that-be always fear: it is a political force."
Flounders draws a comparison with other crucial historical moments, pointing to the anti-colonial struggle, which she says also became an "unstoppable political movement". "That's certainly true with the heritage of Nasser here in Egypt," she says. "It couldn't be stopped. Who could stop the British gunboats in that age? And yet, this enormous people's movement did." With slower communication, these movements took years to build, because people were simply "less informed". "But today, there's nowhere you can go in the world where people aren't aware of this impending war against Iraq," she says. "The weapons may be larger, more powerful, more dangerous; and yet, communication and information can make a real, instantaneous and very powerful change."
Today, the issue is Iraq. There is a great deal of information readily available about the suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein, from human rights violations, to allegations that he has misused the UN "oil-for-food" programme. To many, the anti-war camp is simply naïve, willing to sentence the Iraqi people to a cruel dictatorship in the name of lofty, but unrealistic ideals.
Asked if being against the war meant supporting the regime of Saddam Hussein, Flounders dismisses the connection. "One thing I think we would want to say is that US intervention -- war, invasions -- have never, never brought democracy," she says, rattling off a series of less than admirable interventions. "We could look at Chile, the Congo, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon, the list goes on and on," she remarks, adding a few more for good measure -- Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, Korea.
"You can't find any country in the world where US intervention brought democracy. It brings dictatorships of a far worse character, everywhere. And it brings enormous poverty." As for leaving Iraqis in the hands of Saddam Hussein, Flounders says it is for the Iraqi people to determine their own government. "The Iraqi people have had vibrant governments in the past. They're a highly political population. They can certainly take on these questions again."
The catchwords "regime change" evoke a sense of aggravation in Flounders, who points to this policy as, "a way of dividing and immobilising people". "Regime change, at this point, is in the interests of US corporate domination," she says. "[The US] doesn't want to overturn the government of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath in order to bring democracy to Iraq. They want to break up Iraq into little, tiny, warring pieces. And they're already doing that."
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 23 - 29 January 2003 (Issue No. 622)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/622/sc4.htm