sydney peace prize
19 Aug 2009
Blessed Are The Troublemakers
Working for peace is often about refusing to accept the status quo. That's why the Sydney Peace Prize jury has chosen well in recognising investigative journalist John Pilger, writes Michael Brull
The Sydney Peace Prize Foundation may shortly find itself in the middle of another controversy. Instead of giving the prize to someone who poses in pictures with sick kids, cuts ribbons, or signs treaties, they’ve given it to John Pilger. Why must they always be so difficult? Don’t they realise what a nuisance Pilger is? Don’t they realise that he has spent over 40 years blasting governments across the world?
Six years ago, they gave the prize to Hanan Ashrawi. We all know how controversial that choice was. Another year, they awarded another troublemaker: Xanana Gusmao. He did not seek peace with the Indonesian forces that raped East Timor. He fought to expel them from his country. The Sydney Peace Foundation even gave an award to Arundhati Roy. Roy noted that her friends were nonplussed — why had they given a peace prize to such a troublemaker?
In a sense, these people would not be satisfied with "peace" when it is narrowly defined. They stand for something more. They have fought against oppression, discrimination and human rights violations. In a sense, they have refused peace by rejecting acquiescence with an unjust status quo. It is easier to recognise the bravery and importance of this when the struggle doesn’t involve us. Everyone admires those who struggled for human rights in Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination. When the Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the Prague Spring, those who advocated peace were effectively promoting the surrender of those who fought for freedom.
This is not to suggest that violent resistance was good or necessary in such circumstances. It is to acknowledge that the spirit of resistance and the will to challenge the status quo is sometimes necessary. It is for this reason that we admire the Czechoslovakian troublemakers.
Troublemakers have been important to Australian history too. John Chesterman, in his book Civil Rights, documented the important role of Australian activists, in combination with international pressure, in winning civil rights for Indigenous Australians. They faced substantial opposition, some of which decried their insistence on seeing the negatives in the situation they were trying to change, rather than putting on a smile and hoping things would get better. Paul Hasluck, the Commonwealth minister for territories from 1951–1963, held that these troublemakers "helped to bring about the situation in which so much of the public discussion concentrated on Australia’s shameful record instead of on Australia’s attempt to do something better in the future." He considered that a bad thing.
Jingoists have always considered it outrageous to denounce a government that acts in our name. People of principle, on the other hand, share HL Mencken’s view that "every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." Our troublemakers compared us in international forums to apartheid South Africa and went on the freedom rides led by Charles Perkins. In doing so, they helped make Australia a better place.
John Pilger is an archetypal troublemaker. In 1967, in the early years of his career, he visited apartheid South Africa. When he got back to London, he was informed that he was banned "for the indefinite future". He was able to return 30 years later when apartheid was dead. In his book, Freedom Next Time, Pilger recounts meeting Nelson Mandela, who burst into a smile, welcoming Pilger back to the country. After all, "to have been banned from my country is a great honour".
Today, opposing apartheid in South Africa is considered an obvious position to take, because everyone agrees now that it was wrong. We can oppose the old unjust policy which no longer means fighting an unjust status quo. Yet Pilger remains fiercely independent and continues to fight against unjust status quos everywhere. He sharply challenged Mandela in their interview, in the manner so characteristic of him. In his book, he notes Mandela sold arms to "Algeria, Colombia and Peru, which have notorious human rights records", and that Mandela "recognised the brutal Burmese Junta", refusing to acknowledge the similarities between the current detention of Aung San Suu Kyi and his own former situation. Pilger goes on to note that after the "interview was over, Mandela leaned forward and asked if I thought he had been ‘too soft’ on Indonesia over East Timor. I said yes."
Pilger stirs up trouble in many places. He was able to sneak his way into Suu Kyi’s home and film an interview with her. Yet in his trenchant criticism of the Burmese Junta, Pilger demonstrates that here too he does not just stick to the preferred Western script. In 2007, he also condemned the Australian Federal Police for "training Burma’s internal security forces at the Australian-funded Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation in Indonesia". And he did not overlook the complicity of Israel in supporting the junta, for "its supply of weapons technology to Burma and its reported training of the junta’s most feared internal security thugs".
I could go on and on with Pilger’s brave and honourable fight against the wars being waged upon Afghanistan and Iraq, on the expulsion of the Chagossians of Diego Garcia by the British, on our appalling treatment of Indigenous Australians, against our complicity with the Indonesian genocide in East Timor and with its occupation of West Papua.
Obviously, causing such trouble would bring anyone enemies. Recognising his contributions through the Sydney Peace Prize will obviously outrage those who oppose public discussion concentrating on Australia’s shameful record. Predictably, those who oppose public discussion concentrating on Israel’s shameful treatment of Palestinians are outraged at the award too. Responding to the announcement of the award, the leading representative Jewish organisation, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, was quoted in the Australian Jewish News denouncing what it saw as a "bizarre and disgraceful" decision. According to them, Pilger "does not promote peace, but is a polemicist".
Self-identified moderate Zionist voices have been less restrained on Pilger. There is, for example, the supposedly left-wing Philip Mendes, who co-wrote a critical review of the response of the Zionist lobbies to Hanan Ashrawi winning the Sydney Peace Prize in 2003. Mendes has claimed Pilger is antisemitic. Then there is Sensible Jew, a blog which began in response to what its contributors felt was the inappropriate, heavy-handed style of Jewish lobbyists in their responses to events such as the play, Seven Jewish Children. Sensible Jew holds that Pilger is "far more odious" than the dreaded Hanan Ashrawi. His "anti-Zionism long ago tipped into outright hostility to Jews".
Vic Alhadeff, of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, called the award a "farce", as "[some] of [Pilger’s] work has been noteworthy for its extreme lack of balance or context, which has done nothing to promote the cause of peace."
In a sense, this is true. Pilger is not "balanced" in the way that Alhadeff would prefer him to be, and he is a polemicist. Pilger always takes sides. He does not advocate acquiescence; he stands in solidarity with those who struggle against oppression. His struggle is against the powerful. Pilger’s stance on Israel is typical of him more generally. Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is appalling, and our governments in the West are fully complicit in these crimes. Pilger exposes this and behaves honourably in doing so.
Some people consider this outrageous. (How dare he? Why must he always cause such trouble?)
There are other people across the world who may think differently: the poor, the disenfranchised and the oppressed, struggling against foreign occupations. They need more troublemakers.
I salute John Pilger for his richly deserved award.
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I also salute John Pilger. I have been an avid supporter for many years, and the Sydney Peace Prize is richly deserved.
Considering that he has been ‘non persona gratis’ in Australia Media and in political circles for all those years, because of his outspoken views.
He rocks boats; Aussies HATE ‘boat rockers’!
I suppose now some of his enemies will lobby Krudd to have him stop the awarding of this prize.
Well, at least, his awarding is not going to annoy the Chinese, is it???
I agree dazza [except that this Aussie LOVES boat rockers].
I have several of his books and they are all an unpleasant read.
But essential.
Its not nice to have exposed the lies, corruption and inhumanities that manage to permeate our politics but yet also manages to escape, accidentally of course, the attention of our mass media.
I endorse your comment that he richly deserves this prize, and I suspect the screams will start soon.
Pilger,Chomsky,Cockburn.So few prepared to confront historical engineering and change the script.
Pilger has hardly escaped the attention of the mass media
A world without John Pilger and those who speak out without fear, would be a smothering hellhole. Give him the Nobel too.
Pilger deserves recognition, and yes it is important to be a troublemaker to be part of peace-making as it makes people aware that some of us think things as they are are not OK.
TRuth is important but what is more important is who you are prepared to tell it to. The Mandela story as a case in point. The critics of Pilger say more about themselves.
Pliger seems to be one of those persons dedicated to comforting the troubled & oppressed and troubling the comfortable and complacent. This in my view is always commendable behavior.
John Pilger, may your tribe increase.
The big test case of the greatness of John Pilger is Indochina in the 1970s, where Pilger travelled much and saw plenty. His documentaries about Cambodia reported on the horrors of the Khmer Rouge but unbiased observers should be prepared to overlook that he failed to tell viewers what other foreign correspondents claimed to be true: Vietnam, having invaded Cambodia and installed its own regime, was denying Western relief agencies access to the country. It was in effect trying to control who get fed and who didn’t. And again the notion that Pilger fearlessly “points out policies of genocide” was misrepresented by conservatives in the 1990s. In the continent of Europe, a xenophobic regime inflicted appalling depredations in pursuit of a vision of ethnic purity. Yet courageously, Pilger depicted Slobodan Milosevic’s regime as the victim of Nato aggression. Quite rightly, Pilger saw: “Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent and multi-ethnic, if imperfect, federation that stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to dominate its ‘natural’ market’ in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. The unkindest thing to say about this is that it’s pure conspiracy theory. This is a fearless campaiging journalist refusing to bow to the neocons and not calling to account a racist demagogue who incited or otherwise procured the murders of tens of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats, and who later in the decade expelled hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians from their homes. Pilger bravely wrote one of his more notable pieces for the New Statesman in February in which he attacked President Obama on Israel and ventured:”Just as Blair was the prime mover of the London bombings of 7 July 2005, so Brown, having pursued the same cynical crusades in Muslim countries and having armed and disported himself before the criminal regime in Tel Aviv, will share responsibility for related atrocities at home. He said, “There is a lot of bollocks about at the moment.” I entirely agree with the last sentence.
Thoroughly deserved, John. I’ll take context over phony ‘balance’ any day.
very good article Pilger should be congratulated for his tireless investigative journalism and his ability to cover stories which would usually not be covered.
An Agitator for Justice a vital precondition for Peace.
It is entirely fitting John P. should get the Prize and more public credit.
If those in power feel uncomfortable he must be on the right track
You make a good case for recocognition Michael.
Michael Brull makes a good case. We would all be much poorer if we didn’t have Pilgers in this world.
Iranian President Ahmadinejad has commented on Pilger winning the Sydney Peace Prize. Astonishing!
Here’s the link