Arundhati Roy calls for the UN to move headquarters from NYC

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday March 20, 2003 17:02 by Phuq Hedd

Democracy NOW! -- Thursday March 20th

Arundhati Roy (author of "The God of Small Things" and "War Talk" and outspoken critic of the effects of neo-liberal globalisation) made an emotional appearance on the Pacifica Network's "Democracy NOW!" show. She emphasised the illegal nature of the war and the danger that the UN become a "charwoman" to the US.

Roy argued http://www.democracynow.org/ (link will be up shortly) that the UN headquarters must be moved from NYC and the USA be declared a rogue state http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/chomskyapr98.htm . She noted that China, Russia, France and Germany (among many others) had taken a very clear position which declares that this is an illegal war.

An important caveat that she made was that these countries are not acting out of some moral impulse (they are all ex-colonial imperialists) but that they were deeply afraid of the unstable hegemony http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/feb98herman.htm that the USA is attempting to extend to the world.

This echoes the concerns expressed by commentators within the USA (such as former arms inspector Scott Ritter) who point out that the attack on Iraq was prefigured by the Project for a New American Century http://www.newamericancentury.org/ (a thinktank composed of Perle, Wolfowitz, Bush, Fleischer and others in 1999) which calls for Full Spectrum Dominance http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraq-101402.htm of the world.

Opposition to this war should be carried out not just for the good reason that Iraqi civilians are being killed illegally but because this is a significant move in extending US hegemony.