AMY GOODMAN: In June of 2005, World Tribunal on Iraq was held in Istanbul, Turkey. A 17-member Jury of Conscience at the tribunal heard testimonies from a panel of advocates and witnesses who came from across the world. Arundhati Roy was selected as the chair of that jury. She is in our studio today. But let's watch her in Istanbul. Hear what she has to say.

ARUNDHATI ROY: To ask us why we are doing this, you know, why is there a World Tribunal on Iraq, is like asking, you know, someone who stops at the site of an accident where people are dying on the road, “Why did you stop? Why didn't you keep walking like everybody else?”

While I listened to the testimonies yesterday, especially, I must say that I didn't know -- I mean, not that one has to choose, but still, you know, I didn't know what was more chilling, you know, the testimonies of those who came from Iraq with the stories of the blood and the destruction and the brutality and the darkness of what was happening there or the stories of that cold, calculated world where the business contracts are being made, where the laws are being rewritten, where a country occupies another with no idea of how it's going to provide protection to people, but with such a sophisticated idea of how it's going to loot it of its resources. You know, the brutality or the contrast of those two things was so chilling.

There were times when I felt, I wish I wasn't on the jury, because I want to say things. You know? I mean, I think that is the nature of this tribunal, that, in a way, one wants to be everything. You want to be on the jury, you want to be on the other side, you want to say things. And I particularly wanted to talk a lot about -- which I won't do now, so don't worry, but I wanted to talk a lot about my own, you know, now several years of experience with issues of resistance, strategies of resistance, the fact that we actually tend to reach for easy justifications of violence and non-violence, easy and not really very accurate historical examples. These are things we should worry about.

But at the end of it, today we do seem to live in a world where the United States of America has defined an enemy combatant, someone whom they can kidnap from any country, from anyplace in the world and take for trial to America. An enemy combatant seems to be anybody who harbors thoughts of resistance. Well, if this is the definition, then I, for one, am an enemy combatant.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy speaking at the World Tribunal on Iraq, head of the jury there, the Jury of Conscience in June of 2005. Your thoughts almost a year later right now, Arundhati Roy, as enemy combatant?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Yes, I guess, you know, I think one of the things that I worry about is that there is a way in which, say, somebody like me can also be used by the other side. You know, I know -- I'm very aware of the fact that in India, you know, they kind of leak the political meaning out of things, and they say, “Oh, we have this great batsman, cricket batsman, Sachin Tendulkar, and we have Miss Universe, Aishwarya Rai, and we have this writer Arundhati Roy.” And, you know, everything is telescoped as a kind of “Look at all the things that we have on display,” and “We are a democracy, so we allow her to say these things, you know, and go on with it.” And yet these democracies have learned to just stare things down, you know? So even in America, eventually all of us who are protesting or writing or whatever, we can be commodified. You know, it can just turn into something that we're doing, and yet they carry on what they're doing. We carry on doing what we’re doing. But ultimately, people are being displaced. Countries are being occupied. People are being killed. Laws are being changed. And the status quo is on their side, not on our side. You know, so I worry about that a lot, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: I remember when you were last here, you were headed off to an interview with Charlie Rose. And so I looked to see you on Charlie Rose, and I waited and I waited, and I never saw you. What happened?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Oh, it was interesting. He -- well, when the interview began, I realized that the plan was to do this really aggressive interview with me, and so the first question he asked was, “Tell me, Arundhati, do you think that India should have nuclear weapons?” So I said, “I don't think India should have nuclear weapons. I don't think the U.S. should have nuclear weapons. I don't think Israel should have nuclear weapons. I don't think anyone should have nuclear weapons. It's something that I have written a lot about.” He said, “I asked you whether India should have nuclear weapons.” So I said, “Well, I don't think India should have nuclear weapons. I don't think the U.S. should have nuclear weapons. I don't think Israel should have nuclear weapons.” Then he said, “Will you answer my question? Should India have nuclear weapons?” So I said, “I don't think India should have nuclear weapons. I don't think the U.S. should have nuclear weapons. I don't think Israel should have nuclear weapons.” And I asked him, I said, “What is this about? Why are you being so aggressive? I have answered the question, you know, clearly. And I think I made my position extremely clear. I'm not some strategic thinker. I'm telling you what I believe.” So after that it just sort of collapsed into vague questions about world poverty and so on, and it was never shown. I mean, I wouldn’t have shown it if I were him either, but -- because it was, you know, I don't know, treating me like I'm some kind of politician or something.

AMY GOODMAN: Has he invited you back on in this new trip that you have had?

ARUNDHATI ROY: No more, no, no. I don't think.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you found that through your celebrity, through your writing, that you’re invited into forums, into various places where when you talk about what you think, you're then shut down?

ARUNDHATI ROY: No. I think what happens is that -- well, I don't come to, you know, the U.S. that often, and like, for instance, this time I came to do an event with Eduardo Galeano, but I really wasn’t -- I didn't want to do any -- except for this, I made it clear that I didn't want to be working on this trip, because I want to think about some things. But I think it's the opposite problem that I have. I think that there are many ways of shutting people down, and one is to increase the burners on this celebrity thing until you become so celebrity that all you are is celebrity.

For example, I’ll give you a wonderful example of how it works, say, in India. I was at a meeting in Delhi a few months ago, the Association of Parents for Disappeared People. Now, women had come down from Kashmir. There are 10,000 or so disappeared people in Kashmir, which nobody talks about in the mainstream media at all. Here were these women whose mothers or brothers or sons or husbands had -- I'm sorry, not mothers, but whatever -- all these people who were speaking of their personal experiences, and there were other speakers, and there was me. And the next day in this more-or-less rightwing paper called Indian Express, there was a big picture of me, really close so that you couldn't see the context. You couldn’t see who had organized the meeting or what it was about, nothing. And underneath it said, "Arundhati Roy at the International Day of the Disappeared." So, you have the news, but it says nothing, you know? That's the kind of thing that can happen.

Actually, I'm somebody who is invited to mainstream forums, and I'm not shunned out. You know, I can say what I have to say. But the point is, Amy, that there is a delicate line between just being so far -- you know, just being so isolated that you become the spokesperson for everything, and this kind of person that it suits them to have one person who’s saying something and listen to it and ignore what is being said, and I don't want to move so far away from everybody else, that if you want to listen to me, then why don't you listen to so and so? Why don't you speak to so and so? Why don't you get some other voices, because otherwise it sounds like you're this lone brave, amazing person, which is unpolitical.

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, I'm just looking at a KMS newswire story -- that’s Kashmir Media Service -- May 23, just after you spoke here in New York. It says, “A human rights activist and prominent Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, has said India is not a democratic state. The 1997 Booker winner, Arundhati Roy, addressing a book-reading function in New York, said India is not a democratic society.” Can you talk about that idea?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I do think that we are really suffering a crisis of democracy, you know? And the simplest way I can explain it is that in 2004, when the general elections took place in India, we were reeling from five years of rightwing communal BJP politics, the rightwing Hindu party.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you make any parallels to political parties in the United States?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Very, very much so. I mean, it was very similar to the Republicans versus the Democrats, and in fact --

AMY GOODMAN: The Congress Party being the Democrats.

ARUNDHATI ROY: The Congress Party being the Democrats, and the Republicans being the rightwing Hindu BJP. And, of course, in a country -- like in America, their politics, apart from affecting Americans to a great deal, also affects the rest of the world. But in India, India not being a world power, however much it wants to claim it is, turns those energies on its own people. So in Gujarat, you had in 2002 this mass killing of Muslims on the streets, a bloodbath where people were burnt alive, women were raped on the streets, dismembered, killed in full public view.

What happened after that, there were elections, and the man who engineered all this won the elections. So you're thinking, “Is it better to have a fascist dictator or a fascist Democrat who has the approbation of all these people?” Continues to be in power in Gujarat. Nothing has happened. It's a Nazi type of society, where hundreds of thousands of people are still economically boycotted Muslims, something like 100,000 driven from their homes. Police won't register cases. One or two important cases are looked at by the Supreme Court, but the mass of it is still completely unresolved. That's the situation, anyway, and while you're orchestrating this communal killing, you're also selling off to Enron and to all these private companies, and so on the one hand you’re talking about Indian-ness and all this, and this nationalism in this absurd way, and on the other, you're just selling it off in bulk.

But during the elections, all of us were waiting with bated breath to see what would happen. And when the Congress came to power, supported by the left parties from the outside, obviously we allowed ourselves a huge gasp of relief, you know, walked on our hands in front of the TV for a bit. But the Congress campaigned against the neoliberal policies that it had brought in, actually.

But before even we knew whether Sonia Gandhi was going to be the prime minister or what was going to happen, there was an orchestrated drop in the stock market. The media's own stocks began to drop. The cameras that had been in all these villages, saying look at this wonderful democracy, and the camels and the bullock carts and everyone that's coming to vote was outside the stock market now. And before the government was formed, both from the left and from the Congress, spokesmen had to come out and say, “We will not dismantle this neoliberal regime.” And today we have a prime minister who has not been elected. He is a technocrat who has been nominated. He is part of the Washington Consensus.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask in our last 30 seconds: the role you see of the artist in a time of war?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think the problem is that artists are not a homogenous lot of people, and some of them are as rightwing and establishment as they can get, you know, so the role of the artist is not different from the role of any human being. You pick your side, and then you fight, you know? But in a country like India, I'm not seeing that many radical positions taken by writers or poets or artists, you know? It's all the seduction of the market that has shut them up like a good medieval beheading never could.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think artists should do?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Exactly what anyone else should do, which is to pick your side, take your position, and then go for it, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: Arundhati Roy, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, as well as a number of books of political essays, like An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire.

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