It's A Small World After All When It Comes To The Issue Of Racism
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday September 8, 2001
The words hung high above the assembled delegates, projected on the wall of the conference hall from the screen of a computer running Microsoft Word.
The World Conference Against Racism, it read, ``urges financial and development institutions and ... agencies of the United Nations to assign particular priority and allocate sufficient funding ... to improving the situation of [list of victims/genre description]".
A blinking cursor hovered over the text, ready to dart in and add or delete. Hundreds of diplomats, activists and UN officials looked wearily on.
It was day six of the Durban race conference, and representatives of 153 states were still plowing laboriously through 445 suggested paragraphs that would, if adopted, make up the text of an international declaration against racism and a program of action to fight it.
But with only two days to go, the issue of reparations for victims of racism was still jamming up the conference proceedings.
Beyond the conference hall, in the anterooms and suites of Durban's best hotels, delegations from the Arabic states, Europe and Africa were trying to bridge a yawning gap on whether Israel should be the only country specifically singled out for condemnation by the world.
Meanwhile, such comparatively trifling matters as who or what should benefit from inclusion in ``list of victims/genre description" had still not even been discussed.
Back in the hall, delegates listlessly rustled their papers and slumped lower in their chairs. They weren't supposed to be making law, they knew, and there was little chance of them making history. But it would have been nice, at least, to make some progress.
Even before it kicked off on Friday of last week, the third UN conference against racism showed signs it was in serious trouble.
The basic agenda was supposed to have been agreed by preparatory conferences months in advance. Instead, delegates arrived at the South African coastal resort to find that many of the more contentious issues were still up in the air.
It was clear in advance that the Middle East which wrecked efforts to find consensus at the previous two UN race conferences, in 1978 and 1983 would once again loom large.
Demands that Western states should pay reparations for slavery and colonialism were also likely to prove difficult to resolve.
A coalition of Arab and Islamic states, backed by many allies in the developing world, was demanding that Israel should be the only country singled out by the conference as racist, and that the conference declaration should state that Zionism, Israel's founding ideology, is a racist doctrine.
Meanwhile, African-American pressure groups backed by a growing number of African states and with back-scratch support from Arab and Asian states were stepping up their campaign for a formal apology for the victims of slavery and colonialism and for huge compensation to be paid.
The United States, with a direct interest in blocking both proposals and with little love for the UN, had already signalled its displeasure when its Secretary of State, Colin Powell, decided to stay away from Durban last week.
On Monday the US went even further, walking out of proceedings with its ally Israel.
Their decision to abandon the search for a new blueprint against racism was condemned by many developing countries, human rights groups and non-government organisations (NGOs).
The departure of the world's only superpower left the conference gravely weakened, despite efforts by the European Union to fill in for the US as leader of the Western world.
For the next three days talks remained deadlocked on efforts to tone down the language against Israel, with much of the poor world supporting the Palestinians, while wealthier nations including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan quietly took up positions close to the EU.
A similar alignment also took shape over reparations for Western slavery and colonialism. There was, notably, no pressure on African, Asian or Arab states to face up to their past and present lapses on slavery and human rights.
Not only did the two main controversies take up most of the conference's energy, they threatened to derail passage of the final declaration and plan of action, originally intended as general blueprints for the fight against racism which would not single particular offenders out for blame.
Many oppressed groups who lack the clout and money of the Arab, Israeli or African-American lobbies are lamenting the extent to which their voices at the conference have been drowned out.
While the big guns boomed out over the Middle East and slavery, India for example could quietly manoeuvre to try to erase all mention of caste discrimination from conference documents.
Groups such as the Kurds or the European Roma (or gypsies) had hoped to use the conference to make a bigger splash.
Still, away from the diplomatic wrangling some minority groups still took a positive view of their participation in the conference.
Australian Aborigines had used the conference to make potentially valuable contacts with other indigenous peoples abroad, said Brian Wyatt, a member of the West Australian Native Title Working Group. They had also witnessed at first hand through the Jewish lobby and the African-Americans just how much damage a well-organised pressure group can do to the best-laid plans of governments and politicians.
A delegation from India's 160 million-plus low-caste Dalits, or untouchables, said it felt the conference had been a success, despite signs that India would succeed in blocking any mention of ``descent- and occupation-based discrimination" from the final texts.
``We feel very happy that the Dalit issue has been made visible at the international level for the first time," Mr Ramesh Nathan said.
``This has been an opportunity for us to raise our issue abroad and it has been very successful. There was also a lot of support for us from other communities like the Roma, the burakus [``unclean ones" of Japan] and the Palestinians. That is progress.
``Maybe in the next conference we will be on the agenda."
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
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