Photo from the archive of Magenta Foundation for ICARE.
Recently I had an opportunity to sit down with colleagues and go over the documents and papers from Durban, the ill-fated 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. That year, in the long-lost era before 9/11, I helped lead a delegation of some 40 NGO activists from the U.S., Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia, to sound our own particular notes at this world conference. We were involved in the lengthy preparatory process of several years and found over and over again that the "human rights-based" approach to the problems of discrimination was constantly marginalized, as movements favouring heavily-ideological approaches, incitement to extremism and provocation, and even violence, took precedence.
There was no question that international human rights movement was in a terribly weak position in this Durban process -- they had no intrinsic race, class, national or even grass-roots credentials to wield in this highly-charged politicized atmosphere. And as "offices, not movements," as E.P. Thompson used to make the distinction, they didn't have sufficient involvement in local initiatives and their politics to be able to sound a credible note. In some cases, they were too dependent on some extreme-minded groups for information to be able to vocally criticize their bad behaviour.
Indeed, the ideals of the international human rights movement had always been outside of nationality or ethnicity, and did not ascribe responsibilty -- or remedy -- for human rights violations to economic models for society, whether socialist or capitalist. That put human rights advocates directly at odds with ideologues from Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan and other bad actors at the UN. The human rights movement also eschewed violence as a solution -- which did not mean that it was pacifist in the face of clear-cut genocide, but which meant that *for its own movement in particular* it did not propose recipes involving armed force. These ideals were supposed to be the strength of the international human rights movement, its hidden wellspring of support in the face of seemingly insurmountable tyrannies, where it had achieved many victories.
Yet in Durban, the INGO tent was empty. It was less effective in dealing with the tyranny of other non-state actors.Few tried to caucus effectively to prevent the riot.
Hanging over the tent's doorway at the Kingsmead cricket grounds one August morning in 2001 was a cynical and ultimately racist cartoon taken from a leftist South African newspaper. It showed Colin Powell, Secretary of State of the United States, the first black man to assume such a high government office. He was standing on the porch of the White House, gazing out at a line of black people trudging along, dressed to evoke runaway slaves, some with bandanas bundled up on sticks carrying their belongings, with a sign pointing their way "To Durban". The balloon above Powell's head had him talking as if he were the "house slave": "The Master in da Big House say I cain't go" -- a reference to the ultimate decision of the U.S. to boycott Durban due to its hateful and politicized incitement. Not only did organizers demonize Israel and single it out for criticism alone among states, they also sought ideological remedies founded not in a legal or human rights approach, but in Marxist-style concepts of forcible transfers of wealth, and attribution of all evils to imperialism only of the capitalist kind.
There is an awful lot I could tell you about Durban, having been an eye-witness -- the awful scenes still rise before me. The hot, crowded, big tent on the cricket field on the last evening of the NGO forum, where the gloating triumphalism and hateful remarks of the Palestinians and their supporters became so pronounced that I feared for the safety of Jewish colleagues -- many of whom had walked out by that time in protest against the hijacking of the forum drafting and voting process. Fidel Castro (!) giving an endless long-winded invective-filled speech; Sasha Verkhovsky and I standing in a stadium crowd of people furiously screaming "Cuba Si, Yanqi No" and waving Cuban flags; wondering what such a tyrant was doing at an *NGO conference*; watching Mary Robinson, then High Commissioner of Human Rights, booed by the mob as she attempted to take the stage, heckled by the extremist audience that in fact she had sought to placate -- although ultimately she refused to accept the NGO Forum document.
Or...standing outdoors in the sun as a leader of a major human rights group told me confidently that he "had no problem" with calling Israel "an apartheid state" because "we always use" the word apartheid for all kinds of things like "gender apartheid" -- a position I frankly found offensive, and beyond even moral equivalency. A mob of Africans and Palestinians carrying hateful signs and screaming "Intafada!" at a group of Jewish students. This wasn't just "a guy in a kaffiyeh and a guy in a yarmulke yelling at each other," as this same leader tried to equivocate -- it was a profound clash between a state-sponsored movement idealizing violence and excusing suicide bombings harassing a group of Jewish student NGOs, naively singing John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance". Perhaps it was about hope that if you could convince one side to renounce the active incitement and even celebration of violence, you might get the other side to reduce the necessary use of force which some find excessive.
All of this was in vain in Durban, of course, as our world was already cracking along the fault-lines of defiant abandonment of these goals, and in a few days on 9/11 we would see the twin towers topple in Manhattan. Looking up at the clouds of dust from the falling World Trade Center that fateful day, having just returned from South Africa two days earlier, I felt as if the events were all so intrinsically connected. Then in 2004, the chilling tragedy of the murder of Nikolai Girenko, our Russian colleague who had come with us in the NGO delegation to Durban, gunned down by racists in St. Petersburg, one of numerous racist attacks in Russia in recent years which the world and its conferences seem helpless to curb.
Now, 8 years later, we are revisiting Durban, and we are faced with the "Durban Review" process at the UN which has thrown up the same kind of roadblocks to amity that we saw in the prepcon process with the original WCAR. Whether it's rewarming the old concepts of "Zionism=Racism" long since repudiated by the UN, dressing them up in the new "apartheid state" or other invidious concepts, whether it's deliberately scheduling sessions of the conference on the Jewish holidays, whether it's literally seeing some of the same actors at work from Cuba and South Africa.
All of these re-plays have prompted first Canada to boycott the Durban review conference, then Israel likely to follow suit, then other states to begin to debate seriously the concept of refusing to legitimize the flawed and insidious process that still has not grown beyond the hate that originally spawned it -- and to demand some conditions.
I personally believe boycotting a world-level conference will be futile and further weaken the human rights movement that should rise to the occasion to prevent extremism. A boycott simply won't have significant participation, notably from the EU and the newly-independent East European states and former Soviet Union, not to mention the new democracies in Latin America and Africa struggling with racism themselves. A boycott will not likely garner more than a half dozen supporters, and the most extremist will merely be able to gloat at their empty chairs, undermining even the well-intentioned.
No, I think the U.S. should get back in the Human Rights Council and the UN Durban review, and fight, alongside NGOs, for a better outcome.
I think the reality is that we in the U.S. will likely have our first black president, Barrack Obama, and that he would likely take a very hard look at this UN process and conclude that U.S. presence is required to prevent it from derailing, rather than imagining that U.S. absence can derail it. Obama has already shown some political pragmatism and appeared to dismiss the extremist calls of the "reparations" movement. Again, these emotional and incendiary calls offer merely an economic determinism and cash remedies not only on a Marxist model of mandated wealth transfer, but on a collectivist concept that takes today's multiracial population of the U.S. and makes it collectively responsible for what then has to be collectively identified as the descendents of African slaves. Collectivist solutions of this nature breed resentment rather then public support and don't provide long-lasting institutionalized legal remedies.
Obama appears to offer a pragmatic corrective to the extremism, explaining that enhancing existing programs to provide education, housing, and health would already disproportionately benefit African Americans who have suffered discrimination and neglect precisely because they are in the most need. It seems a fair and realistic way to address the crime against humanity of slavery -- as Durban officially designated it, in one of its positive achievements. What the human rights movement shows us is the need to use democratic policy-making and provide legal remedies to crimes, rather than to spawn more injustice and crime.
There are other aspects of Durban that will require attention, however, as a host of previously unseen complications and ideological battles have sprung up. One is the issue of blasphemy sponsored by the Organization of Islamic States, designated as "defamation of religion," with a demand to introduce into the racism discourse these concepts of disrespecting religions, such as the issue of the Danish cartoons. Such a restriction of speech to accommodate the concerns of religious states of course has troubling consequences for media freedoms as well as the protection of minorities.
NGOs who were appalled at the original hate-filled antics of Durban's NGO Forum, a number of whom who signed an independent statement condemning the forum at the time, issued a new manifesto for the current review process specifying "bright red lines" beyond which they urged states and NGOs not to go:
- The global effort to eradicate racism cannot be advanced by branding whole peoples with a stigma of ultimate evil, fomenting hateful stereotyping in the name of human rights.
- The UN and its human rights fora must not serve as a vehicle for any form of racism, including antisemitism, and must bar incitement to hatred against any group in the guise of criticism of a particular government. We pledge to prevent this from happening again.
- We pledge to uphold language and behavior that unites rather than divides. As NGOs we commit to use language in accordance with international human rights standards and conduct ourselves with civility and with respect for human rights standards.
A number of leading human rights and anti-racism groups from around the world joined this effort, although again, with this moral and human rights approach -- they are in the minority with some conspicuous absences from those who should have been in solidarity.
One victory NGO activists have achieved so far with their please to governments is to keep the venue of the review -- as has been the case with all previous reviews such as for the Beijing and Vienna world conferences -- firmly set on UN premises. A major criticism of Durban was that NGOs and government officials in the host state of South Africa had undue influence on the political process, and did not take sufficient care to prevent extremism. Fears of a Durban redux surfaced when South Africa offered to host the conference again; ultimaely, the organizers opted for Geneva instead as the venue. Ideally, the international space of the UN, with its ideals of parliamentary order in the conducting of meetings as well as its global nature, will act as a deterrent to extremist hate groups.
More has to be done to prevent the train wreck that Durban became for many who had hoped it would do more to reinvigorate ideals instead of destroying them.
Likely the next battle should be for postponing this conference, currently scheduled for April 20-24, 2009. There are many reasons to do this -- waiting for a new administration to come forward and become prepared in the U.S. is a good one, but having more time to tackle the challenges to the agenda and also the mandate to stick to actual review of states' practices in the last 8 years are as well. The more the review can look at actual "best practices" and real problems in real states with names and addresses mentioned, rather than lurching off to abstractions of ideological extremes, the better!
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