Rwanda News Agency/Agence Rwandaise d'Information (Kigali)
27 August 2008
Kigali — The upcoming United Nations Durban Review Conference in South Africa-billed as an international effort to achieve racial reconciliation-is likely to make a mockery of any bona fide attempt to overcome racial discrimination, an influential campaign group says.
The Conference, scheduled for 2009, will review the international progress made in response to the "Durban Declaration and Programme of Action" released by the first Durban conference in 2001.
This earlier conference was initially an attempt to bring together representatives from fifty-three nations in order to proclaim the equality of all men and to condemn racial hatred and discrimination around the world.
Rather than producing a clear statement against racism, however, as the Washington-based Center for Just Society says, the conference crumbled under the weight of the racist impulses of the countries involved.
The faith-leaning group does not feel the 2009 conference is anything to go by because the previous Durban Declaration also neglected to make any mention of racial Genocide.
The group describing itself as a defender of Judeo-Christian principles says the word "genocide" is only used six times in the Durban Declaration, and no specific cases of Genocide are ever discussed.
"Some of the worst cases of racial hatred in the past century involved massive genocide, including the millions of Jews slaughtered by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust, the ethnic genocide waged by the Bosnian Serbs, and the murder of nearly one million Tutsi people by the Hutu militia in Rwanda", author Mr. Ken Connor points out.
"Refusing to address these events and others like them erased the credibility of the Durban conference."
In Nigeria, Africa countries meet there this week from August 24-26 for the Africa Regional Preparatory Meeting for the Durban Review Conference. Ministers from the continent were working on a document that should form the basis for review of their countries' progress in fighting racism, xenophobia and intolerance.
Human rights abusers may yet dominate this upcoming conference, according to campaigners urging the United States and other western countries not to relent in their efforts to overcome racial hatred.
"Racial hatred is a great evil, and it has adversely affected virtually all countries at one time or another", they note.
Among those countries attending the 2001 conference were China, Columbia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. The Center for Just Society says this is just out of question because Syria and Cuba are on the U.S. top ten list of worst human rights violators, and China was only just dropped from the list in 2008.
It became clear early on that the first Durban conference would not achieve any great leap forward in racial equality, Mr. Connor says in an assessment posted on the Center's website.
The United States and Israel are said to have quickly seen that they were going to be the scapegoats of the conference, as delegates from the Middle East sought to condemn Zionism and the Western slave trade as the prime examples of racism in human history.
"Not surprisingly, the United States and Israel withdrew their delegations a few days into the conference", Mr. Connor notes. Then U.S Secretary of State Collin Powel eventually rubbished the conference.
Mr. Connor says a well-framed international condemnation of racism has the potential to transform the global discussion on race and discrimination.
All countries ought to acknowledge their own shortcomings as we work to overcome racial hatred at home and around the world, he says. (End)
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