Durban Review: Day 2
UN Watch continues its daily blog from this week’s Durban Review preparatory committee meeting in Geneva.
Durban II was supposed to be about reviewing implementation of the program adopted at Durban I. The terms of the Durban Review process expressly preclude reopening the 2001 program. Nevertheless, Islamic states today continued their campaign to do exactly that, in order to introduce new charges against the West — of Islamophobia, religious profiling, and “defamation of religions.”
All of this, we are told, is the legacy of Sept. 11. In plenary speeches today, Pakistan said “no operational strategy to combat racism could be implemented without addressing contemporary realities since 2001.” Egypt said that it agreed with the EU proposal to extract the relevant recommendations for the objectives of the review conference, but that “post-2001 developments must be considered as well.” Iran said the review conference must deal with old forms of racism, such as racial profiling, but “it must also deal with new forms of racism, such as religious profiling.”
Breaching the ground rules is bad enough. What is most appalling, however, is to be told that a world racism conference’s greatest and indeed only concern from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and their progeny — the bombings in London, Madrid, Iraq — is persecution of Islam and Muslims. That is a perfectly legitimate issue. But what about the racism, hatred, and xenophobia that actually caused all of these mass murders, and continues the world over to threaten many more? Should not this world forum be used to tackle the global and violent hatred preached by radical Islamists against Westerners, Americans, Christians, Jews? The same hatred that, in its parallel expressions, one day massacres hundreds of Shiites, and the next day hundreds of Sunnis? For the Organization of the Islamic Conference to appear before the world court of xenophobia and invoke the blood-soaked history of the past six years as a plaintiff takes some chutzpah.
Western governments come to these conferences playing defense. In one form or other, eventually they lose. It’s high time to turn the tables.
In other news, Egypt suggested using the same rules of procedure as the 2001 conference. Belgium and Portugal, however, supported using the GA rules of procedure. Chairperson al-Hajjaji (Libya) asked why the rules of procedure would change, perturbed that this was becoming an issue.
The Chair also said that she wanted to achieve consensus on the objectives of the review conference. She circulated a summary of objectives prepared by the secretariat at her request. This is a “non-paper” providing an overview of the 8 major points under discussion.
