Durban Review: Day 3
UN Watch continues its daily blog from this week’s Durban Review preparatory committee, meeting in Geneva to plan a series of UN anti-racism sessions leading up to a major conference in 2009.
Islamic countries continued their campaign to reopen the Durban 2001 package and introduce new accusations against the West for purported post-9/11 crimes such as defaming Islam with cartoons or persecuting Muslims by profiling. The battle played out in today’s debates on a document summarizing objectives of the 2009 conference.
Slipping Islamic Agenda into Durban II
Chairperson al-Hajjaji of Libya tried to reach consensus on the summary of objectives. Egypt suggested that the summary of objectives include the statement that “[The Review Conference will] consider ways of ensuring the effective implementation of the outcome of the Durban Review Conference (emphasis added) and the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.” If adopted, this would ensure that the proceedings of the 2009 Review Conference itself—now certain to feature a lengthy charge-sheet against the West for crimes against Islam and its adherents—will yield its own “outcome,” separate and additional to that of the 2001 program, for future implementation.
Pakistan, which represents the Organization of the Islamic Conference, called for the summary of objectives to enumerate various forms of racism, including “religious hatred, racial profiling in the fight against terrorism, and the rejection of diversity and multiculturalism.”
Hmmm… Whom does Pakistan have in mind here? Saudi Arabia, for its absolute ban on any non-Wahabbist religion, or for its national airline’s ban against “Bibles, crucifixes, statues, carvings, items with religious symbols such as the Star of David”? China for seeking to bury the last vestiges of Tibet’s proud culture? Cuba or Zimbabwe for crushing dissenters? Wethinks not.
Pakistan—a country wherein gang rape is a court-ordered punishment for women who commit the crime of speaking to the wrong tribesman—is, of course, directing this charge against Western countries, and them alone. Countries like the U.S., England, Holland—where anyone can pretty much do as they please—are the ones accused here of “rejection of diversity and multiculturalism.”
It’s one thing to raise legitimate claims of discrimination. It’s quite another for the most intolerant and anti-Western countries to smugly invoke such archetypal Western catch-phrases as “diversity” and “multiculturalism” as a weapon to attack the West.
What was the West’s response? You be the judge. The European Union, represented by Portugal, had this to say:
“First and foremost, [Durban II must] aim to safeguard and promote concrete implementation of the achievements of the conference and therefore avoid adopting the format of a new world conference which would potentially create the environment conducive to the renegotiation of often arduously reached agreements.”
The numerically-superior Islamic bloc then insisted on conducting consultations for most of the day in an attempt to railroad through its agenda.
Venue
It was formally decided today that the Prep Com sessions in 2008 will be held in Geneva. As to the final conference in 2009, the reported practice for such UN follow-up events is to hold them in New York. But several countries are pushing for anywhere but. Iran, Cuba, and China rejected the idea that the Durban Review conference would qualify as a special session of the General Assembly, and therefore occur in New York. This, they argued, would greatly diminish the importance and standing of the Durban Review Conference as it would simply become one of many that are held each year at UN headquarters.
New Role for High Commissioner Louise Arbour
High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour was formally named today as Secretary-General of the Conference. She will now carry an important leadership role through 2009, assuming her 4-year term as High Commissioner is renewed this summer.
There are cautionary lessons to be learned from the counterproductive role played by former High Commissioner Mary Robinson in 2001, whose diplomacy of appeasement encouraged the spoilers. (You wouldn’t know any of this from her new book, “A Voice For Human Rights.”)
Tom Lantos’ detailed eyewitness account from 2001, which is not uncritical of the Bush administration, tells of events following the disastrous Tehran session, and before the last-minute Geneva meeting convened to salvage the ship heading to Durban:
Robinson reported that she was making progress on persuading the Arab and Islamic states to drop their specific demand to equate Zionism with racism, but insisted that a majority of states felt that the situation in the Middle East, and Israel’s settlement policies in the occupied territories, could not be ignored in the Durban discussions. I was troubled by her response and explained to her that the U.S. position was non-negotiable, that no individual country or political conflict should be singled out in the context of a World Conference on Racism. I urged Robinson to consider the implications of appeasing the radical and fundamentalist forces that wanted to turn the entire aim of the conference on its head.
Here’s how things went down at the July 2001 gathering in Geneva:
OIC delegates drafted a “non-paper” for consideration by the conference that they hoped would salvage some of the original anti-Semitic language of the Tehran drafts. This document, in fact, was dripping with hate. All of the slurs against Israel and all of the distortions of the discussion of anti-Semitism in the earlier draft text were included in this “compromise.”… I met twice with Mrs. Robinson … and urged her publicly to denounce it in order to salvage the conference. She expressed concern over the document, but pleaded with me to provide her with the “diplomatic space” she needed to overcome this obstacle by not making the document public until a press conference which I had scheduled for the next day.
Lantos agreed to Robinson’s request, and continued bilateral negotiations with three of the more moderate OIC ambassadors. He found that the Islamic countries were prepared to relent but needed a way to save face. The moderates needed help in their ongoing battle with the hard-line countries such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Arafat’s Palestinians. Then there came Mrs. Robinson’s speech to assembled delegates later the same day:
[It] left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened… [Robinson] refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East. Instead, she discussed “the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and…the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.” Thus, instead of condemning the attempt to usurp the conference, she legitimized it. Instead of insisting that it was inappropriate to discuss a specific political conflict in the context of a World Conference on Racism, she spoke of the “need to resolve protracted conflict and occupation, claims of inequality, violence and terrorism, and a deteriorating situation on the ground.” Robinson was prepared to delve into the arcana of a single territorial conflict at the exclusion of all others and at the expense of the conference’s greater goals.
Robinson’s intervention broke all momentum that the U.S. had developed, explained Lantos. The Arab countries immediately sensed that the tide had turned again in their favor, and dropped all talk of compromise:
It was clear to me that Mrs. Robinson’s intervention during the Geneva talks represented the coup d’ grace on efforts to save the conference from disaster. If the conference was knocked off track in Tehran, it was completely derailed in Geneva.
This time, if Durban II will not repeat the mistakes of the past, things must be different. We trust that Madame Arbour will stand firm in fully opposing any initiative—and there will be many—that demonizes or unfairly singles out Israel, or that falsely accuses the West as a whole of defaming Islam or of persecuting Muslims. When sharks smell blood they will pounce. From now until 2009 there cannot be the slightest compromise with the malicious initiatives that will surely come, in the preparatory sessions as at the final conference.
