UN Watch in the News
The Economist
November 27, 2008
Preparations for a new global discussion on race start to go wobbly
THE United Nations has high hopes of combating racial intolerance, and the violence it causes, with giant talkfests. One such gathering—a World Conference against Racism—took place in Durban in 2001. Preparations for a follow-up to be held in Geneva next April, are in trouble. Two countries, Israel and Canada, have left the process; several others (all in the West) are threatening to do so unless the new meeting avoids the anti-Israel excesses which in their view marred the first one.
“Had we thought there could be some real value to this conference, we would not have walked out,” said Aharon Leshno-Yaar, Israel’s envoy in Geneva. “Israel must be in the forefront of any combat against racism. But the whole process has been hijacked by a group of radical countries wanting to shield themselves against criticism by heaping blame on the West.” Israel feared a repeat of the “hatred and extremism” that marked the 2001 meeting.
That gathering, with some 18,000 delegates, was certainly imperfect. A Palestinian intifada was raging and passions were high. The Israelis and Americans walked out early on, saying criticism of Israel was disproportionate. Europeans and other Westerners slogged on, finally producing an anodyne statement. Of 341 paragraphs, only six referred to Israel, the Palestinians, anti-Semitism or the Holocaust, none in an obviously objectionable way.
What gave the 2001 meeting a bad name, in the eyes of Israel and its friends, was the parallel NGO forum, whose final declaration was so strongly worded—equating Israel’s policies in the occupied territories with apartheid—that Mary Robinson, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, refused to endorse it or to transfer it to the main forum. In many minds, the two sessions—the official one and the NGO one—have become conflated into a single event, known by human-rights wonks as “Durban I”.
The whole thing was a “festival of hate and anti-Semitism”, says Hillel Neuer, head of UN Watch. He predicts the Geneva meeting will be just as bad. Its cause is not helped by the fact that it is being organised by the UN’s much-criticised Human Rights Council, with Libya chairing a preparatory panel that includes Iran, Cuba, Russia and Pakistan.
Some stridently anti-Israel views expressed by a group of Asian countries, and drafted mainly by Iran, have added to the mood of alarm. But the outcome of the 2009 meeting may prove less extreme. The Asian paper is just one of five regional contributions, none of which will see the light of day in its current form. Line-by-line haggling will start in January, with the aim of producing a much shorter final declaration with some hope of winning consensus.
When Canada left in January, it said it would not be “party to an anti-Semitic, anti-Western hatefest dressed up as an anti-racism conference”. Israel followed on November 19th. America, Australia, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic may also quit unless things change. Others, like Germany, Spain, Austria, Belgium and the Scandinavians seem keener to try influencing the tone from inside.
Some people question the idea of a global discussion of an issue as diffuse as racism. After all, they say, little was gained by the 2001 show or by anything that followed. Others, like Gay McDougall, an American who is the UN’s independent expert on minorities, disagree. She deems it significant that in 2001 almost all governments admitted that racism existed in their own societies, and notes that in 2009 countries will be held to account for pledges made in Durban; only then can the process be judged. Sceptics are unwilling to wait.
