The Dalai Lama sent a special envoy to the Geneva ceremony, which was attended by UN officials, ambassadors, and community leaders, along with Canadian Health Minister Rona Ambrose.
“UN Watch honors Minister Kenney for demonstrating the courage to lead in upholding the founding principles of the United Nations, and defending the true principles of human rights,” said UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer.
To appreciate Minister Kenney’s principled positions, see selections below from his candid remarks as delivered at the gala.
Previous winners of the UN Watch award include Spanish Prime Minister Josa Maria Aznar, British parliamentarian John Mann, and North Korean dissident Shin Dong-hyuk.
UN Watch’s international advisory board includes Nobel Peace Prize laureate David Trimble, Chinese dissident Yang Jianli and Katrina Lantos Swett, Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
POWERFUL REMARKS BY CANADIAN MINISTER JASON KENNEY 
On the UN’s ‘Durban II’ World Racism Conference:

“I recall being at an international conference in London around the time just after Canada announced our withdrawal from Durban II, and the minister of another government, whom I won’t mention for diplomatic reasons, came up to me and said, ‘Why exactly have you Canadians decided to do this?’

And I thought for a moment and said, ‘Well, listen, I can give you an hour’s worth of reasons for why we’ve withdrawn from Durban, but I’ll save both of us a lot of time and just give you one: Iran is the vice-chair of the conference. Argument is over!’”  Click for video
On Iran’s Torturer-in-Chief Speaking at the UN Human Rights Council — and the Importance of UN Watch Calling Out the Hypocrisy:
“An Iranian-Canadian woman named Zahra Kazemi went back to be a witness. She was a photojournalist. In 2005, she returned to Iran to record the democratic longings of the Iranian people, the persecution of gays, Bahais, Christians and other religious minorities.
Because of her moral courage she was arrested in Evin prison. She was tortured and murdered by a man named Saeed Mortazavi who was then Prosecutor-General in Tehran.
When our government came to office in 2006, we learned a few months later that Saeed Mortazavi was coming to Geneva to participate with the Iranian delegation at the hearings of the UN Human Rights Council.
And that one story tells you all you need to know about why we need UN Watch. Why we need to hold that and similar bodies accountable.
Why we need — when others would listen to the seductive voice of diplomatic politesse — why we need a Hillel Neuer standing at the microphone as an observer, calling people to account for allowing monsters like Saeed Mortazavi to have a microphone at a body dedicated to human rights. It’s wrong! And UN Watch is right to call those people to account.”  Click for video
On the Mission of UN Watch:
“To its great credit, UN Watch is doggedly, consistently focused on a very simple objective, which is to hold the United Nations to account to its own stated principles, of its founding charter. Such as, the first words in the preamble of the UN Charter from 1945: ‘the UN is founded to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights and the dignity and worth of the human person’.”
On the New Anti-Semitism:
“What do I mean by ‘the new anti-Semitism?’ I mean a growing acceptance of the unique an growing vilification of Israel and the new apologetics that try to hide or explain away the underlying anti-Semitism.
Today, there are those who are trying to strip the State of Israel if its citizenship in the international community, minimize its natural rights as a sovereign state, and even deny its right to exist.

The Dalai Lama’s envoy placed a traditional Tibetan scarf upon Kenney to recognize his outspoken defense of oppressed Tibetans.

Dalai Lama to Minister Jason Kenney on receiving UN Watch Award: “I have great admiration for your leadership, the concern and active support you have shown for the Tibetan cause, and your role in enhancing Canada’s diverse multi-ethnic and multicultural society… I have been impressed by your efforts to support the rights of oppressed people around the world.”

The new anti-Semitism has adopted even more sophisticated language than the old one. Instead of targeting the Jewish people, it now targets the Jewish homeland but it ultimately espouses the same ancient hatred and the old intent. Of course, criticism of Israel cannot in and of itself be regarded as anti-Semitic, however, if and when that criticism selectively condemns, selectively condemns and denies the only Jewish state’s right to exist, it cannot be considered anything but anti-Semitic.”
Canada Will no Longer Go Along to Get Along
“As Prime Minister Steven Harper has said, Canada has a purpose in the world, and that purpose is no longer just to go along with everyone else’s agenda. It is no longer to please every dictator with a vote at the United Nations, and I confess that I don’t know why past attempts to do so were ever thought to be in Canada’s national interest. He went on to say, ‘Now we know where our interests lie and who our friends are, and we take strong principled positions in our dealings with other nations whether popular or not and that is what the world can count on from Canada.’
“I’m proud to repeat those words to you today, and I’m proud to receive this award on behalf of all my colleagues and Prime Minister Harper, to wish you continued success, to Hillel and the entire UN Watch team, as they continue to be a voice for the voiceless and speak truth to power. Thank you very much.”
________________
Congratulatory Messages
Human rights dissidents, activists, and community leaders sent their congratulations to Minister Jason Kenney for receiving the UN Watch award. Click here to see messages from former Chinese political prisoner Rebiya Kadeer, international human rights advocate and MP Irwin Cotler, CIJA, Canadian Friends of Burma, African Diaspora Association of Canada, B’nai Brith Canada, Vietnamese Canadian Federation, All Pakistan Minorities Association, World Uyghur Congress, the Federation for a Democratic China, and others.

The post Top Canadian Minister Jason Kenney Receives UN Watch Moral Courage Award at 2014 Geneva Gala appeared first on UN Watch.

Referring to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech before a 2009 global anti-racism conference in Geneva, Pillay acknowledged: “I was a bit naive.”

“I wondered why people were so afraid that he would use it as a political platform, but I see that they were right,” she said. “I think that it was pretty evident to everyone that it is an inappropriate speech to make at that venue.”

Ahmadinejad used his speech to deliver an angry diatribe against Israel, calling it the most “cruel and repressive racist regime” and prompting a walkout by European delegates. U.S. and Israeli diplomats had boycotted the conference from the start.

UN Watch welcomes Pillay’s statement. At the same time, it would have been better had the High Commissioner made clear that Ahmadinejad’s speech was simply hateful and wrong, and not merely “inappropriate” at that particular venue.

The post U.N. rights chief admits being wrong on Durban 2, “naive” about Ahmadinejad appeared first on UN Watch.

Referring to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech before a 2009 global anti-racism conference in Geneva, Pillay acknowledged: “I was a bit naive.”

“I wondered why people were so afraid that he would use it as a political platform, but I see that they were right,” she said. “I think that it was pretty evident to everyone that it is an inappropriate speech to make at that venue.”

Ahmadinejad used his speech to deliver an angry diatribe against Israel, calling it the most “cruel and repressive racist regime” and prompting a walkout by European delegates. U.S. and Israeli diplomats had boycotted the conference from the start.

UN Watch welcomes Pillay’s statement. At the same time, it would have been better had the High Commissioner made clear that Ahmadinejad’s speech was simply hateful and wrong, and not merely “inappropriate” at that particular venue.

The post U.N. rights chief admits being wrong on Durban 2, “naive” about Ahmadinejad appeared first on UN Watch.

The delegation of Israel called for the vote, explaining that her government refused to afford credibility to a process that was “obsessed” with the Middle East.  The text was initially adopted with 161 countries in favor, 6 against, and 12 abstaining. 

After the vote, however, the delegation of the Russian Federation raised a point of order to note that their “yes” had been recorded as an abstention; they then requested a new vote.  The United States responded that it was “highly unusual” for a new vote to be recorded, asking under what rule of procedure the Committee would be acting.  The Chair replied that although it was, indeed, unusual, the rules do not prohibit the retaking of votes.  Furthermore, in previous demands for a new vote, the requesting delegation had pressed the wrong button.  As the Russian delegation had insisted that he had pressed the correct button, the Chair deemed it acceptable to grant a re-vote.  However, the United States argued that because the delegation had not requested a reconsideration of the resolution, a second vote would be invalid. 

The Chair decided to hold another vote, and the final count was 163 in favor, 5 against, and 9 abstaining.  The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the Russian Federation, changed their votes from abstentions to “yes.”  The Marshall Islands, which initially voted “no” was absent during the second vote, as was Macedonia, which had voted “yes” originally.

Canada was one of five nations to refuse to vote for the Durban Outcome Document (the other four were Australia, Israel, the Netherlands, and the United States.)  The Canadian representative explained that the language in the text reaffirmed the outcome document of the first Durban Conference in 2001, and that his government would not lend its approval to such a politicized process.  Moreover, the delegation argued that references in the document to the Middle East bore no relevancy to the fight against intolerance.

The other five countries that walked out of the Conference, namely Germany, the Czech Republic, New Zealand, Poland and Italy, all abstained.  They were joined by Georgia, the Republic of Moldova, Romania and Tonga.

In a general statement on the resolution, the delegation of Israel remarked that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.”  Israel argued that the 2001 Durban Conference “had descended in a brazen display of anti-Semitic racism,” and the promotion of racist agendas.  The representative of Israel further explained that they had initially decided to reserve judgment on the General Assembly’s decision to convene the Durban Review Conference; that they had realized the Conference’s potential to rectify the wrongs of 2001, but that these hopes had been misplaced.  Though Israel acknowledged the importance of various elements of the Review, the Conference had, nevertheless, reaffirmed the 2001 Durban Declaration.  The delegation explained that Israel was “fully committed to address, in a professional manner, the scourge of racism, xenophobia and intolerance,” but that it could not support a document that endorsed the 2001 Durban Declaration.

The post GA adopts outcome document of Durban Review Conference appeared first on UN Watch.

Interestingly, McDougall has never investigated any of the countries listed by Freedom House as the world’s worst human rights abusers: not China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Burma, Chinese-ruled Tibet, South Ossetia in Georgia, Chechnya in Russia, or Zimbabwe.

While it’s perfectly legitimate to hold free societies accountable, the reality is that immigrants of every color and creed rightly seek out Canada as a haven of tolerance, equality and opportunity.

UN Watch launched a protest against this U.N. official’s skewed set of priorities: picking on the most tolerant countries like Canada — possibly as U.N. payback for Ottawa being the first of 10 Western governments to pull out of the world body’s ill-fated Durban II conference — while she consistently turns a blind eye to the world’s worst abusers. Our action sparked more than a dozen news articles, columns, and editorials across Canada that cited UN Watch’s protest — including in the Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, and Calgary Herald. This National Post editorial is a powerful piece worth reading.

In a related development, the U.N. human rights office is also investigating the United States as a country of singular concern. The “special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing” has decided to conduct her next investigation in the U.S., particularly in New York City.

Writing in the Opinio Juris blog, Professor Julian Ku of Hofstra Law School notes that the U.N. monitor “is going to spend her time on a country which is unlikely to be in the top ten places with lack of adequate housing, and which in any event, is not a party to any of the treaties which form her mandate.”

But the anti-Western voting blocs that control the U.N. Human Rights Council — and appoint its experts — will no doubt be very pleased.

The post U.N. Investigates Canada and U.S. But Ignores Worst Abusers appeared first on UN Watch.

[S]everal actors deserve the blame for the problems: Israel and its friends, who have manipulated the truth about the nature of the work of the United Nations by gross exaggeration of the role and intervention of certain fanatics; western States, like Canada and the United States and those of Western Europe, that love to talk about ‘accountability’ for atrocities when they take place in Cambodia or Bosnia or Sierra Leone but that loath the idea that we continue to address the impact of slavery, the slave trade, colonialism and the destruction of aboriginal peoples…

To be fair, he also includes Ahmadinejad in this list of blame-sharers. Except that the world’s leading Holocaust denier is described as a merely “provocative politician,” not a barbaric murderer of his own people, inciter of genocidal anti-Semitism, or arch-sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East. For Schabas, as for Klein, the menacing power of Iran is instead something to be “ignored.”If only Eleanor Roosevelt and Rene Cassin — the architects of the UN human rights system who passionately defended Israel’s right to exist — were alive today. Then again, for their sake — lest they have to witness what has become of their legacy — maybe not.

The post When law professors believe Naomi Klein appeared first on UN Watch.

The strange, enduring rage of Naomi Klein
When it comes to Israel, she has always acted out of intense emotion, hysteria and anger

By Hillel Neuer

Supporters of liberal democratic values may have a hard time understanding why anti-globalization activist Naomi Klein has recruited Jane Fonda and other stars to boycott the Toronto International Film Festival for the crime of showing films from Tel Aviv, a symbol of tolerance in a region of tyranny.

Klein has never called for a boycott of films or any other products from the dozens of Arab and Islamic countries that systematically subjugate their women, torture dissidents and persecute religious and ethnic minorities.

She was not moved to protest when the city of Toronto twinned with Chongqing, nor when it established a “friendship relationship” with Ho Chi Minh City, despite the widespread human rights abuses in both China and Vietnam.

Nor has she ever called for the boycotting of films from the many Western democracies, including Canada, whose soldiers are fighting Islamist terrorists in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Klein’s singling out of Israel — particularly its most liberal city and cultural sector — has no rational basis.

This should come as no surprise. For while Klein’s statements and writings on Israel pose as sober analysis, the truth is that she has always acted on this subject out of intense emotion, hysteria and anger, rather than rational thought, facts or logic.

“This is, I think, the most emotional event I have ever done,” she recently told an audience of 500 Palestinians in Ramallah. “I have never had this feeling before, this feeling of overwhelming emotion.” This was how she opened her speech that accused Israel of committing “apartheid,” and Jews, except the tolerant few like her, of using the Holocaust as “a kind of get-one-genocide-free card.” The crowd, according to reporter Patrick Martin, responded with “one of the longest and loudest rounds of applause I have ever heard.”

At first glance, Klein’s targeting of Israel seems a newfound passion. The subject was absent from her first two books, as well as from her columns in the 1990s.

In 2007, however, Klein devoted a chapter of The Shock Doctrine to her theory that Israel seeks war for financial gain. In January, when Israel fought to end Hamas rocket attacks, Klein called for a global boycott –against Israel, not Hamas.

And now, in a cover story for this month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine, Klein offers a revisionist whitewash of the anti-Semitic Durban conference of 2001, laments the collapse of this year’s Durban II conference and portrays Jewish organizations as lying profiteers who sabotaged this UN cure-all for racism. As she did in Ramallah, Klein accuses my organization, UN Watch, of “misinformation,” yet fails to name a single example.

Ignoring the mass “Kill the Jews” marches during the 2001 conference, Klein accuses the late Congressman Tom Lantos and other Jewish delegates of creating a false memory, belatedly conflating a harmless gathering with the 9/11 attacks that followed days later. In fact, the hate-fest was documented in numerous statements, news reports and editorials published during the event itself. She cites cherry-picked quotes from Shimon Peres to support her arguments, without mentioning that he instructed his delegates to walk out of the Durban conference, describing it as “a farce” where “human rights were defeated,” and as a “court of mockery of justice.”

As to Durban II, Klein’s fictionalized account imagines that a newly hired UN bureaucrat was the organizing force, but avoids any mention of Najat Al-Hajjaji, the representative of Libya’s Colonel Qaddafiwho actually headed the two-year Durban II planning process, as well as the final conference’s main committee. The essay has gone completely ignored.

But Klein has certainly succeeded in becoming today’s leading opponent of Israel in the Western world. While this is a new role for someone famous as an anti-capitalist crusader, the truth is that Klein has nurtured a strange rage against her own people, faith and national cause, from a remarkably young age.

At 12, as Klein has proudly recounted, she wrote her Bat Mitzvah speech “about Jews being racist.” Her target then was attitudes supposedly held by her sixth-grade classmates in Montreal’s well-respected Jewish People’s School.

This was only prelude to a central episode in the Klein mythology, about which she boasts in biographical interviews.

As a college student in 1990, Klein wrote an editorial (see https://unwatch.org/naomiklein) the University of Toronto’s student newspaper The Varsity, entitled “Victim to victimizer.” In her various accounts, Klein describes a simple op-ed that urged Israel to “end the occupation not only for the Palestinians, but also for its own people, especially its women.” To organize a response, she claims, no less than 500 Jewish students gathered for a “lynch mob” meeting. However, she showed up herself, unrecognized, and stood up and told them off. “I was 19,” Klein told the Guardian, “and it made me tough.” The experience “prepared me for controversy,” empowering her to take on multinationals and the World Bank. Heroic stuff.

The facts, though, tell a very different story.

Klein’s article was anything but normal. Its thesis sentence and blaring headline: “What Israel has become: Racism and misogyny at the core of its being.”

“Israeli men,” she said, “reach maturity by brutalizing and degrading Palestinians.” Then there was “Israeli men’s misogyny toward Israeli women.”

Most disturbing, said Klein, “is something known to Israeli women as ‘Holocaust pornography,’ where images of emaciated women near ovens, shower heads, cattle cars and the like are used to sell clothing and other products.” Jewish women, she informed her readers, “are sexualized as Holocaust victims for Israeli men to masturbate over … the themes are fire, gas, trains, emaciation and death.”

If such aberrant ads or magazines ever existed, they were well hidden. But Klein was looking to demonize — not only Israel, but Judaism, and Jews.

“A Jewish education is an education of fear,” continued Klein. “Jews made the shift from victims to victimizers with terrifying ease.”

“I wish to be saved from Israel,” she concluded. “I am a Jew against Israel — just as Israel repeatedly proves itself to be against me.”

Interestingly, all this Goebbelslike venom — Israel as wicked, racist and depraved in its essence — as well as the article’s hysteria, rage and paranoia, are erased from Klein’s later accounts.

As to her alleged confrontation of a lynch mob, the Canadian Jewish News reported a meeting between 50 Jewish students and the Varsity editors, noting Klein’s attendance. It says nothing about her supposed dramatic intervention. Others present don’t recall any. Either way, Klein claims the community’s outrage changed her life, scaring her into silence on Israel for over 10 years. Now she’s back, and with a vengeance.

Two decades ago–in the “Victim to victimizer” article that she continues to revere, even as she has been hiding its true contents — Klein asked Toronto to hate Israel on the grounds that “racism and misogyny” were “at the core of its being,” a society sick on “Holocaust pornography.”

In her recent op-ed calling on Toronto to boycott Israeli films, Klein attacks the Jewish state for objecting to the Goldstone inquiry on Gaza created by the UN Human Rights Council — in which the Arab-controlled body declared Israel guilty in advance.

The path to Middle East peace requires mutual dialogue, recognition and compromise — not irrational boycotts motivated by selective morality, anger and rage.

Hillel Neuer is executive director of UN Watch in Geneva ( https://unwatch.org/).

The post The strange, enduring rage of Naomi Klein appeared first on UN Watch.

GENEVA, August 12, 2009 — On the day that former U.N. rights chief Mary Robinson is to receive the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch said that her recent comments in the Irish press resorted to “ad hominem and straw man” arguments that fail to address detailed charges that she fostered anti-Israel bias during the lead-up to the 2001 Durban conference on racism.

In an open letter to Mrs. Robinson, UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer argues that her response to the 22-page indictment of her record by the late U.S. congressman Tom Lantos, who was a U.S. delegate to the Durban conference, distorted and failed to address his allegations concerning her actions at Tehran and Geneva pre-conference meetings held in 2001.

Robinson claimed last week that Lantos “misunderstood” her role. Neuer sharply disagrees.

“Let’s face it: Tom Lantos never ‘misunderstood’ your role. Known as Mr. Human Rights, he was a veteran lawmaker on U.N. affairs who directly engaged with you on the issues in Washington, Geneva, and Durban,” said Neuer. “He knew exactly what measures of influence and responsibility you exercised over the process as Secretary-General, and it was on that nuanced basis that he denounced your record.”

“Leadership means taking responsibility. During the march to Durban you could have confronted the purveyors of anti-Israel hatred from the start. Instead, you chose to egg them on, only to have it explode in your face—by which time your protestations were simply too little and too late. You may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but you will always be its preeminent symbol.”

Neuer said that as U.N. rights chief Robinson failed to take on the now-defunct U.N. Commission on Human Rights when “the Arab and Islamic blocs, supported by an automatic majority of countries like China, Russia, and Cuba, diverted the world’s highest human rights body from its mission, ignoring millions of human rights victims in 191 countries in order to target Israel.”

Robinson’s actions also hurt the Palestinian cause, said Neuer. “Your support of one-sided U.N. measures only encouraged Palestinian extremists, deterred Israelis from trusting international institutions, and promoted the futile path of feel-good unilateral censure, instead of the necessary path of dialogue and reconciliation.”

“Mrs. Robinson, last week you said that when it came to the Middle East, you acted ‘purely in a principled, human rights way with no bias, which I am incapable of.’ The evidence, however, shows that you were not only capable, but all too willing.”

The full letter to Robinson follows below. UN Watch has offered to publish her response.

_____________

Following is an open letter by UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer to Mrs. Mary Robinson, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and Secretary-General of the 2001 Durban conference, who is today set to receive the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony.

Letter to Mrs. Mary Robinson

Dear Mrs. Robinson,

Recent statements by you and your defenders, amid the growing opposition to your receipt this Wednesday of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, require a response.

According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights—for whom you recently worked on a report together with one of its board members, Richard Goldstone—you are being “vilified” by “false accusations.”

In your own words, “certain elements” of the Jewish community—those opposed to your selection—are subjecting you to “bullying.”

Mrs. Robinson, let’s be honest: no one has bullied you, and you are not being vilified by false accusations.

Instead, facts were presented and issues raised concerning your 1997-2002 tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights—by mainstream Jewish organizations as well as by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle—which question the integrity of your actions on the Middle East, most famously during the lead-up to that dark moment in history known as the Durban conference.

Hurling ad hominem epithets won’t make these facts go away. Nor will misrepresenting your critics’ arguments and then purporting to refute them, which is what both you and your defenders have been doing.

If you are to receive this medal, the American people are entitled to know precisely what the issues are.

1. Your Role at Durban

Let us begin with Durban, the U.N.’s 2001 world conference against racism, which you presided over as Secretary-General, and then consider your overall tenure as U.N. rights chief.

As you know, the Durban conference degenerated into an unprecedented international platform for anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli hatred, with massive rallies in the streets of Durban organized by Palestinian and fundamentalist Arab groups. One widely distributed flyer showed a photograph of Hitler and the question “What if I had won?” The answer: “There would be no Israel.”

The late Tom Lantos, founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and a respected defender of human rights for all, was a U.S. delegate to the conference. “Having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust first hand,” he said, “this was the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.”

Shortly after the conference, Lantos published an essay in the Fletcher Forum for World Affairs that amounts to a stinging indictment of your role in the events leading up to the conference, including at the fateful preparatory meetings in Tehran and Geneva, with your acts of omission and commission described as “a major contributing factor to the debacle in Durban.”

This article is the primary source cited by your critics. If its author had been a hawkish unilateralist, you could have easily dismissed him as just another “bully.” But Tom Lantos was a Democrat, a firm believer in vital multilateral institutions, and a true friend—meaning never an uncritical one—of the United Nations.

And so you have no choice but to address his charges. Your main defense, as reported in the Irish Times, is that Lantos “misunderstood” your role.

“The conference was run by the member states, particularly by South Africa as the chair,” you said. “So all key meetings and all decisions at the official level were made by governments and I wasn’t present when they were arguing about whether anti-Semitic language which was in brackets should be included. I just wasn’t there.”

You weren’t there, Mrs. Robinson? That’s odd, because in the same breath, you proceeded to claim credit for the removal of these proposals: “But I did finally, after the United States and Israel had withdrawn, persuade South Africa to take this language out immediately and to continue with the conference.” It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it, too.

In attempting to defend the final text, you say that Shimon Peres, Israel’s foreign minister at the time, “welcomed” it. This is a deliberately misleading half-truth, put to frequent use this year by the apologists for Durban II.

The facts tell another story. On September 4, 2001, after he instructed his delegation to walk out of the conference, Peres described the gathering in Durban as “a farce” where “human rights were defeated,” and as a “court of mockery of justice.”

At the same briefing, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Rabbi Michael Melchior—a spiritual leader known for his advocacy of pluralism, liberalism and human rights protections for Israel’s minorities—described the Durban draft as “the most anti-Semitic official document put on any table in any official conference since World War II.” Yet you omit to mention any of this.

Yes, a few days later, when the final text emerged, Peres cheered the removal of the worst proposals, a direct result of the diplomatic pressure created by the joint U.S. and Israeli walkout that you continue to condemn. At the same time, his legal adviser, Alan Baker, made clear that Israel hardly gave its blessing to the outcome: “The fact that the Palestinians succeeded in inserting partisan and specific statements concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a declaration of a conference on racism is something that never should have happened.”

Sure enough, when the declaration came before the U.N. General Assembly in March 2002, Peres instructed the Israeli representative to join the U.S. and vote against it. Some endorsement.

Yet even if your account were true, it is, in the end, immaterial to Lantos’ 22-page indictment, only a small fraction of which discusses your role at the final conference. Most of it, as you know, addresses what you did—and failed to do—during the lead-up.

Lantos never denied that at Durban you stood up to condemn anti-Semitic pamphlets distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union, or that you rejected the viciously anti-Israel NGO declaration.

Rather, citing one instance after another, he made a compelling case that throughout the year of lead-up meetings you continuously fanned the flames of anti-Israel prejudice, only to cry “Fire!” once they rose up into a great conflagration.

I urge you to respond to Lantos’ detailed charges concerning your actions during three key moments, in Tehran, Geneva, and Durban:

1. That You Condoned the Tehran Hatred of February 2001
   In February 2001, when the Tehran preparatory meeting of Asian states adopted a text condemning only one country—demonizing Israel as a country guilty of a “new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity,” and calling Zionism a “racist and violent movement based on racist and discriminatory ideas”— your response was to congratulate the Tehran delegates for their “high degree of consensus.”When asked about the inflammatory rhetoric at a news conference, you replied: “The situation in the Palestinian occupied territories was brought up at the meeting and it is reflected in the final Declaration.” You went on to add that a “striking feature” of the meeting was the “emphasis on dialogue between civilizations.” That was it. No outrage. No criticism. No moral leadership.

   Your comments, wrote Lantos, “represented a pivotal moment in the evolution of the World Conference Against Racism. By appearing to condone the Asian conference’s efforts to place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda of the World Conference, [Mary Robinson] betrayed its intentions and emboldened those intent on using the conference for their own political purposes. From that moment the conference began to take a dangerous trajectory that became ever more difficult to correct.”

In other words, at the moment when the Islamic states injected the toxic language that would eventually poison the entire Durban process, your actions encouraged it.

Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

2. That You Opposed the U.S. at the Geneva Pre-Conference of August 2001
   Lantos detailed your actions during the emergency Geneva meeting of August 2001, a last-minute attempt to stave off the impending disaster. “Mrs. Robinson’s intervention with the assembled delegates later in the same day left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened. In her remarks, she advocated precisely the opposite course to the one Secretary [Colin] Powell and I had urged her to take. Namely, she 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. The Arab countries immediately seized on these statements as a clear indication that the tide had turned again in their favor, dropped all talk of compromise, and began pressing for the continuation of the Middle East discussion in Durban.”

   Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

3. That You Opposed the U.S. at the Durban Endgame in September 2001
   Finally, at the endgame in Durban, Lantos documents your counter-productive role: “As the U.S. pressed its case, Robinson seemed to be working to stymie our efforts. In her public and private statements, as was the case in Geneva, she insisted that the conference had to recognize the suffering of the Palestinian people. In a meeting on Sunday, September 2, with [U.S.] Ambassador Southwick, she lashed out at him, characterizing the U.S. threat to pull out if the Norwegian language was not accepted as ‘warped, strange and undemocratic.’”“In a meeting I had with Commissioner Robinson later that same day… [I] told her that the U.S. government was extremely displeased with the way she had handled the conference, and we indicated that we held her responsible for her actions that contributed to its failure.”

   Mrs. Robinson, will you respond to this charge?

The American people are entitled to answers to the specific allegations, not to straw man arguments.

Let’s face it: Tom Lantos never “misunderstood” your role. Known as “Mr. Human Rights,” he was a veteran lawmaker on U.N. affairs who directly engaged with you on the issues in Washington, Geneva, and Durban. He knew exactly what measures of influence and responsibility you exercised over the process as Secretary-General, and it was on that nuanced basis that he denounced your record.

Leadership means taking responsibility. During the march to Durban you could have confronted the purveyors of anti-Israel hatred from the start. Instead, you chose to egg them on, only to have it explode in your face—by which time your protestations were simply too little and too late. You may not have been the chief culprit of the Durban debacle, but you will always be its preeminent symbol.

1. Your Role as High Commissioner

But the concerns about your actions on the Middle East are not limited to Durban. They extend to your entire 5-year tenure as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Here again, you invoke the same defense: Your critics “misunderstand” what your role was, failing to appreciate the difference between the former Commission on Human Rights, a body of 53 U.N. member states, and your own role as the U.N.’s top human rights official.

To be sure, some of your critics, while getting the big picture right, have helped you make this case by conflating your former office with that of the Commission and its resolutions condoning Palestinian terrorism.

I will be the first to defend you on this point: you cannot be held responsible for texts that you neither initiated nor voted upon.

The errors of a few, however, do not detract from the numerous, genuine and well-grounded concerns cited over the years by UN Watch and others.

When the Arab and Islamic blocs, supported by an automatic majority of countries like China, Russia, and Cuba, diverted the world’s highest human rights body from its mission—ignoring millions of human rights victims in 191 countries in order to target Israel—you could have taken them on.

Unlike the U.S. president’s powers vis-à-vis Congress, you had no power to veto the Commission’s enactments. But you held the moral pulpit of the U.N. human rights system and could have set a different tone for Geneva. Unlike the political body, you were required to be impartial, objective, and non-selective.

Regrettably, however, when it came to Israel, you effectively encouraged the Commission’s anti-Israel obsession—an obsession that epitomized the politicization and selectivity that ultimately doomed the now-defunct body.

Examples abound. To name but a small portion:

• On May 15, 1998, as we reported, you legitimized Palestinian demonstrators hurling bricks, rocks and Molotov cocktails as a “peaceful assembly.”
• In September 2000, we protested your breach of impartiality and integrity when you named Ms. Mona Rishmawi, notorious for having written articles comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, as your senior advisor. She continues to serve at the office of the High Commissioner.
• In November 2000, when you led a fact-finding mission with the cooperation of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, we noted your distinct policy of listening to the Palestinians, while asking hard questions only of the Israelis.
• The subsequent report that you published was found by UN Watch to have denounced Israeli actions without considering their cause and context, including self-defense from armed attacks, and to have presumed Israel to be the aggressor.
• In December 2001, as documented by UN Watch, you gave special support to an extremist Palestinian demonstration held on the sidelines of a gathering of Geneva Convention signatories that was convened to condemn Israel.
• At the Commission’s April 2002 special session against Israel, your speech gave more credence to Palestinian propaganda than to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had witnessed Palestinian unloading of an explosive suicide belt from an ambulance.

Unfortunately, whenever we met with you in Geneva to raise such concerns, you rejected them out of hand.

Last week, when Jean Ziegler was elected vice-chair of the Human Rights Council’s Advisory Committee, we were reminded of your legacy. In the year 2000, it was you who invited Ziegler—the 1989 co-founder of the Moammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize—to become a U.N. human rights expert. He has since distinguished himself as the most anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israel U.N. official in the history of the organization, cynically abusing his mandate.

Did your actions, however selective, at least help Palestinians? No. Your support of one-sided U.N. measures only encouraged Palestinian extremists, deterred Israelis from trusting international institutions, and promoted the futile path of feel-good unilateral censure, instead of the necessary path of dialogue and reconciliation.

Mrs. Robinson, last week you said that when it came to the Middle East, you acted “purely in a principled, human rights way with no bias, which I am incapable of.”

The evidence above, however, shows that you were not only capable, but all too willing.

I look forward to your response, which we offer to publish in its entirety.

Yours truly,

Hillel C. Neuer
Executive Director
UN Watch
Geneva, Switzerland

The post Watchdog Urges Ex-U.N. Rights Chief Mary Robinson to Answer Allegations appeared first on UN Watch.

(Source: https://www.ned.org/about/carl/carl042009.html)

The Importance of African Human Rights Defenders to
The World Democracy Movement

Remarks by Carl Gershman, President, the National Endowment for Democracy to
“Johannesburg + 10: The All Africa Human Rights Defenders Conference
April 20, 2009       Kampala, Uganda

            I’m very honored to have been invited to give the keynote address to the 10^th anniversary conference of the All-Africa Human Rights Defenders.  It was more than a half-year ago that Hassan Shire Sheikh visited the NED and we talked about what I might say today.  He thought I should reflect upon the contribution that the African human rights defenders make to the World Movement for Democracy, the global network of democracy activists whose secretariat is housed at the NED and is represented here today by Ryota Jonen.  I’d like to do that, because I feel that their contribution is very significant.  But before I do, I’d like first to reflect upon the contribution that Africa itself has made to American democracy as well as to my own personal development as a political activist committed to democracy in America and around the world.  In both cases that contribution has been profound, if not always well understood or fully acknowledged.

            It’s not possible to speak about the evolution of American democracy over the last two and a quarter centuries without focusing on the place in American life of Africans who were brought involuntarily to the New World as slaves.  How America dealt with the issue of slavery and, after its abolition, with the legacy of racial segregation and discrimination, has always been the central problem of American democracy. 

This year the United States is celebrating the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln whose rise to national leadership in the 1850s was intimately connected with the stand he took against slavery.  For Lincoln, slavery contradicted and undermined everything the United States was about as a country and represented to the world – its democratic character, its egalitarian values, its belief on human dignity and freedom.  In his first great speech, delivered in 1854 following the passage by Congress of a bill that allowed the expansion of slavery, Lincoln said that he hated slavery not just because it was a “monstrous injustice,” but “because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world” and “enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites.”  He subsequently made the famous statement, which continues to reverberate today in countries where people are fighting for freedom and human rights, that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  Since it cannot “endure permanently half slave and half free,” Lincoln said, it will eventually have to become “all one thing or the other.” 

For Lincoln, the struggle against slavery raised the larger issue of America’s democratic purpose.  When he was travelling to Washington in 1861 to assume the presidency, he delivered a short, extemporaneous speech in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence had been signed 85 years earlier, in which he said that the principles contained in that document gave liberty not just to the people of America “but hope to the world for all future time” that “the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”  This was not just Lincoln’s view but reflected the mass sentiment at the time in the free states.  The civil war that the United States was about to enter, the bloodiest war in our history, was fought fundamentally over the issue of slavery and in the belief that a larger principle was at stake.  Some two years into that war, an Ohio sergeant wrote in his diary that the war had to be prosecuted, no matter how long it lasted, “for the great principles of liberty and self-government at stake, for should we fail, the onward march of Liberty in the Old World will be retarded at least a century, and Monarchs, Kings, and Aristocrats will be more powerful against their subjects than ever.”

Again, it was the enslavement of people from Africa that caused this sentiment to swell in America, leading to the abolition of slavery and propelling America a giant step forward in the development of its democracy.  Of course deep racial problems remained, and it was not until a century later that the civil rights movement propelled America to take another giant step forward with the abolition of Jim Crow, the system of legalized segregation in the Deep South.  It was an African leader, the Kenyan Tom Mboya, who captured the essence of what had happened in the 1960s when he wrote in 1969 that American society had “been forced to undergo a genuine social revolution in response to the black struggle.”  It was a struggle that, like the anti-slavery movement a century earlier, had mobilized broad social forces in the mainstream of American society to redress what the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, in a path-breaking study, had called “the American dilemma” — the contradiction between the American creed of equality for all and the unequal condition of American blacks.  Barack Obama built his presidential campaign in a similar way, using the vision of an America overcoming racial division to inspire a new movement to broaden and deepen American democracy.

The article that Mboya wrote in 1969 was a response to his African-American “cousins,” as he called them, some of whom were so alienated from the United States that they had become militant nationalists, even to the point of calling upon American blacks to return to Africa.  Drawing upon his own fight against tribal division in Kenya, he urged the American black to transcend nationalism and racialism and to seek liberation by merging “his blackness with his citizenship as an American.”  Barack Obama’s political success four decades later was a vindication of this vision of American post-racialism, even as Mboya himself succumbed to an assassin’s bullet, a victim of the very tribalism he had warned against. 

And so now we have an American president who is the son of a Kenyan, which adds yet another dimension of inter-connectedness to the close link between Africa and American democracy.  The fact that Obama’s father came to the United States in 1959 as part of a “student airlift” organized by the same Tom Mboya, who wanted to prepare a new generation of African leaders to meet the challenge of self-government, is but further proof of the powerful and enduring bond between Africa and America.

            What else could it be that would cause someone like Congressman Don Payne to put his life on the line to save a failing African country, as he did a week ago in his visit to Somalia, other than this deeply human bond that ties the fate of our democracy to yours and that is grounded in so much suffering and blood, but also in so much hope and faith?

            I myself have not been untouched by this unique relationship.  I got my start in the 1960s in the civil rights movement, which shaped my generation.  I worked for a civil rights leader named Bayard Rustin who was a democratic socialist, a pacifist, an intellectual, and a brilliant organizer.  It was he who organized the March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I have a Dream” speech.  Dave Peterson, whom many of you know well – he’s Mr. Africa at the NED –, also worked for Bayard, though Dave, a relative youngster, came along a little after I did. 

            But it’s not Bayard whom I want to talk about today.  It’s his mentor, A. Philip Randolph, whom I also had the honor of working for, though at something of a distance since he turned 80 in 1969, the year I started at the A. Philip Randolph Institute.  Like Rustin, Randolph was a democratic socialist, and he was also a trade unionist, having organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1937. Working from this institutional base, he launched the March on Washington Movement in 1941 that integrated the defense industry, subsequently persuaded President Truman to integrate the armed forces, and effectively laid the foundation for what later became the civil rights movement.  The journalist Murray Kempton once wrote that “It is hard to make anyone who has never met him believe that A. Philip Randolph must be the greatest man who has lived in the U.S. in this century.  But it is harder yet to make anyone who has ever known him believe anything else.”

            Malcolm X once conveyed his grudging respect for Randolph when he said that “All civil rights leaders are confused, but Randolph is less confused than the rest.”  They debated frequently, and Malcolm would sometimes challenge Randolph by saying that whatever blacks got they would have to take, to which Randolph once replied by reciting a passage that he often used in his public speeches.  He said: “At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats.  You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold.  If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything; and if you can’t hold anything you won’t keep anything.  And you can’t take anything without organization.” 

Randolph spoke as a trade unionist and a democrat, his basic message being that what blacks needed to advance their democratic rights and economic interests was not militant rhetoric but organization.  It’s a message that should resonate among us today as we meet to consider how to defend human rights in Africa.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent Johannesburg and Human Rights Defenders Declarations are important not just because they establish international norms but also because they inspire people to take effective action to defend and implement those norms.  Without such action that is made possible by organization and political influence, such declarations would be words of little consequence and possibly even a rhetorical façade giving cover to real abuses by cynical autocrats.

Compare, for example, the fate of three Congolese human rights defenders who were arrested last month after making critical statements about the government at a press conference, with that of Birtukan Mideksa in Ethiopia, a former judge and opposition leader who was sentenced in 2007 to a second life prison sentence for the crime of not retracting a statement she made characterizing her earlier release as the result of a politically negotiated settlement and not a formal legal pardon.  The three Congolese activists were quickly released following the mobilization of protests by national groups as well as international condemnation.  But Birtukan remains in solitary confinement because the national groups lack political space and are weak, and the international community has been silent.

The lesson, I think, is clear.  Organization matters, and this is especially true in Africa.  One of the most important democratic developments anywhere in the world since the NED was founded 25 years ago has been the emergence in Africa of a mass movement of civil society, with human rights defenders at the forefront.  According to Larry Diamond, this development has been the principal factor accounting for Africa’s “second liberation” —  the growth since 1990 of the number of democracies in sub-Saharan Africa from three (Botswana, Mauritius, and the Gambia) with a total population of just three million to more than twenty African democracies in 2008.  The pressure for this transformation came from the bottom up, generated by an enormously diverse array of civil society actors: women’s and civic-education groups, think tanks, bar associations, trade unions, student associations and other youth groups, religious bodies, election-monitoring networks, development and environmental organizations, journalists and community radio broadcasters, groups building peace between different ethnic and religious sectors and promoting a dialogue between police and the community, others that fight corruption and advance the rule of law, and of course human rights organizations that not only advocate for human rights and monitor abuses but also engage in human rights education and training, provide legal assistance, help refugees and – like the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Network – provide refuge and protection for activists and journalists in the most dangerous situations.

Such groups have done much more than foster the transition from one-party dictatorships to multi-party systems with regular elections.  They have also tried to hold elected governments accountable and to help Africans understand the importance, as our friend Maina Kiai has said, of looking “beyond the forms and facades of democracy” – the imperial presidencies, the passive and self-serving legislatures, the partisan electoral commissions, the corrupt officials, the less than independent judiciaries – to real democracy, what Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, famously called “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Thinking about the vital role of African civil society activists reminds me of a comment made by the late Samuel Huntington at a meeting we organized nearly two decade ago of democracy assistance foundations.  When Larry Diamond spoke about the need to support democracy in Africa, Huntington demurred, saying that democracy required a certain minimal level of economic development and that this precondition was lacking in most of Africa. While we couldn’t reach agreement about the possibility for democracy in Africa, we ended up agreeing that the NED should support African democrats.

Well, so we did, and what happened was that these democrats produced electoral and even liberal democracy in half the countries of sub-Saharan Africa – against all the odds and the expectations of so many specialists.  This sends a message of hope to democrats everywhere, especially those in the most difficult circumstances.  I can say without any hesitation that there is no greater source of inspiration to people fighting for democracy around the world today than the courage and determination demonstrated by African democrats in one country after another. 

            And that’s not the only way that democratic activists in Africa contribute to the global struggle for democracy.  Within the World Movement for Democracy, African democrats were the first to organize a regional network.  The African Democracy Forum has now inspired the creation of a similar network in Latin America, and it is the model that democrats in other regions can try to emulate.  It was also an African human rights activist, Nigeria’s Ayo Obe, who became the first Chair of the World Movement’s Steering Committee and helped the movement gain traction and credibility among activists around the world during the early days when it was still more an idea than a reality.

African democrats are also in a unique position to reshape the global debate on democracy and human rights.  The adoption of the Johannesburg Declaration in 1998 was eloquent testimony to the failure of governments to take meaningful action to redress the terrible violations of human rights that take place on a daily basis in Africa and which were spelled out in the Declaration, from torture, rape, and extrajudicial executions to efforts to silence human rights defenders through censorship, intimidation, imprisonment, the denial of freedom of assembly and association, and the use of laws to suppress human rights organizations and activities. 

Our meeting today just happens to coincide with the opening of the UN’s Durban Review Conference in Geneva.  I regret that this conference, like the first Durban meeting, will be an exercise in obfuscation, scapegoating, and evasion, and that some of the worst violators of human rights will use it as a forum to point the finger at others and to decry everything but the real offenses.  This has a deeply corrupting effect on the entire UN system and on the international legal and moral norms that have been established over the past six decades. 

No one is better placed to counter this corruption than African human rights defenders.  It is your alternative African voice that can begin to introduce truth and accountability into an international discussion that is otherwise sterile, mendacious, and even sinister.  Your words and even more, the actions you take at great risk to your own safety and well-being, have the potential to resonate within the international system and encourage the representatives of democratic governments to show that they have the courage of their convictions.

In the end, there is no alternative to solidarity – among the human rights defenders themselves, and between them and their allies within the international community.  Ultimately people must find their own way to freedom, but if their cause is just, they deserve support based on shared values.  This is how I understand a memorable observation by A. Philip Randolph, on which I’ll close.  “Salvation for a race, nation, or class,” he once said, “must come from within.  Freedom is never granted; it is won.  Justice is never given; it is exacted.  Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races, and the struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationships.”

That’s a call to action as well as a reminder that we share a common humanity.  With that in mind, let us proceed together – Africans and Americans, and democrats the world over.

The post NED’s Carl Gershman speaks in Africa for human rights while perpetrators obfuscate at Durban II appeared first on UN Watch.

(Source: https://www.ned.org/about/carl/carl042009.html)

The Importance of African Human Rights Defenders to
The World Democracy Movement

Remarks by Carl Gershman, President, the National Endowment for Democracy to
“Johannesburg + 10: The All Africa Human Rights Defenders Conference
April 20, 2009       Kampala, Uganda

            I’m very honored to have been invited to give the keynote address to the 10^th anniversary conference of the All-Africa Human Rights Defenders.  It was more than a half-year ago that Hassan Shire Sheikh visited the NED and we talked about what I might say today.  He thought I should reflect upon the contribution that the African human rights defenders make to the World Movement for Democracy, the global network of democracy activists whose secretariat is housed at the NED and is represented here today by Ryota Jonen.  I’d like to do that, because I feel that their contribution is very significant.  But before I do, I’d like first to reflect upon the contribution that Africa itself has made to American democracy as well as to my own personal development as a political activist committed to democracy in America and around the world.  In both cases that contribution has been profound, if not always well understood or fully acknowledged.

            It’s not possible to speak about the evolution of American democracy over the last two and a quarter centuries without focusing on the place in American life of Africans who were brought involuntarily to the New World as slaves.  How America dealt with the issue of slavery and, after its abolition, with the legacy of racial segregation and discrimination, has always been the central problem of American democracy. 

This year the United States is celebrating the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln whose rise to national leadership in the 1850s was intimately connected with the stand he took against slavery.  For Lincoln, slavery contradicted and undermined everything the United States was about as a country and represented to the world – its democratic character, its egalitarian values, its belief on human dignity and freedom.  In his first great speech, delivered in 1854 following the passage by Congress of a bill that allowed the expansion of slavery, Lincoln said that he hated slavery not just because it was a “monstrous injustice,” but “because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world” and “enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites.”  He subsequently made the famous statement, which continues to reverberate today in countries where people are fighting for freedom and human rights, that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  Since it cannot “endure permanently half slave and half free,” Lincoln said, it will eventually have to become “all one thing or the other.” 

For Lincoln, the struggle against slavery raised the larger issue of America’s democratic purpose.  When he was travelling to Washington in 1861 to assume the presidency, he delivered a short, extemporaneous speech in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence had been signed 85 years earlier, in which he said that the principles contained in that document gave liberty not just to the people of America “but hope to the world for all future time” that “the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”  This was not just Lincoln’s view but reflected the mass sentiment at the time in the free states.  The civil war that the United States was about to enter, the bloodiest war in our history, was fought fundamentally over the issue of slavery and in the belief that a larger principle was at stake.  Some two years into that war, an Ohio sergeant wrote in his diary that the war had to be prosecuted, no matter how long it lasted, “for the great principles of liberty and self-government at stake, for should we fail, the onward march of Liberty in the Old World will be retarded at least a century, and Monarchs, Kings, and Aristocrats will be more powerful against their subjects than ever.”

Again, it was the enslavement of people from Africa that caused this sentiment to swell in America, leading to the abolition of slavery and propelling America a giant step forward in the development of its democracy.  Of course deep racial problems remained, and it was not until a century later that the civil rights movement propelled America to take another giant step forward with the abolition of Jim Crow, the system of legalized segregation in the Deep South.  It was an African leader, the Kenyan Tom Mboya, who captured the essence of what had happened in the 1960s when he wrote in 1969 that American society had “been forced to undergo a genuine social revolution in response to the black struggle.”  It was a struggle that, like the anti-slavery movement a century earlier, had mobilized broad social forces in the mainstream of American society to redress what the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, in a path-breaking study, had called “the American dilemma” — the contradiction between the American creed of equality for all and the unequal condition of American blacks.  Barack Obama built his presidential campaign in a similar way, using the vision of an America overcoming racial division to inspire a new movement to broaden and deepen American democracy.

The article that Mboya wrote in 1969 was a response to his African-American “cousins,” as he called them, some of whom were so alienated from the United States that they had become militant nationalists, even to the point of calling upon American blacks to return to Africa.  Drawing upon his own fight against tribal division in Kenya, he urged the American black to transcend nationalism and racialism and to seek liberation by merging “his blackness with his citizenship as an American.”  Barack Obama’s political success four decades later was a vindication of this vision of American post-racialism, even as Mboya himself succumbed to an assassin’s bullet, a victim of the very tribalism he had warned against. 

And so now we have an American president who is the son of a Kenyan, which adds yet another dimension of inter-connectedness to the close link between Africa and American democracy.  The fact that Obama’s father came to the United States in 1959 as part of a “student airlift” organized by the same Tom Mboya, who wanted to prepare a new generation of African leaders to meet the challenge of self-government, is but further proof of the powerful and enduring bond between Africa and America.

            What else could it be that would cause someone like Congressman Don Payne to put his life on the line to save a failing African country, as he did a week ago in his visit to Somalia, other than this deeply human bond that ties the fate of our democracy to yours and that is grounded in so much suffering and blood, but also in so much hope and faith?

            I myself have not been untouched by this unique relationship.  I got my start in the 1960s in the civil rights movement, which shaped my generation.  I worked for a civil rights leader named Bayard Rustin who was a democratic socialist, a pacifist, an intellectual, and a brilliant organizer.  It was he who organized the March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I have a Dream” speech.  Dave Peterson, whom many of you know well – he’s Mr. Africa at the NED –, also worked for Bayard, though Dave, a relative youngster, came along a little after I did. 

            But it’s not Bayard whom I want to talk about today.  It’s his mentor, A. Philip Randolph, whom I also had the honor of working for, though at something of a distance since he turned 80 in 1969, the year I started at the A. Philip Randolph Institute.  Like Rustin, Randolph was a democratic socialist, and he was also a trade unionist, having organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1937. Working from this institutional base, he launched the March on Washington Movement in 1941 that integrated the defense industry, subsequently persuaded President Truman to integrate the armed forces, and effectively laid the foundation for what later became the civil rights movement.  The journalist Murray Kempton once wrote that “It is hard to make anyone who has never met him believe that A. Philip Randolph must be the greatest man who has lived in the U.S. in this century.  But it is harder yet to make anyone who has ever known him believe anything else.”

            Malcolm X once conveyed his grudging respect for Randolph when he said that “All civil rights leaders are confused, but Randolph is less confused than the rest.”  They debated frequently, and Malcolm would sometimes challenge Randolph by saying that whatever blacks got they would have to take, to which Randolph once replied by reciting a passage that he often used in his public speeches.  He said: “At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats.  You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold.  If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything; and if you can’t hold anything you won’t keep anything.  And you can’t take anything without organization.” 

Randolph spoke as a trade unionist and a democrat, his basic message being that what blacks needed to advance their democratic rights and economic interests was not militant rhetoric but organization.  It’s a message that should resonate among us today as we meet to consider how to defend human rights in Africa.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent Johannesburg and Human Rights Defenders Declarations are important not just because they establish international norms but also because they inspire people to take effective action to defend and implement those norms.  Without such action that is made possible by organization and political influence, such declarations would be words of little consequence and possibly even a rhetorical façade giving cover to real abuses by cynical autocrats.

Compare, for example, the fate of three Congolese human rights defenders who were arrested last month after making critical statements about the government at a press conference, with that of Birtukan Mideksa in Ethiopia, a former judge and opposition leader who was sentenced in 2007 to a second life prison sentence for the crime of not retracting a statement she made characterizing her earlier release as the result of a politically negotiated settlement and not a formal legal pardon.  The three Congolese activists were quickly released following the mobilization of protests by national groups as well as international condemnation.  But Birtukan remains in solitary confinement because the national groups lack political space and are weak, and the international community has been silent.

The lesson, I think, is clear.  Organization matters, and this is especially true in Africa.  One of the most important democratic developments anywhere in the world since the NED was founded 25 years ago has been the emergence in Africa of a mass movement of civil society, with human rights defenders at the forefront.  According to Larry Diamond, this development has been the principal factor accounting for Africa’s “second liberation” —  the growth since 1990 of the number of democracies in sub-Saharan Africa from three (Botswana, Mauritius, and the Gambia) with a total population of just three million to more than twenty African democracies in 2008.  The pressure for this transformation came from the bottom up, generated by an enormously diverse array of civil society actors: women’s and civic-education groups, think tanks, bar associations, trade unions, student associations and other youth groups, religious bodies, election-monitoring networks, development and environmental organizations, journalists and community radio broadcasters, groups building peace between different ethnic and religious sectors and promoting a dialogue between police and the community, others that fight corruption and advance the rule of law, and of course human rights organizations that not only advocate for human rights and monitor abuses but also engage in human rights education and training, provide legal assistance, help refugees and – like the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Network – provide refuge and protection for activists and journalists in the most dangerous situations.

Such groups have done much more than foster the transition from one-party dictatorships to multi-party systems with regular elections.  They have also tried to hold elected governments accountable and to help Africans understand the importance, as our friend Maina Kiai has said, of looking “beyond the forms and facades of democracy” – the imperial presidencies, the passive and self-serving legislatures, the partisan electoral commissions, the corrupt officials, the less than independent judiciaries – to real democracy, what Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, famously called “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Thinking about the vital role of African civil society activists reminds me of a comment made by the late Samuel Huntington at a meeting we organized nearly two decade ago of democracy assistance foundations.  When Larry Diamond spoke about the need to support democracy in Africa, Huntington demurred, saying that democracy required a certain minimal level of economic development and that this precondition was lacking in most of Africa. While we couldn’t reach agreement about the possibility for democracy in Africa, we ended up agreeing that the NED should support African democrats.

Well, so we did, and what happened was that these democrats produced electoral and even liberal democracy in half the countries of sub-Saharan Africa – against all the odds and the expectations of so many specialists.  This sends a message of hope to democrats everywhere, especially those in the most difficult circumstances.  I can say without any hesitation that there is no greater source of inspiration to people fighting for democracy around the world today than the courage and determination demonstrated by African democrats in one country after another. 

            And that’s not the only way that democratic activists in Africa contribute to the global struggle for democracy.  Within the World Movement for Democracy, African democrats were the first to organize a regional network.  The African Democracy Forum has now inspired the creation of a similar network in Latin America, and it is the model that democrats in other regions can try to emulate.  It was also an African human rights activist, Nigeria’s Ayo Obe, who became the first Chair of the World Movement’s Steering Committee and helped the movement gain traction and credibility among activists around the world during the early days when it was still more an idea than a reality.

African democrats are also in a unique position to reshape the global debate on democracy and human rights.  The adoption of the Johannesburg Declaration in 1998 was eloquent testimony to the failure of governments to take meaningful action to redress the terrible violations of human rights that take place on a daily basis in Africa and which were spelled out in the Declaration, from torture, rape, and extrajudicial executions to efforts to silence human rights defenders through censorship, intimidation, imprisonment, the denial of freedom of assembly and association, and the use of laws to suppress human rights organizations and activities. 

Our meeting today just happens to coincide with the opening of the UN’s Durban Review Conference in Geneva.  I regret that this conference, like the first Durban meeting, will be an exercise in obfuscation, scapegoating, and evasion, and that some of the worst violators of human rights will use it as a forum to point the finger at others and to decry everything but the real offenses.  This has a deeply corrupting effect on the entire UN system and on the international legal and moral norms that have been established over the past six decades. 

No one is better placed to counter this corruption than African human rights defenders.  It is your alternative African voice that can begin to introduce truth and accountability into an international discussion that is otherwise sterile, mendacious, and even sinister.  Your words and even more, the actions you take at great risk to your own safety and well-being, have the potential to resonate within the international system and encourage the representatives of democratic governments to show that they have the courage of their convictions.

In the end, there is no alternative to solidarity – among the human rights defenders themselves, and between them and their allies within the international community.  Ultimately people must find their own way to freedom, but if their cause is just, they deserve support based on shared values.  This is how I understand a memorable observation by A. Philip Randolph, on which I’ll close.  “Salvation for a race, nation, or class,” he once said, “must come from within.  Freedom is never granted; it is won.  Justice is never given; it is exacted.  Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races, and the struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationships.”

That’s a call to action as well as a reminder that we share a common humanity.  With that in mind, let us proceed together – Africans and Americans, and democrats the world over.

The post NED’s Carl Gershman speaks in Africa for human rights while perpetrators obfuscate at Durban II appeared first on UN Watch.