As Durban II Wraps Up, A Look Back at the Original Conference

It looks like Durban I was as great a success as the sequel:

The Economist- Shambles and Fury at Durban
Sep 6th 2001 | DURBAN (I can't help but notice it was the week before 9/11)

THE meeting was supposed to be far too important to foul up. Racism, as every delegate intoned, is a modern scourge. Xenophobia is evident all over the world. For eight days in the South African port of Durban, the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance was meant to highlight the problem and persuade more governments to outlaw discrimination. An apology for slavery in the past might be forthcoming. And if minority groups—camera-courting pygmies and Amerindians who strutted by with feathers in their hair—could bolster their profile and influence, so much the better.

Instead, the conference descended into farce. On Monday the American and Israeli delegations stormed out, citing anti-Semitic attacks outside the official meeting. (Some activists had handed out leaflets saying Hitler should have finished “his job”; others accused Israel of carrying out genocide.) When Arab delegations tried to single out Israel for condemnation in the final declaration, the Israelis claimed the meeting had become a forum for racists........

It gets worse:

Furious African-Americans said their government's delegation had used Israel as a cover to avoid the conference's second difficult issue, the slave trade. The Rev Jesse Jackson, still America's paramount black leader, muttered that the American delegation had come to sabotage the meeting. A South African government spokesman agreed that America had used the Middle East controversy as a red herring while it fled for the door. Fishy or not, it skipped out just as talks on transatlantic slavery took a turn for the worse.

At the start of the week, some European countries, notably Germany and Belgium, the current president of the EU, seemed ready to make a general apology for slavery. African governments had assured them that they wanted contrition, investment and aid rather than reparations. But as the week wore on, American activists pushed African countries to demand “restitution for their immense suffering” from western states (ie, reparations and more debt relief) and recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity (ie, grist for lawsuits). The Europeans promptly closed ranks around those old imperial slavers, Britain, Spain and Portugal, which had earlier refused even to consider an apology.

Caught in the middle, the South African government and Mary Robinson, the United Nations human-rights chief who was running the show, tried to limit the damage. There had been successes, she said. Some 18,000 people had attended from over 160 countries, including 4,000 non-governmental activists and over 1,000 journalists. The activists had their own marches and meetings, in which victims of discrimination—an escaped slave from Niger, an “untouchable” widow from India—told their moving tales.

Debacle:

Western governments, too, share responsibility. By sending junior delegates, they gave the message that they were not taking the conference seriously. If the final product is a shambles, producing not even a coherent set of intentions, that eases the pressure on them to tackle racism in their own countries. But vulnerable groups have missed a chance to push their interests on to the world's headlines, and the NGOs that campaign for them have not strengthened their influence over governments. The farce in Durban has done no one any good.

Perhaps something good will come out of Durban II, but I doubt it.

Talk about Heart Ache!

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Obama said Tuesday that Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent characterization of the Israeli government as "racist" was part of a disappointing pattern that threatens to undermine the prospect of warmer relations between Washington and Tehran.