Friday July 27 12:21 PM ET

U.S. to Boycott Race Conference if Zionism Raised

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will boycott a U.N. conference on race if planners insist on including discussions of equating Zionism with racism and reparations for slavery, the White House said on Friday.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer (news - web sites) said President Bush (news - web sites) ''very much wants'' the United States to be represented at the Durban, South Africa, conference but will not send envoys to it if the two items are on the agenda.

The Bush administration was presenting its position to dozens of Washington-based ambassadors on Friday to try to keep the two topics off the conference agenda.

The United Nations (news - web sites) Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance from Aug. 31 to Sept. 7, has been billed as a turning point in the international fight against racism.

The State Department has already objected to, among other things, draft language from conference planners that Israeli government policies are racist and constitute a new form of apartheid.

Fleischer said a group of ``third world nations'' was trying to ``hijack'' the conference by including discussions about whether Zionism in Israel, seen by Arabs as the Jewish state's ongoing effort to repress Palestinians, amounts to racism.

``This would be a throwback to a position that was rejected 10 years ago by the international community if this conference takes this unwise step,'' Fleischer said.

NO REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY

Fleischer said Bush had adopted former President Bill Clinton's position opposing reparations for slavery.

``This conference should be focused on the future on combating racism that exists in the world today,'' he said. He said it was wrong to ``try to revisit a very tangled issue, that gets into complications such as what West African nations that were involved in the slave trade should pay reparations.''

African nations have disagreed with the United States over reparations. Besides a strongly worded condemnation of the slave trade, which flourished between Africa and the Americas for over two hundred years until early in the 19th century, some African states are looking for a financial settlement.

The U.S. comments amounted to a firm message to Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and the main organizer of the racism conference.

Robinson will open the final round of meetings to discuss the agenda for the Durban conference on Monday in Geneva.

Robinson warned Arab states on Friday that next month's conference would fail if they insisted on trying to put Zionism on the agenda.

``If there is an attempt to revive the idea of Zionism as racism we will not have a successful conference,'' Robinson told reporters in Geneva ahead of the agenda discussions.

She conceded that negotiators had their work cut out to agree a draft text to take to the conference.

Asked why the United States would forfeit the chance to argue its case whether the language was included or not, Fleischer said:

``The United States stands on the side of what is right. And the United States stands on the side of principle. And the United States can stand on the side of making certain that a variety of third world nations do not hijack a conference that should be aimed at combating racism and under the guise of combating racism turn this into a conference that itself smacks of anti-Semitism.''

-- Anonymous, July 27, 2001