BBC 3 September, 2001, 17:18 GMT 18:18 UK US abandons racism summit Middle East conflict has spilled over to Durban's streets The United States and Israel have pulled out their delegations to the UN conference on racism after failing to have "hateful" language removed from meeting documents.

"I have instructed our representatives to the World Conference Against Racism to return home," Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a statement, adding that he had taken the decision with regret.

The conference in the South African port city of Durban reached deadlock on Monday when paragraphs criticising Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people came up for discussion.

Arab and Islamic countries have been demanding condemnation of Israel in the final declaration for its treatment of the Palestinian people.

A statement from the South African government called the US withdrawal unnecessary and said the conference would continue.

Mr Powell had already boycotted the event because of reservations about the wording of draft texts relating to Israeli prepared before the conference.

A mid-level US diplomatic team in Durban had been heavily involved in behind-the-scenes efforts to amend the wording, but took no public role in the conference.

Earlier Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Israel would not withdraw before the US - "to avoid the impression that the United States is serving Israel", he said.

The racism conference has also been beset by rows over reparations for slavery and other disagreements.

'Racist crimes'

On Sunday, a human rights forum coinciding with the conference equated Zionism - the movement which led to the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948 - with racism and called for international sanctions against Israel.

The forum's declaration - which will be presented to the summit organisers for consideration - branded Israel "a racist apartheid state" and called for an end to its "systematic perpetration of racist crimes, including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing."

Israeli delegate Mordechai Yedid made a strongly-worded speech to the conference on Monday saying Arab and Islamic states trying to label Israel and Zionism as racist were being anti-Semitic themselves.

"The outrageous and manic accusations we have heard here are attempts to turn a political issue into a racial one, with almost no hope of resolution," Mr Yedid said.

Amr Moussa - the former Egyptian foreign minister who now heads the League of Arab States - warned against the issuing of a final declaration in which too much weight was given to one side.

"What is the use of the document that will be tilted to one or the other. It will just be condemned and thrown away and not implemented at all," he said.

Divided on slavery

Divisions have also emerged among European countries on whether to apologise for the slave trade between Africa and the New World, with former slave traders Britain, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands holding out against pressure to apologise and agree it was a crime against humanity.

Other countries that were not, led by current EU president Belgium, want to move closer to African and black American demands for an apology.

A senior African-American campaigner, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, said a failure to apologise would indicate that these countries were proud of their colonial past.

"If you don't feel apologetic for slavery, if you don't feel apologetic for colonialism, if you feel proud of it, then say that," he told the BBC.

"But if one has a sincere desire to overcome the ravages of the past it doesn't take much to apologise and move towards some plan for restoration."

Some countries may indeed fear that an apology would add momentum to demands that those which traded in slaves pay reparations.

-- Anonymous, September 03, 2001

Answers

www.dailytelegraph.com/opinion

Fighting racism? This will have the opposite effect

By Barbara Amiel

News: Norway offers hope to racism summit after setback on Israel

OH please, let there be a video of this week's United Nations "World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance". I'm not sure about my favourite moment, but it might well be Saturday night's dinner with Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights Commissioner, imitating the fictional incident in the novel Exodus when the King of Sweden was supposed to have worn a yellow star on hearing of the Nazi race laws.

"I am a Jew," said Roman Catholic Ms Robinson dramatically, on seeing the cartoon equating the Star of David with the swastika, handed out to conference delegates by the Arab Lawyers' Union. Ms Robinson's gesture is very sweet, but we Jews are not in the business of proselytising, even when it is unintentionally done by our Islamic brothers.

I'm not that unhappy about the emphasis placed on equating Zionism with racism, or, as the 2001 version has it, Israel as a "racist, apartheid state". It is a godsend in the sense that this defamation has made it easier for a lot of governments to send low-level delegations to the meeting. But the Zionism issue is a red herring. Read all the material on this conference and one thing becomes clear: no sane person or government in a Western democracy should have attended.

The organisers of this conference are the same Orwellian monsters that named the Ministry of Torture as the Ministry of Love. Apart from condemning Israel, which has been designated to fill the role of the old South Africa, the purpose of this conference is clear. It is to extort money from the First World for the pockets of Third World despots by forgiveness of debt and further loans, and to attack and delegitimise the Western democracies.

The UN has, in effect, become a union shop for the Third World, most Islamic countries and the few remaining communist regimes. The notion that this conference has anything to do with eliminating racism is pathetic.

Today the evils of slavery live on only in the Third World. I managed to find one background paper on slavery in Sudan and Mauritania, but only a couple of paragraphs were devoted to it and you can bet they will not be the focus of demands for reparations. The decisive moves against slavery were made by the French and British in the 19th century.

It is brave of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to apologise for the role of Germany in the slave trade, but beside the point, given that Germany did not become active in Africa and Polynesia until Bismarck decided to acquire an empire 50 years after the abolition of the slave trade. Perhaps Mr Fischer was reading Mao's Little Red Book rather than history during the 1960s, when he was busy keeping a safe house for New Left terrorists in Germany.

The conference is keen to change Western immigration policy so that illegal immigrants from the Third World can move to the First World, taking pressure off their own governments and creating havoc for us. "Migrants", as used in this context, is a synonym for illegal immigrants. Stopping them is "racist".

Try telling that to white Commonwealth nationals or Americans who find it impossible to get work permits. Never mind that you couldn't enter a Third World country from a First World country this way; never mind that the conditions that make people flee China or Afghanistan are indicative of the kind of systems Third World countries have: the point is to pile this on as an indictment of the First World.

When the UN conference argues that America is racist because more Hispanics or blacks face the death penalty after lengthy trials and proceedings, it is simply illustrating one of the most common logical fallacies. Owners of red sports cars may complain that the police stop them more often than owners of Volvos, but whether or not this is a question of the police being prejudiced against red sports cars or whether red sports cars speed more often is unknown.

The only known fact that emerges is that more blacks and Hispanics are on death row. Arguing with people whose starting point is that America is a racist society because of this is to try to have a rational discussion with Julius Streicher.

The condemnation of xenophobia and slavery began in the West. It is not that the West was never guilty of these practices, but it was in the West that they were first condemned. The notion that one's own group, religion, ethnicity or whatever was superior to everyone else's was taken for granted in the entire world until certain notions developed solely in the West - and solely with regard to its own actions.

It is ludicrous for countries that still practise xenophobic intolerance, from Zimbabwe to Syria, to condemn the West, which not only stopped such practices but provided the sole basis for the Third World's idea that these things are wrong. One is reminded of the Flanders and Swann line "Eating people is wrong". If the First World hadn't discovered that xenophobia was bad, would the Third World know it?

No doubt there are some racists among us in Britain and America. But racism is not a part of our social institutions. Being accused, rightly or wrongly, of racism here is in the same league as being accused as a child molester. The only time institutionalised racism has been a serious threat in the contemporary developed world, apart from the Third Reich, was in the Soviet Union, when it took the form of "groupism" or "xenophobia": people were aliens simply by virtue of class. Today, even the best countries in the Islamic world, such as Saudi Arabia, are xenophobic.

The very soldiers sent to save Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War were cautioned not to hang Christmas decorations outside their tents or they would offend their hosts. This illustrated both the sensitivity of the Westerners and the intolerance of the people they were rescuing.

The UN's ideals and principles have been hijacked by the forces they were originally intended to hold in check. The UNHCR newsletter for the Durban conference praises China for its "Seminar on the Internet and the spread of Racism" and quotes Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan for stressing "the importance the Chinese government placed on the World Conference and its significance for Internet study and racism". No doubt. The Chinese, along with other authoritarian societies, are worried sick about the impact of the internet on censorship of information. The racism bandwagon is just the thing to keep it under control.

The "World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance" is a conference in favour of it - when directed at Caucasians, Europeans, Americans and Jews. I suppose Tony Blair would argue that one must be present to steer it along more useful lines. That argument now seems unsustainable.

When you convene a conference whose primary aim is to extinguish the Jewish state or extort concessions to be a force for the worst totalitarian impulses, the time has come to stay away. As for the UN, it should either be reconstituted along the lines of its former ideals or abandoned by us. The original UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1948, has had some 67 conventions added to it, most of which do nothing but eliminate rights. My favourite is the 1987 "UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice", amusingly, in the light of Tiananmen Square, named the "The Beijing Rules".

We should all just stay at home.

-- Anonymous, September 03, 2001