Comments (0)Act Now To Stop Durban II
August 29, 2008Alfred H. Moses
Special to the Jewish Times
Is next April’s follow-up to the 2001 Durban conference against racism — a United Nations fiasco that promoted the hatred it was meant to fight — headed for the same fate?
Much will depend on the European Union, which can use its influence to demand that the Durban Review Conference, or “Durban II,” avoids the sins of 2001. For starters, the EU must speak out against pernicious passages in the latest draft declaration for the April conference, to be hosted in Geneva.
What went so wrong with Durban I? Despite its declared universal intentions, the African sponsors of Durban I, to satisfy the non-aligned group of 118 countries dominated by Islamic states, allowed the conference to be hijacked by anti-Israel and anti-Western forces. The conference pursued ideological point-scoring and Israel-bashing at the expense of its own work of fighting racism around the world.
Then as now, the lead-up process was formative. Six months before the 2001 conference, a preparatory meeting in Iran — prompted by the 57-strong Organization of the Islamic Conference — accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and of committing a “new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity.”
After international interventions, the final Durban declaration was toned down. Nevertheless, it singled out Israel by referring to “the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation.”
The U.S. and Israeli delegations walked out in protest. Canada’s representative remained, only to “decry the attempts at this conference to delegitimize the State of Israel.”
Far worse than the governmental actions were those of the non-governmental organizations. Ugly caricatures of Jews, reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, circulated freely. Jewish participants were physically harassed. The final NGO statement declared Israel a “racist apartheid state” guilty of “genocide.”
The late Democratic Representative Tom Lantos of California, a US delegate at the conference, said that “having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand, this was the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews I had seen since the Nazi period.”
Will Durban II suffer the same fate? The EU — with its own influence in the UN and due to the absence of othersóhas acquired the principal responsibility for preventing another hatefest.
Canada already announced it will not participate. The U.S. and Israel effectively announced the same, unless it is somehow proven that Durban II will not be a venue for anti-Semitic or anti-Israel hatred. Australia may follow.
This leaves the EU. The alliance has been clear in opposing attempts by Islamic states to alter the mandate of Durban II by raising “defamation of religions” — a reference to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
In responding to renewed attempts to tar Israel with racism, however, the EU has shown ambivalence.
On the one hand, France and some other leading EU states have declared this to be a red line.
“[T]he Durban conference in 2001 led to intolerable excesses from certain states and numerous NGOs that turned the conference into a forum against Israel,” said French President Nicolas Sarkozy in February. “France will not allow a repetition of the excesses and abuses of 2001. Our European partners share France’s concerns.”
Earlier this month, French human rights minister Rama Yade echoed the warning in a written answer to a parliamentary question. Similar cautions were expressed by British Minister for Europe Jim Murphy and Netherlands Interior Minister Maxime Verhagen.
Yet since the UN released its blueprint for the Durban II outcome document in May — a document that singles out Israel as racist — not one EU state has spoken out.
In the section headlined “Victims of Racism,” the draft makes special reference to “the plight of the Palestinians.” Under “Contemporary Forms of Racism as Reported by Different Countries,” Israel is again singled out, in the text’s summary of a report by Iran, a vice-chair of the conference’s organizing bureau, which is headed by Libya.
This document is now being developed further by a 25-member “Friends of the Chair” committee that met twice in July behind closed doors, and includes Iran, Egypt, China, Pakistan and Russia.
In other words, the train to Durban II may have already left the station. Unless the EU acts to remove the odious singling-out of Israel, the conference threatens to become a repeat of the 2001 debacle.
Those of us who would like to give the Durban Review Conference a genuine chance to combat intolerance need to know that Iran, Libya and other like-minded regimes don’t push aside legitimate concerns for victims of racism in order to delegitimize Israel.
The test — the EU’s test — is now.
Alfred H. Moses, former U.S. ambassador to Romania and Special Presidential Emissary for the Cyprus Conflict, is Chair of UN Watch, an affiliate of the American Jewish Committee. He is a past President of AJC.