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Anti-Racism Meeting Split Over Israel, Shunned by U.S.
DURBAN, South Africa, Aug 28 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Global anti-racism groups met at a United Nations-backed conference Tuesday with the divisive issue of Israel expected to take center stage, news agencies reported.
Countries participating in the U.N. summit, which commences in this Indian Ocean city on Friday, are deeply divided over the Middle East, demands for reparations for slavery, and whether the caste system in India and other Asian countries should be discussed.
In the opening of the forum, U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson called on activists meeting ahead of a U.N. conference on racism to "give a space" to Palestinians, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Robinson, speaking in front of delegates of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), declared, "We are starting something here in Durban."
"Durban is a conference essentially about relationships ... and we have not got it right in the previous centuries," she said.
To enthusiastic applause, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said, "Yes, you must give a space here to Roma, to Palestinian people, to people of African descent."
The start of the United Nations World Conference Against Racism NGO Forum came after the United States said it would not send Secretary of State Colin Powell to the main meeting starting on Friday because of "offensive" language about Israel in some texts.
Earlier Monday, the U.S. State Department confirmed that Powell would not attend the conference.
A department official said the U.S. was still debating whether to send any representation at all to the conference, the BBC online service said.
He made it clear that Washington was still unhappy about language in preparatory documents, which he claims singled out Israel for condemnation, BBC added.
"The exact nature and level of our representation, if any, is not clear," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a news briefing on Monday.
Just hours earlier, Robinson said delegates had agreed that moves to equate Zionism with racism would be taken off the agenda.
"One thing I would like to reaffirm is that there is a clear understanding that the formulation Zionism-equals-racism has been done away with," the former Irish president and secretary-general of the conference said.
Her comments came in a written statement released in Johannesburg and Geneva before a meeting with South African President Thabo Mbeki.
The U.S. has threatened to boycott the conference, which its organizers had hoped would be a turning point in the fight against racism.
U.S. President George W. Bush said on Friday that the United States would not go to the conference in Durban at all if the participants "picked on" or denigrated Israel.
U.N. head Kofi Annan urged the United States Tuesday to attend the upcoming racism conference, AFP reported.
"We are going to discuss an issue that touches every society and every country. No country is immune from racism and xenophobia," he added at a press conference in Hof bei Salzburg, a village in central Austria.
Annan, who was due to leave for South Africa Tuesday evening, refused, however, to directly criticize Powell's decision not to attend the Durban meeting.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticized the United States for warning other countries that the conference should not lead to any new programs to combat racism, any new legal standards, or any additional money to fund anti-racism efforts.
"Victims of racism around the world expect more than empty talk - they expect action," said Reed Brody, Advocacy Director of HRW.
"This meeting needs to offer something to the refugee in Europe who is beaten up simply because he is a foreigner, to the scavenger in India whose low caste prevents him from rising in life, to the Tibetan tortured by Chinese police, to the Palestinian under Israeli occupation, to the African-American child who is three times as likely to live in poverty as her white counterpart," Brody added.
Arab and Islamic states called on the conference to equate Zionism with racism, describing Israel a racist state because of its continuous aggressions against the Palestinian people.
A draft declaration before 7,000 delegates at the non-governmental meeting urged the U.N. to accept that Israel was a "discriminatory" state and that Palestinians could resist "occupation by any means."
The document also demanded that Israel pay "full compensation," effective reparations, to Palestinians living under the foreign military occupying power.
"The Palestinian people are one such people currently enduring a colonialist, discriminatory military occupation that violates their fundamental human right of self-determination," the draft said.
Meanwhile, pro-Israeli groups in Durban denounced the proposed NGO document and plans for the official conference to focus on Israeli actions in the Middle East.
"The conference has been hijacked, hijacked by those with political agendas. What we are seeing here, for example, is total, disproportionate emphasis on the question of the Middle East, which is not a race issue at all. It's a political conflict," claimed Shimon Samuels, Director for International Liaison at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
"It's a total ganging up on Israel...Neo-Nazism should be on the agenda," Samuels added.
Anne Bayefsky, a visiting law professor at New York's Columbia University Law School, claimed the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was allegedly at risk by a process where the Jewish holocaust was questioned and where anti-Semitism was permitted.
But, pro-Palestinian groups said Israeli actions against the Palestinian people showed that the occupying power and the Israeli state were racist.
"Inside Israel itself, there is institutional racism against the Arab minority. In the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem there is colonialism, occupation and a new form of apartheid," said Shawqi Issa, executive director of the Jerusalem-based Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment.
"Israel, after 50 years of its existence, is still an institutional racist state," said Issa, who represents Arab NGOs in Durban.
Israel, backed by Western powers, came into existence in 1948 after Jewish groups launched a war against their Muslim neighbors in 1948 and declared today's state of Israel. Arabs and Muslims believe Israel is an extension of the colonial period that saw the occupation of Muslim and Arab countries by Western powers.
The NGO meeting runs through September 1, culminating in an anti-racism march by an expected 10,000 people. Delegates will discuss the source and contemporary forms of racism and broach issues such as slavery and caste-based discrimination.
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