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NGOs in Durban Label Israel "Racist"
DURBAN, Sept 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), gathering on the sidelines of a U.N. racism conference in the South African city of Durban, accused Israel of racist crimes and genocide, but several bodies such as Amnesty International refused to back it.
In a declaration presented to the main meeting, the NGOs said that Israel is an apartheid state which practices ethnic cleansing, reported the BBC's online service.
The United Nations should impose punitive sanctions against Israel until it withdraws unconditionally from all Palestinian occupied territories, the NGOs said.
The statement also stresses that Palestinians are subject to a "new kind of apartheid" and "other racist crimes against humanity".
It also condemned Israeli policies for trying to "ensure the continuation of an exclusively Jewish state" and "driving out the indigenous Palestinian population". And it calls for the establishment of a war crimes tribunal and a U.N. special committee on apartheid.
Amnesty International and the International Federation for Human Rights, refused to endorse the declaration.
"Israel has committed war crimes and other atrocities against the Palestinian people, but it is simply not accurate to use the term genocide...," said Reed Brody, of Human Rights Watch.
But the NGO recommendations are not binding, even if the more than 1,000 different organizations are accredited to the U.N. conference.
NGO activists received warm support from Cuban President Fidel Castro, who has raised a number of their causes at the U.N. World Conference Against Racism and was present at the closing of the NGO ceremony.
U.N.-sponsored talks on racism entered their third day Sunday, still facing uncertainty over whether the United States will boycott the meeting over what it considers objectionable language on Israel.
"I would hope that we would come up with language, whether in a generic form or whatever, that will speak to every situation and will respond to the feelings and the pain that vulnerable people are feeling around the world," U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan told reporters, responding to a question on whether he favored all specific references to Israel being removed from the draft declaration.
A team of U.S. diplomats is in Durban trying to renegotiate the texts to be adopted by the U.N. conference, but officials in Washington have warned that the delegation could still walk away early if they fail in their mission.
The U.S. boycotted the conference because of what Washington called "offensive" regarding Israel in draft declarations.
U.S. congressman Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California, and member of the U.S. delegation, told South African television he had come to the conference with high hopes but that the team was now facing only two options.
"The first - the one I'm hoping for - is that at the last minute the language against Israel will be eliminated, not improved, but eliminated," he said.
"But if the extremists succeed in keeping it in, we will have nothing to do with this document... we will not sign it."
The U.S. is Israel's main ally in the international community and many accuse it of helping to intensify the conflict by taking a stance that allows Israel to evade an international conviction.
Arguments over Israel led to confrontations - some broken up by police - between pro-Israelis and pro-Palestinians on the sidelines of the NGO forum, which started Tuesday.
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