Atrocity victims left on the sidelines at Durban Racism Conference

By Johannes Dietrich

DURBAN (DPA): Pretty much everyone got a word in, be it Indian dalits, who protested outside the Durban's cricket stadium against the Indian caste system, or Japan's buraku, who denounced in broken English the marginalisation they say thje suffer in their country.

Then there were South American Indians from Brazil, who drew attention to themselves by singing and dancing in feather costumes, and South African street children who begged delegates from around the world for a few rand on the streets of Durban.

Whether anyone heard them is another matter. South African police regularly rounded up street children and trucked them off to some hostel -- or maybe just dumped them in some outer suburb of the city.

Dalits and buraku fought in vain for their causes to be included in the final conference document, and Irani Barbosa dos Santos somehow felt they might just as well have stayed at home. "Everyone here seems to have only one issue in mind," said the Brazilian Indian. "We're just stage-props here."

That widely held opinion for once unites almost all races. The UN's World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) has been kidnapped, say US civil rights campaigner Jesse Jackson, a European delegate and a spokesman for Australian aborigines. All they disagree on, if they disagree at all, is who was kidnapped and who the kidnappers are.

The judgment on the streets of Durban and the public statements by the majority of conference delegates is clear. "By leaving prematurely the Americans have broken up the conference," says Roland Pangowish, spokesman for Canada's Assembly for First Nations. "They're running away so as not to have to come to terms with racism in their own country," the Canadian Indian adds.

International human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch agree with governments such as that of the host, South Africa -- at least publicly. The Americans do seem to have run away, so they are to blame for the failure of the historic conference.

Behind the scenes a different picture emerges. From the start the conference was controlled by hardliners from the Middle East, Western delegates say.

While the various interest groups had agreed at the preparatory conference in Geneva that the old tactic of trying to equate Zionism with racism was not to be warmed up yet again ("the subject is dead," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said), the Arab League had called for precisely that as the conference began.

Beyond that, the Arab delegations insisted on Israel as the sole country to be singled out and condemned in the final report. In what some observers called "typical bazaar mentality," Arab delegates made maximum demands -- and now they're surprised at the consequences of their negotiating strategy.

Western delegates saw as a poor omen what non-governmental organisations (NGO) agreed on as their final document on Saturday night. It pillories Israel as an "apartheid state" that is in the process of practising "genocide" among Palestinians. These formulas came as a shock to participants from the West.

When a majority of NGO delegates went on to delete from the declaration a paragraph condemning anti-Semitism, Jewish delegates' patience was exhausted. They too pulled out.

The NGOs' declaration even prompted the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, to comment. "I am outraged by the hate-filled language in the document," she said. Parts of the declaration were "offensive and absolutely unacceptable." But Ms. Robinson's statement came too late. By then the Israelis and the US delegation had already left.

Demonstrations in Durban last weekend testified to the strange wind that was blowing among NGO delegates and South African sympathisers with the Palestinians. Leaflets were distributed on which a picture of Adolf Hitler was captioned: "What would have happened if I had won?"

The leaflet noted approvingly that "there would be no Israel and no Palestinian blood shed." On the downside, it said that "I would not have allowed the New Beetle to be built." The South African government has yet to respond to such incidents.

The host country's role in the Durban debacle is viewed with scant enthusiasm by Western delegates. Conference chairwoman South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Zuma-Dhlamini has since offered to salvage the conference, but South Africa sided too openly with the Palestinians from the start for it now to assume the role of a neutral pilot.

The African countries had evidently been given an assurance by the Arab League that they could rely on support for all their demands if they backed the Palestinians. But the pact has backfired on Africa even though no African delegate has yet openly admitted the fact.

With the Middle East dominating the conference, the most important agenda item for the Africans almost fell by the wayside. It was to have been an apology by the West and reparations for slavery.

Advocates stood a fair prospect of making headway on this new issue. The West is said to have been prepared to apologise for the horrors of the slave trade, delegates said. The African countries had previously signalled that they might be prepared in return to set aside their call for reparations payments.

In the course of the conference they reneged on that concession. Zimbabwe assumed the role of spokesman for countries that resurrected the call for compensation. Zimbabwe, the very country that is currently campaigning against white farmers by playing on racist resentment!

Only last weekend Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe hit the headlines by pillorying the avarice of "Jewish factory owners" in his country. Strangely, Zimbabwe has so far played virtually no role on the agenda of the anti-racism conference in Durban.

In these circumstances it seems virtually out of the question that a final declaration will be agreed that is endorsed at least by the Europeans as the remaining representatives of the West. The only real question is whether the Europeans will leave early, as they did in 1978, or vote against the final declaration, as they did in 1983. If either happens, the WCAR would go down as the third historic failure to agree on a common language and a common programme of action against racism.

"The only thing that makes me keep on trying" says a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda, "is that the world must know my story." Francois-Xavier Nsanzuwera, who lost his entire family in the unprecedented bloodbath that swept his country, is one of the victims of racism who report daily at midday to the conference on what happened to them.

Not a day has passed on which those who tell their stories have not burst into tears or choked their tears back. They have included a child slave from Niger, a Bosnian woman from Prijedor who was raped by Serbs -- or Nsanzuwera from Rwanda. But one thing's already sure -- not a word of his report will be included in the final conference document.