Point / Counterpoint: Hijacking the United Nations

Counterpoint to:

Nations must unite against racism
"Regrettably, last January Canada announced its intention to withdraw from the Durban review conference. And this month so did Israel. What message does a state boycott send to those who are suffering from racism?"

Navanethem Pillay
The Guardian (London)
December 16, 2008

Israel and Canada have announced that they will stay away from the forthcoming United Nations conference on human rights, dubbed Durban II. The previous World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, from which the United States and Israel withdrew their delegations, was one of the greatest fiascos in the history of UN conferences.

At Durban I, which has since been branded the racist conference on racism, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, declared "I am a Jew", while waving a book of antisemitic cartoons distributed to the delegates.

Navanethem Pillay is the current newly appointed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Ms. Pillay, a South African of Tamil descent, holds a Harvard doctorate in law and is a former International Criminal Court judge. As part of her job, she supervises the UN Human Rights Council - a group of countries that includes such dubious beacons of civil liberty as Bangladesh, China, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. The council's mission is to address human rights violations in specific countries and, unsurprisingly, much of their time is devoted to Israel. This council has also been entrusted with the responsibility for organizing Durban II.

Ms. Pillay has expressed her concern that several additional countries have now stated that they too may shun the conference. Writing in the Guardian, she asks, "What message does a state boycott send to those who are suffering from racism? What message does it send to those who perpetuate racism?" Pillay states that behind the decisions of Israel and Canada stands the controversy that tainted the 2001 Durban Conference "that was caused by the antisemitic behavior of some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) at the sidelines of the conference." But that is nowhere near an accurate description of events at Durban I. 

The more than a thousand accredited NGOs who were invited to Durban, overshadowed much of the main conference proceedings, and concluded their work with a venomous anti-Israel document in which they threw just about every known racial slur at Israel including apartheid, racism, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity, the commitment of genocide, torture, state terrorism, and the targeted killing of children, women, and refugees. The decision to invite the NGOs to the conference is perceived by many as one of the prime mistakes of the conference organizers.

Pillay rightly argues that "the document that emerged from the conference itself, the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA), transcended divisive and intolerant approaches." Admittedly, it is not a bad document, since all antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric that characterized the conference proceedings and the first drafts of the document, were removed. Thus, seen solely through the prism of the final published document, the conference seems benign.

But US delegate Tom Lantos, who was present at the at Durban I, reported on what he described as the hijacking of the conference:

The majority of blame for the failure of Durban must be laid at the feet of several members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). These regimes, some of them US allies, proved unwilling to yield in their campaign to scuttle the noble agenda of the conference and to turn it into a forum to shun, isolate and de-legitimize Israel, America's key democratic ally in the Middle East.

As the OIC states spread their rhetorical attack on Israel from Tehran to the world stage in Geneva, their strategy became ever more clear - turn Israel into an international pariah."

So, what will be done differently at Durban II to avert another fiasco? Unfortunately, not much.  Incredibly, NGOs have been invited once again to the second conference, and those NGOs that were accredited to Durban I will automatically be accredited to Durban II. But that's not the only problem.

The preparatory committee for Durban II has been busy producing a new formula for disaster. This started with the UN Human Right's Council choosing the representative of Libya to chair the preparatory committee and Iran as a vice-chair. As a result, Israel has been raised once again to the forefront of the conference agenda, and much of the time left in the agenda after the demonization of Israel, is devoted to Muslims, Islamophobia, and the protection of Islam from criticism. 

This has led the foreign minister of Denmark to warn that unless the proposal to equate criticism of religion with racism is removed, Denmark - and perhaps other European countries - will not attend the conference.

With the iniquity of the preparatory committee as a backdrop, Pillay declares that "states will have an opportunity to demonstrate their determination to fight intolerance by moving the anti-racism agenda forward" when the conference convenes. But apparently Denmark is not the only country that shares Israel's and Canada's concern that it will be a racism, rather than an anti-racism agenda that will be moving forward at Durban II. Dutch Foreign Minister, Maxime Verhagen has declared that the "Netherlands will not contribute to a summit that degenerates, as the last one did, into an anti-Semitic witch-hunt."  Similar sentiments have been voiced by representatives of other Western countries including Italy, Denmark, France, Australia, Canada, and the United States.

Israel's Foreign Minster Tzipi Livni summarized the situation succinctly last month when she stated that the Durban II conference appears to be heading once again towards becoming an anti-Israeli tribunal, which has nothing to do with fighting racism.

"In view of this situation," Livni stated, "Israel will not participate in and will not legitimize this conference, which will be used as a platform for further anti-Israeli and antisemitic activity. We call upon the international community not to participate in a conference that seeks to legitimize hatred and extremism under the banner of the 'fight against racism.'"

It was apparently Livni's call that prompted Pillay's appeal, which she concludes by saying that states should not stay away from Durban II because "We owe a frank debate and concrete action to the victims of discrimination, intolerance and racism."

Perhaps that is precisely the reason they should stay away.