Obstacles Abound for Racism Forum

As a schoolboy, Thamim Aboobacar was once ordered to cross his arms over his chest, grab his earlobes and bounce up and down chanting, “I am a Zanzibarian. I am a Zed.” He was permitted to stop only when he collapsed.

Today, Aboobacar is a soft-spoken, very focused 48-year-old who would like an apology not from the teachers who humiliated him because of his race but from the Arab and Portuguese slave traders who stole his relatives off the coast of East Africa. His forebears landed here in South Africa 120 years ago after they were liberated--by the British, whose nation also was once an active slave trader.

As thousands of delegates and world leaders gathered Friday not far from Aboobacar’s home for the third U.N. conference on racism, he recounted a personal history that shows the difficulties delegates will face in tackling some issues. It also underscores how, even with the best of intentions, a conference built around such a broad and yet personal theme invariably will leave many people dissatisfied.

Aboobacar’s case bears directly on one of the most controversial issues facing the delegates: whether to call on the West--in particular, the United States and Britain--to pay reparations to African nations and to descendants of slaves for centuries of trading in human beings.

Throughout the debate, there has been little or no talk about the role played by other nations in the slave trade. And there is no indication that that is about to change.

“The apology will be a farce if it is not across the board,” said Wally Shaik, another member of the Zanzibari community here. “The Spanish, the Portuguese, Africans, Americans and the Arabs--they all must apologize.”

After more than a year of preparation and months of heated arguing over the agenda, the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance opened Friday in the port city of Durban.

More than 6,000 delegates from 166 countries--and about a dozen heads of state, including Cuban President Fidel Castro--crowded into the International Conference Center for prepared remarks and a round-table discussion. Most parties said the conference will fail if it does not produce a decisive plan for combating racism the world over.

“If we leave here without agreement, we shall give comfort to the worst element in every society,” United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the delegates Friday. “But if, after all the difficulties, we can leave with a call to action supported by all, we shall send a signal of hope.”

But the early hours of the conference were more about airing grievances and trying to calm tensions than about charting a course of action. In particular, the Middle East has cast a long shadow over the gathering, with many participants cautioning that the emotional fight between Israelis and Palestinians threatens to crowd out all other issues.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat used the opening session to hurl charges against Israel, criticizing “its racist practices and laws.” His aides said they have agreed that the Jewish state not be labeled a racist nation in conference documents.

Nevertheless, the language being considered for the final action plan remains so inflammatory that U.S. officials in Washington said Friday that early next week they may withdraw the low-level delegation that was reluctantly sent to the conference, which ends next Friday.

With his remarks, Annan attempted to satisfy those on both sides of the volatile issue. He said the Jewish people “have been victims of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world, and in Europe they were the target of the Holocaust, the ultimate abomination.”

“Yet,” he said, “we cannot expect Palestinians to accept this as a reason why the wrongs done to them--displacement, occupation, blockade and now extrajudicial killings--should be ignored, whatever label one uses to describe them.”

With little success in calming the Palestinian drive to isolate and vilify Israel, the Rev. Jesse Jackson met with Arafat and other Palestinian officials Friday and afterward said he remained concerned that the Middle East will overshadow other matters.

“Reparations and slavery are issues whose time has come,” the U.S. civil rights activist said. “Whoever has engaged in violations of people and exacted from them economic exploitation should be held accountable.”

Those were sentiments that resonated with Aboobacar and the Zanzibari community in Chatsworth.

More than a century ago, after slavery had already been outlawed by the international community, Arab and Portuguese slave traders grabbed men and women along the coast of East Africa and brought them to the island of Zanzibar. From there, they were to be sold. But British colonialists detained the ships, eventually liberating about 500 men and women who otherwise would have been sent to Europe and the Middle East to be sold. The freed were delivered to Durban, where for five years they worked as indentured servants.

The Zanzibaris were Muslims, spoke a little-known language and were not expected to mix well with South Africa’s indigenous Zulu people and Indian population. They were isolated on a small parcel of land called Kings Rest overlooking the Durban harbor. Initially, they were considered by South Africa’s white rulers to be blacks and were therefore denied access to education.

In the 1950s, when the white-minority apartheid government began enforcing the so-called Group Areas Act, their land was deemed a white community and they were forced to move to their current location, which was populated primarily by Indians. There have long been tensions between the two groups.

The Zanzibaris have remained a relatively close-knit community that is struggling to preserve traditions merging the Islamic faith and African traditions. They pray five times a day, for example, and circumcise boys when manhood is deemed to have been reached.

But they have found themselves falling into the cracks, neglected first by an apartheid government that was not sure how to classify them--ultimately settling on “other Asians”--and then by a post-apartheid government that lumps them in with the Indian community.

Now they feel ignored by a conference that is purportedly designed to address the very issues dear to them.

“We tried to get involved. We are the descendants of slaves,” said Aboobacar. “We thought they would want to hear from us. We thought they should hear from us.”