Durban Meeting Gets a Bitter Review

The world racism conference that ended Saturday in South Africa may have done more harm than good to the United Nations’ credibility, participants said, despite the last-minute accord on two hot-button issues that had threatened to scuttle the meeting.

Although the conference was lauded by U.N. officials for giving a voice to long-ignored victims of racism, critics called it another in a series of U.N. gatherings overshadowed by historical or tangential grievances that should have been resolved or sidelined before they even began.

“It really has been a deplorable failure,” said David Malone, president of the International Peace Academy, an independent policy institute in New York that works closely with the U.N. “The real issues were drowned out completely by the ‘Zionism is racism’ controversy and, to a lesser extent, the more legitimate slavery issue. So claiming it was a success when it was clearly a major disappointment is not helpful. It’s a flight from reality, and the member states of the U.N. need a reality check.”

Others involved in the conference, which lasted nine days, said they believed that the U.N. should have managed the lead-up to it better. A meeting of such a duration centered on an issue as sensitive as racism requires much more preparation and advance negotiation, diplomats said, especially on topics as explosive as reparations for slavery and as intractable as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Two previous U.N. conferences on racism, in 1978 and 1983, should have offered warning signs, these observers said; both produced tepid conclusions amid considerable rancor.

In the end, the Durban meeting adopted a global plan to combat racism and recognized the injustice of slavery and the Palestinians’ plight.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that it was up to the member states to make the conference work and that it was not a mistake to push forward despite the bitter divisions.

“If it were a mistake, then by implication we are saying that racism and intolerance do not exist,” Annan said Thursday.

“Look around you. It’s very much an issue. It is unfortunate that the member states could not organize themselves to discuss it in a calmer and more constructive manner without all the divisions.”

Diplomats said a much stronger plan of action could have been achieved if the meeting had not been sidetracked by the debate over the Middle East, an issue some said didn’t belong at the conference.

For nearly a year before the conference, diplomats wrangled over language proposed by Arab states that singled out Israel for racial discrimination against Palestinians. The draft declaration didn’t accuse any other country of racist practices, and negotiators tried to keep the Middle East conflict from spilling over into the conference.

The U.N. held three preparatory meetings--instead of the two it had planned--to iron out the differences, but as the conflict in the Mideast deepened, stances hardened. At that point, critics said, the U.N. should have fenced off the issue as a historical, political conflict to be taken up in a separate forum, and not allowed it to dominate the racism gathering.

Although conference organizer Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, pleaded for a resolution, she didn’t take action to strip the text of the divisive language for a fresh start, or demand that no country be singled out, causing the United States to threaten to boycott the meeting. Then, in a speech at the meeting, Annan said it was unrealistic to expect the Palestinians to overlook the “wrongs done to them”--a move that critics said only inflamed the conflict rather than helped solve it.

The mid-level delegation that the U.S. sent walked out of the meeting, along with Israel, the same day.

A former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Richard Holbrooke, called the U.N.’s handling of the conflict “a tragedy” that will set back the cause of peace in the Middle East and “hurt the United Nations as an organization.”

Participants also said that the outcome of the conference might have been different if member states, especially the U.S., had been more committed to its success.

“I think there was a little bit of a cynical manipulation of this process,” said Wade Henderson, executive director of the U.S.-based Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which represented more than 150 organizations in Durban. “There were a lot of countries, for their own parochial reasons, that wanted to see this conference collapse. India was not anxious to see the Dalit [the so-called untouchables] get recognition. The European Union didn’t want to see the Roma [Gypsies] emerge as an international cause celebre. African states didn’t want to confront incidents of contemporary slavery, trafficking in women, abuse of children and genocide.”

According to Henderson and others, if anyone could have made a difference at the conference, it would have been Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. As the first black American secretary of State, he would have been a symbol of civil rights progress in the U.S. and wielded tremendous influence in the talks. Instead, the U.S. sent a lower-level representative.

“If Colin Powell had come here, the dynamic would have been very different,” said Reed Brody, the spokesman for Human Rights Watch in Durban.

Though the U.S. is already viewed by the U.N. as increasingly disengaged from multilateral affairs--losing even traditional allies as it insists on “my way or the highway,” as one diplomat put it--the outcome of the racism conference is likely to hurt U.S.-U.N. ties even further.

“Durban will have done nothing to reassure Congress that the U.N. is serious about dealing with actual issues rather than engaging in political posturing,” said the International Peace Academy’s Malone. “In that sense, it’s very damaging.”