September 4, 2001
As feared, the United Nations summit on racism in Durban, crumbled into a certain amount of disarray last night as both American and Israeli delegations walked out in protest over attempts to criticise racist' attitudes towards Palestinians. It is a great shame that the conference - which had such ambitious, bold and noble aims - should have been thus diverted. Making the most of this unique occasion meant not exacerbating its inherent confusions by opportunistically singling out Israel for particular criticism over Palestine. It meant not using the conference to settle scores over, say, China (over Tibet) or Russia (over Chechnya) or Zimbabwe (over Matabeleland) - all of which conflicts have racial undertones. It meant not exploiting the event to appeal to a narrow, domestic ethnic constituency, as has been the case with Jesse Jackson and members of the US Congress's African-American caucus. And it meant not allowing the horrific but basically historical injustices of yesteryear to divide and undermine consensus and thus obscure and deny the pressing needs of tomorrow's world. In launching the summit, Mary Robinson, the UN's human rights tsar, spoke of ambitions to shape and embody the spirit of the new century based on the shared conviction that we are all members of one human family'. But, from the outset, there was always a serious danger of those ambitions being confounded by the complexities and confusions of the event's sweeping, self-appointed task.
If the summit is to be rescued from disappointment, the delegates must now concentrate their thinking. Is the summit, in fact, about racism or slavery, about 19th-century European and US colonialism or present-day African good governance, about pecuniary compensation and concrete reparation or sym bolic apologies, about globalisation or development aid, about the past or the future? The answer appears to depend on which delegate has the floor at any given moment. The effective failure to define terms and set tangible objectives makes this the sort of exercise that could be easily written off and soon forgotten. But by raising such fundamental issues, pushing them up the agenda, forcing the debate, and giving an international platform to those whose voices rarely carry far, the UN should bedoing the global community a service and creating an opportunity that its responsible members would do well not to abuse.
To their credit, senior African leaders such as Thabo Mbeki, Olusegun Obasanjo and Yoweri Museveni have largely moved beyond the calls for abject apologies and reparations for the slave trade. Whatever formula for saying sorry is ultimately inserted in the conference's final communique, what really matters to them is increased aid, assistance, debt reduction and investment from the world's wealthier nations. A vehicle for such help (call it restitution if you prefer) already exists in the New African Initiative. And if properly funded and managed, it promises the prize of reduced poverty and disease, increased educational opportunity and economic self-sufficiency, and a prospective end to the misrule and conflicts that hinder Africa's efforts to escape from colonial despoliation.This conference is not only about Africa, of course, nor simply about black and white. Racism is a universal affliction; it lurks within us all, and has many faces (as the English and Germans reminded each other at the weekend). If this UN summit helps by raising individual consciousness, as well as by stirring collective conscience, all may not yet be lost.
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