‘Durban II’ Counter-Conference Planned, But What Will Obama Do?

By Patrick Goodenough
November 13, 2008
CNS News
Original Source: http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=39283

 (CNSNews.com) – As a United Nations committee continues preparations for what is shaping up to be a politically charged international conference on racism next spring, plans are moving ahead for a parallel event that aims to deliver an “alternative viewpoint.”
 
Whether the United States will take part in the five-day U.N. conference in Geneva remains unclear, but the decision will have to be announced in the early weeks of the Obama administration.
 
The meeting in Geneva is a follow up to the U.N.’s first such gathering, the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The Bush administration withdrew its delegation, citing Israel-bashing on a large scale.
 
Judging from the most up-to-date version of the “outcome document” drafted for the April 2009 meeting – by a 20-member preparatory committee chaired by Libya, and including Iran, Cuba and Pakistan – Israel will once again be http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=39125 \t _blank in the crosshairs.
 
The document accuses Israel of “practices of racial discrimination against the Palestinians,” saying its policies constitute “a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity [and] a form of genocide.” No other country is similarly targeted.
 
The document also makes it clear that the “Islamophobia” and the alleged “defamation” of Islam will feature strongly at the conference, which some have dubbed “Durban II.”
 
After Canada and Israel earlier this year announced they would not attend, the U.S. started coming under pressure to follow suit. The Bush administration said it would not support a reprise of 2001, and that it would play no part in the planning process. But the decision on whether to attend Durban II would be left to its successor.
 
A decision on whether to attend will likely be tied to a decision on whether the U.S. should stand next May for election to the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, the Geneva-based body overseeing planning for the racism conference. The Bush administration sat out of the last three elections for the newly-formed body, which has been widely criticized for disproportionately targeting Israel.
 
During the presidential primary campaign, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign issued a statement saying that, as president, Clinton would “lead a boycott of the [Durban II] conference should current efforts to rein in the forces of hatred fail.”
 
Clinton raised the issue again in early June when – a day after Barack Obama claimed victory in the Democratic race – she told a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that the 2009 conference would be “a test of resolve” for the next president.
 
“We should take very strong action to ensure anti-Semitism is kept off the agenda at Durban II,” she said. “And if those efforts should fail, I believe that the United States should boycott that conference.”
 
Obama, addressing AIPAC later that day, did not mention Durban II. He did pledge, in a different context, that he would “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself in the United Nations and around the world.”
 
Although Obama has not spoken definitively about either joining the Human Rights Council or attending Durban II, during last August’s forum at Saddleback Church, he said it was absolutely critical to have “an administration that’s speaking out, joining in international forums where we can point out human rights abuses.”
 
Observers noted that the only rights-related international forums the U.S. had not joined – or had left – in recent years were Durban I and the Human Rights Council.
 
It remains to be seen how Obama will weigh the strongly-held Democratic conviction that the U.S. needs to mend fences with the U.N. after eight years of the Bush administration, against the concerns of his Jewish supporters, many of whom have strong views on the U.N.’s historical anti-Israel stance.
 
‘Attending Durban I legitimized it’
 
Two liberal lawmakers – a Jewish Canadian senator and an African-American U.S. congressman – are working on plans to hold a counter-conference to coincide with Durban II.
 
Toronto Sen. Jerry Grafstein, who initiated the idea, said Wednesday there was “a bit of a history” to it.
 
He recalled that when Nazi Germany was selected to host the 1936 Olympic Games, a protest movement organized an alternative event in Barcelona. The plan ultimately collapsed because the Spanish civil war broke out, but not before a Canadian team was sent to participate, he said. 
 
(A historical footnote: an American member of the International Olympic Committee, former assistant secretary of the Navy Ernst Lee Jahncke, of German Protestant descent, was expelled from the IOC after he called for a boycott of the Berlin games. He is reportedly the only IOC member in its history to be expelled.)
 
Turning to the first U.N. racism conference in 2001, Grafstein said some who attended the event – despite troubling signs that emerged beforehand – said they hoped to salvage it.
 
“They didn’t save it, quite frankly, they legitimized it by attending,” he said.
 
Durban II would be no better – “the same old players, the same old mechanisms, the same old weakness of the United Nations.”
 
Grafstein said the envisaged parallel conference would also dealing with the topic of racism “but with a more open-minded approach. It would be pro-democracy and anti-discriminatory.”
 
The one-day conference would probably be in North America, because of funding considerations and to make it easier for the international press to attend.
 
He could not give more details about keynote speakers, but said some well-respected and outstanding academics were being lined up. Of the 15 or so individuals he had approached, he said, “nobody said no, not one.”
 
Grafstein co-chairs both a parliamentary assembly of the 56-country Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and a Canada-U.S. interparliamentary group.
 
He has been discussing the plans with lawmakers in the U.S. and Europe, and said he has found considerable interest in the U.S. and European countries including Britain, Germany and France, as well as from some in Africa and Latin America.
 
In the U.S., he has been working closely with Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), who chairs the U.S. Helsinki Commission, a body with a strong international human rights and democracy focus. Grafstein hopes to visit Washington, D.C., before the end of the year to firm up the plans.
 
“The working committee is just myself and [Hastings],” he said. “We don’t have the machinery of the United Nations that our taxpayers pay for to disseminate racism. We don’t have their bureaucracy, but we’re working.”
 
Should the U.S. boycott?
 
While noting Canada’s decision not to go to the Durban II conference, Grafstein would not be drawn on whether he thought the U.S. or other Western governments should boycott.
 
Asked whether he thought the U.S. was now more likely to attend under President Obama, he said, “Whatever the U.S. does, it will do. I’m not suggesting it will or will not. Canada’s taken a stand. I think each country has to decide what it chooses to do.”
 
“All I really want to do is to make sure that the international community watching this will have an alternative viewpoint – that it won’t be so bigoted, it won’t be so biased, it won’t be so … racist.”
 
Lale Mamaux, communications director for Hastings and the Helsinki Commission, said the congressman’s discussions with Grafstein were continuing. She said Hastings “certainly does not condone the comments made in the ‘outcome document’ against Israel.
 
Mamaux said Hastings had not yet heard whether the U.S. will participate in Durban II.
 
But, she said, “He will urge the new administration to carefully consider whether participation would assist in meeting the underlying goal of combating all forms of racism and discrimination.