Source: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/mideastdigest/119409.htm http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/mideastdigest/119409.htm
Date: February 20, 2009

Middle East Digest - February 20, 2009 
Bureau of Public Affairs
From the Daily Press Briefing of February 20, 2009

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QUESTION: Anything more on the – any achievements by our advance team to the Durban racism conference? There’s some reporting that they made some headway in watering and – you know, preventing some kind of language on slavery reparations and that they were able to stop, you know, alteration of a language on anti-Semitism. 
MR. DUGUID: I believe the meetings have ended now in Geneva. Part of our delegation is – of course, is based in Geneva and part of the delegation is on its way back to the U.S. So I haven’t had a full briefing on their views of what happened. We went into this meeting – excuse me – we went into this meeting with grave concerns about the document that was being produced. And we engaged with other countries in an effort to have the conference produce a document that actually did address racism around the world in a way that could achieve some results. 
Our intervention was welcomed by many countries. We had extensive meetings with all of the other representatives there to present our viewpoints on this document and on this process. I can’t predict any success for you at this point, first not having had a readout from the group. But as I said, there were many things we disagreed with in the document. The document began as a very lengthy piece of work and got longer during the conference itself. The intention was to engage and to try and make something that was flawed better. We did not predict success, and I can’t do that for you now. But we are on – you know, on the record with our international partners as to where we stand on these issues. 
QUESTION: So bottom – you haven’t walked away from the process yet. 
MR. DUGUID: Well, those decisions will be made once we have a full review and when the team returns and they’ve had a chance to sort of write up, you know, their thoughts and present them to the Secretary. The – it will be a verbal briefing and they will give their advice on where they think the process is going, and whether or not we can affect what is going to happen in the full session. As you know, we’ve had grave doubts about the effectiveness of these conferences in the past.

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