Word: durban
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This was never going to be an easy conference," said Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, as she spoke in Durban last week at the opening session of the U.N. Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. That was an understatement. The conference was a disgrace. It was a disgrace in conception--in the very idea that a few days of talk could lead to any useful action directed against a scourge that diminishes the lives of millions--and it was a disgrace in execution. The only good thing that might conceivably come...
...hatred and bias remains only half fulfilled." Robinson hoped the conference would "shape and embody the spirit of the new century, based on [the] shared conviction that we are all members of the human family." But for such sentiments to be more than pious cant, those who went to Durban had to travel in a spirit of generosity, reconciliation and compromise...
...meeting. They had no choice. Early drafts of the official communique included language on Israel's behavior that no American or Israeli government could tolerate. But that isn't the half of it. Like all U.N. gabfests since the first Earth Summit at Rio in 1992, the conference at Durban was but the formal core of a giant carnival, something like a medieval ice fair in a Bruegel painting. Increasingly, these "forums" of nongovernmental organizations have become the main event. In principle, the participation of ngos in international meetings is to be welcomed; it opens up debate beyond the stilted...
...same reaction: "I've been struck by how not struck I am by him." A friendly foreign official notes, "It's not useful to sit as silent partner when you have his stature." What people noticed most at the United Nations Conference on Racism that opened last week in Durban, South Africa, was Powell's absence...
...SOUTH AFRICA Politics Clouds a Conference on Racism A meeting designed to promote racial tolerance was in danger of achieving the opposite as protests over the Middle East overshadowed early proceedings. The U.N. World Conference Against Racism drew 6,000 delegates from 130 countries to Durban, but the U.S. agreed to attend only after a declaration equating Zionism with racism was dropped. Issues of slavery and India's caste system also promised lively debate, but U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that failure to agree on a plan of action would "give comfort to the worst elements of society...