Durban II

We cannot let this week’s circus deter us from relentlessly challenging the evils of racism

You could hardly escape seeing the President Ahmedinejad circus this week. Images of him with a young guy in a colourful wig were everywhere – TV, national and international newspapers, the blogosphere.
 
I saw those images too, but there, on the conference floor in the United Nations. I heard him speak. Of course I knew that he was coming and I had a fairly clear idea of what he was likely to say but somehow I still I sat there in disbelief and shock. How did an anti-racism conference hosted by the United Nations – the purported bastion of human rights – allow this circus to develop, by giving a platform to a Holocaust denier and racist at an anti-racist conference?
 
Eight years ago I attended the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 with a sense of tremendous anticipation and excitement at the prospect of the world working in concert to challenge racism. I left that conference crestfallen at what had become a grotesque carnival of hatred and antisemitism. Others told me that I had undergone a “baptism of fire”.
 
In an atmosphere hot with violent rhetoric, leaflets gloatingly speculating “what if Hitler had won?” circulated in the conference centre. It became an intimidating place to be, a place where there could be no doubt that the purported ‘anti-Zionism’ of some participants had descended into outright and irrational hostility to Jewish people the world over.
 
Any hopes of dealing with real issues of racism and injustice were lost as Durban became a stain on the UN’s name and offence to anti-racists the world over. This was something that could not be allowed to happen again.
 
So the Durban Review Conference arose amidst serious scepticism and wariness over the possibility of achieving something – yet still there was determination by many to give it a chance. However, the decision to give a platform to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who described the Holocaust as a “myth,” undermined this optimism. This is a man whose appalling human rights record includes presiding over the viscous repression of gay people and other minorities. Who hosted a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, inviting Europe’s and America’s most fanatical neo-fascists as honoured guests – and then proceeded to call for Israel to be “wiped out”.
 
For me, Monday’s episode all but wrecked any hope that Durban II will be remembered for anything more than the bizarre and profoundly offensive sight of a racist lecturing the United Nations on racism.

Monday’s walk-out of diplomats from those western countries who had not already boycotted the conference, which included the UK, made a necessary statement and was rightly applauded. Besides being an affront to decency, Ahmedinejad’s speech proved an almost fatal distraction from the important work that Geneva was supposed to be hosting; challenging the spectre of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia. And elsewhere at the conference there has been genuinely constructive debate taking place.

A well-attended side event was organised by the Jewish Human Rights Coalition, at which NUS president Wes Streeting and inter-faith campaigner Rokhsana Fiaz spoke passionately and practically about the importance of minority communities uniting to forge a common front against racism. The contrast between the progressive approach to combating prejudice discussed there and the appalling grandstanding of Ahmedinejad behind his podium could not be sharper.
 
The media circus of this week will roll on, but we cannot allow the substance behind the headlines to be swept under the carpet. There must be serious questions asked about how this could have been allowed to happen – a challenge that the UN now has a responsibility to meet. Britain can take the lead in holding the UN to account here. Anti-racists around the world also need to consider how to reconcile the fact that while some walked out of that room, others stayed and indulged a Holocaust denier.
 
We must all work together against prejudice in its many insidious forms. There is no hierarchy when it comes to racism. We are all in it together. That’s why we must confront racism head on. We have to speak out and not allow ourselves to be silenced, even when it appears in as unlikely a forum as an UN anti-racism conference.
 
The purpose of Durban II ought to have been to light a beacon of hope to all those around the world suffering from the injustices of racism and discrimination. Instead, it was allowed to be hijacked by a Holocaust denier whose sole intent was to fire provocative and inflammatory barbs at world Jewry. While this is shameful, we cannot let it deter us from the pursuing of what were supposed to be the ideals of the conference, by relentlessly challenging the evils of racism.

Karen Pollock is Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust

22 Apr 2009 11:14

 

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