UN officials says racism conference to touch colonialism
Regional, Politics, 7/28/2001

Despite a US threat to stay away if reparations for slavery are called for, a UN conference taking place in five weeks will discuss mistakes of the past and colonialism, UN Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson said Friday.

Addressing journalists in Geneva, she said there was general agreement within the United Nations that these difficult topics should also be dealt with at the meeting, which begins in Durban on August 31, dpa reported.

The United States will boycott the Conference Against Racism if the issues of reparations for slavery and colonialism or the equation of Zionism with racism are on the agenda, the Washington Post reported Friday.

In the light of compensation awarded to victims of Nazi slave labor programmes, several African countries have demanded similar reparations for the victims of slavery in the 17 th and 18 th centuries.

As the world community, the UN had to discuss the past, simply to establish an agenda for the future, Robinson said. However the Irish UN official did not comment on the reparations claim as such.

Until now the issue has been simply set aside in preparatory meetings.

A final preparatory meeting begins Monday in Geneva and runs until August 10.

Western countries adamantly reject reparations. Quoting a senior State Department official, the Washington report said the Bush administration planned to inform foreign diplomats in the course of Friday of the U.S. position on the issues.

The Post said State Department officials intended to tell the ambassadors that the United States needs their help to build support for striking out the two topics.

The conference is being billed as the most important international discussion of race ever held.

Formally titled the U.N. Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, it is scheduled to run until September 8 in the South African city.

Robinson said the Durban declaration would refer to human-rights breaches in the Israeli-occupied territories in appropriate language and would not go beyond that. The issue would not be allowed to deadlock the conference.

The dispute over Zionism goes back to a 1975 UN resolution equating it with racism. The resolution was repealed 10 years ago, but some Arab organizations proposed similar language for the conference's draft declaration.

Robinson said the United Nations had had the final word on Zionism 10 years ago.

To questions, she conceded that governments had been somewhat slower than usual to announce their delegations to the Durban meeting. So far 30 heads of state have said they will attend.

Previous Stories:
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