geneva | Durban II reached its conclusion, it seemed, three days early.
A day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tirade against Israel triggered a walkout by the European delegation and generated headlines around the world, diplomats at the U.N. forum ratified the conference’s final document April 21 — three days before the parley’s close, when the document was scheduled to be adopted.
The document included the item that prompted Israel, the United States and eight other countries to boycott the conference: reaffirmation of the 2001 Durban document, which singles out Israel, brands it a racist country and cites the Palestinians as victims of racism.
“Clearly they were panicking and had to get a quick victory before the text could spiral even further out of control,” Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based U.N. Watch, said of the delegates’ vote. “Of course, the text is unacceptable because it still ratifies the flawed 2001 text.”
Despite the document’s early ratification, the very public walkout by EU delegates during Ahmadinejad’s April 20 speech and the events surrounding the conference guaranteed that Durban II was not be a reprise of the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. Pro-Palestinian elements hijacked the original event in Durban, South Africa, and turned it into an anti-Israel free-for-all.
Not that Geneva didn’t have any similarities with Durban.
In 2001, the conference provided a platform for a polarizing leader from the developing world to rebuke Western nations: Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who was greeted enthusiastically by thousands of activists at the NGO Forum that preceded the conference. This time it was Ahmadinejad, the only head of state to address the conference.
But whereas the Durban conference was chaotic, noisy advocacy in Geneva was banned from U.N. grounds and activists were restricted to a few minutes per day to address its follow-up.
And whereas critics of Israel in 2001 went largely unanswered or drowned out pro-Israel voices, Ahmadinejad’s speech was met by denunciations in the media, including a rare rebuke by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. And after Ahmadinejad relinquished the podium, the very next speaker, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store, called the Iranian president’s speech “incitement to hatred, spreading politics of fear and promoting an indiscriminate message of intolerance.”
Israel’s allies worked hard in the months leading up to Geneva to ensure it did not devolve into a repeat of Durban. In Geneva and beyond, pro-Israel protesters went on the offensive, holding their own news conferences, demonstrations and Holocaust commemorations.
Moreover, three French Jewish students wearing colorful clown wigs heckled Ahmadinejad only seconds into his speech, calling him a racist and a clown; one threw a rubber nose at the speaker. The students, who had entered the hall as representatives of NGOs, were removed within seconds after their outburst, but their protest drew considerable attention.
To some extent, then, the document’s early adoption April 21 could be considered a defeat.
Diplomats worked last week to hammer out details of the final draft, in part to avoid threats of boycott by countries concerned about its implicit branding of Israel as a racist state. In theory, however, the document could have been debated and changed at the conference itself, for better or for worse. Indeed, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference called for “open discussion on all issues” at the conference.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called the document’s early adoption “great news,” saying it “reinvigorates the commitment” of states to combat racism and “highlights the suffering of many groups.”
B’nai B’rith denounced the document’s ratification, calling it “flawed and offensive” and blaming Libya for engineering its early and swift passage.
“The adoption of this document shows nothing has changed since 2001, no lessons have been learned,” said Richard Heideman, the head of the B’nai B’rith Delegation in Geneva.
Though the document was adopted by consensus, it was tainted by the boycott of 10 nations, including the Czech Republic, whose delegates walked out in protest during Ahmadinejad’s speech and never returned to the conference. The other boycotting nations were Israel, the United States, Australia, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland.