Following my participation on a panel discussing religious freedom in the context of the Durban Review Conference recently held at the United Nations in New York, a gentleman approached me to correct my comment that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had said he wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map. The gentleman believed this was a mistranslation.
If there was any ambiguity in Ahmadinejad's statement before, there can certainly be none following the President's vile rantings at the opening of the notorious “Durban Review Conference” (aka “Durban II”) this morning (Monday, April 20, 2009) in Geneva.
President Ahmadinejad once again targeted Israel as a nation founded on racism and military aggression. An English translation of his remarks quote him as saying, “Following World War II they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless, on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question of the holocaust... They sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world, in order to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine, and in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racists in Palestine.”
While UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay had vainly hoped Durban II would provide a platform for addressing the real problems of racism throughout the world, the conference was clearly marred from the outset. Today's comments by President Ahmadinejad only reinforced the outcome that most knew would occur.
Even before the conference began, a draft outcome document was prepared.. This document contained three points that concerned the United States among many other Western nations involved in preparations for the conference. This included references reaffirming the importance of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA) adopted by the first Durban conference in 2001, a disproportionate focus on the problem of racism by Israel, and references to the problem of the ‘defamation of religions’. While the draft final outcome document for Durban II removed the latter two issues, reference to the DDPA remained, which was a cause of concern for many Western nations that felt it had unjustly targeted Israel as racist, and references to “defamation” were merely repackaged as “incitement”.
Absent throughout the preparation for Durban II was any serious steps to address racism in places such as India, Burma, Indonesia, Sudan, Egypt, China, and elsewhere, where whole ethnic communities have been the victims of discrimination, often directed by the government.
Instead, many of the nations involved in the preparations for Durban II chose to focus on a perceived link between “defamation of religions” and racism. Although these references were replaced by “incitement” in the final outcome document, the change could not hide their objective. Pakistan, on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) has been pushing resolutions condemning “defamation of religions” since 1999 at the UN. It has become clear to most UN observers that this push is intended to create a new international legal principle whereby “religions” are elevated to the status of rights bearers under international law, and any “incitement”, ie. critique or truth seeking considered a threat to that religion, may be punishable by law.
Blasphemy laws (ie. laws preventing religions from being defamed) exist in many OIC countries. While there are clearly negative societal attitudes about religion that may at times involve racial communities that are identified by this religion, a legitimate discussion about how to address this intersection was not discussed in the Durban II process. The OIC began to move this issue into Durban II and link defamation with racism to provide greater justification for these domestic laws at the international level, which are often in place solely to limit the freedom of speech and religion of those who dissent from the state's interpretation of a particular religious belief, not to encourage social harmony among diverse religious and ethnic communities.
Such limitations on these fundamental human rights, and radical distortions to the traditional concept of human rights as rights held by and for individuals rather than religions, have no place in Durban II or the UN more generally.. Moreover, social harmony and tolerance are not developed by singling out one nation as racist while neglecting to address the real problems that lie within one's own nation and community.
Following months of indecision, the United States finally decided to boycott the conference last weekend over objections to the remaining references to the DDPA and “incitement.” Following Ahmadinejad's statement, U.S. Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Alejandro Wolff commented, “I can't think of any other word than shameful.” However, Congressional Black Caucus leaders were critical of President Obama's position to boycott the conference, despite its serious flaws.
In a statement released today, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon commented, “I deplore the use of this platform by the Iranian president to accuse, divide and even incite. This is the opposite of what this Conference seeks to achieve.. This makes it significantly more difficult to build constructive solutions to the very real problem of racism.” It was reported that Ban Ki-moon had also, “reminded the President that the UN General Assembly had adopted the resolutions to revoke the equation of Zionism with racism and to reaffirm the historical facts of the Holocaust respectively.” Clearly, this was lost on Ahmadinejad whose definition of racism is limited to Israel's crime of existence.
What happened in Geneva today comes as no surprise to those of us who follow Ahmadinejad's toxic statements, and the United Nations’ dubious attempts at combating human rights violations, with our eyes wide open.
Tina Ramirez is Congressional International Religious Freedom Fellow for Representative Trent Franks in Washington, DC.
