Race to Durban

In the first of a series of articles, Helmy Shaarawy reviews some key conceptual issues raised at preparatory meetings for the first World Conference Against Racism soon to be held in Durban, South Africa
The World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance will be held in Durban, South Africa, between 31 August and 7 September, 2001. It comes in the wake of a long series of world conferences held over the last decade. Indeed, the 1990s witnessed a plethora of UN-sponsored conferences dealing with the environment, human rights, social issues and gender.
These conferences grew out of globalisation which polarised world economic and political power. Grassroots organisations resisted the nascent "new world order," developing into a militant international movement representing a global civil society of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Yet from its early beginnings, the dissenting movement was deeply fractured, reflecting the political polarisation of the world at large. International civil society reproduced the North-South divide among its ranks, with the North controlling, manipulating and suppressing Southern voices.
Preparations for world conferences usually include UN-sponsored regional meetings, in addition to specific meetings at both government and NGO level. Meetings with government agencies usually involve deliberations on post-structural adjustment programmes and neo-liberalism, while meetings with NGOs are generally less structured and more problematic. The process of NGO representation at such meetings is highly competitive and selective -- reflecting a fierce power struggle between various single-issue tendencies vying to be politically conspicuous. The emergence of the NGO as the only de facto "legitimate" representative of civil society has displaced other actors from the political scene. Since NGOs have filled the political space, they have eclipsed radical social movements and political parties.
The preparations for Durban reflected these trends, as did the regional meetings in the run-up. As a result of Northern manipulation, the first World Conference against Racism fails to address the question of racism as perceived by the formerly colonised peoples of Africa, Asia and South and Central America.
At this historical juncture the world needs to be reminded that racism cannot be reduced to a simple reference to "race" or "ethnicity." Racism is an ideology upheld by the strong to dominate the weak in order to achieve social, political and economic superiority. It is predicated on difference: marginalisation is justified as being an inevitable result of the existence of different "races," not a product of unfair economic distribution. This reasoning formed the cornerstone of racist ideology, which emerged at the time of the formation and consolidation of colonial empires and world capitalism. Racism justified genocide, looting and dispossession of entire continents.
Historically, racism became part of hegemonic and expansionist ideologies, and at other times it was linked to interests within their framework (as in the cases of Apartheid and Zionism). The connection linking imperialism and capitalism to racism is vital and should be stressed. Historically, racism served to create a Northern self-image that would reify supremacy as an objective fact, rather than part of a process of imperialism. It also created an image of the other that would explain the reasons for conquest and subjugation. It was imperative to propagate the ideas of the white man's civilising mission and link them to free trade and the right to settle -- all neatly packaged within the framework of modernisation and development.
But this neat package has burst. Northern nations experienced a rude awakening when they realised that, like Frankenstein, they had created a monster. This happened when competition between various capitalist systems led to the appearance of Nazism and Fascism in Europe; these political formations annexed racist ideologies, which ultimately destroyed them from within.
In the wake of World War II a wave of national liberation movements swept first Asia and then Africa. With the fall of Nazism and Fascism the tendency to racially isolate non- European world populations ended. While populations in the South associated this development with the end of colonialism, slave trading and systematic exploitation, Europe was associating it with freedom from the racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime.
The Zionist project became a reality on the land of Palestine when the State of Israel was established, specifically making use of this climate prevailing in Europe, leading the world to ignore the colonial-settler nature of the project, and also denying its racist character. The then governing powers of the world, the US and the USSR, supported the creation of a state based on those discriminatory premises, while they were still trying to mend the effects of Nazism, which was based on the same principles.
Zionists connived with imperialist forces to perpetuate racist ideologies, loudly denouncing "anti-Semitism" which now came to epitomise racism, while completely disregarding the hidden racist agenda behind the creation of the State of Israel. They achieved this by a piece of conceptual legerdemain: they termed Zionism a liberation movement and a pioneering Jewish Socialist enterprise. In the ideological climate of the time, that made it seem acceptable.
Meanwhile, the wave of political independence in Africa was widely celebrated as a triumph of anti-racism, and the struggle against racist South Africa and Rhodesia intensified.
The connection between Zionism and apartheid and racism was made by the Afro-Asian liberation movement. Israel was condemned in 1955 during the Bandung Conference, which demanded "the application of the United Nations resolutions regarding the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people." Israel was considered to be one of the forces of neo-colonialism by the Afro-Asian People's Conferences both in Cairo and Accra, in 1958 and 1960. Finally, Israel was designated as the "spearhead of colonialism" by the conferences of the Casablanca Bloc in 1961.
It was only in the 1960s, when the movements for national liberation in countries of the South had politically matured, that they started to identify Zionism with racism. In this climate the International Declaration on the Elimination of Racism and Racial Discrimination was issued on November 20th, 1963 by the United Nations General Assembly. But it was some years later that the UN General Assembly emphatically defined Zionism as a form of racism.
Recommend this page
Related stories:
A monopoly on victimisation
A little respect
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor