Will Obama support Durban Review?

Will Obama support Durban Review?
By Karen Juanita Carrillo

With the much-anticipated exit of President Geor

ge W. Bush and the even greater awaited entrance of President-elect Barack Obama to the White House this month, millions are expecting to see federal policy changes that will spur the United States’ economy.

But beyond the changes needed in-country, many people are expecting the Obama administration to help reposition U.S. foreign policy – in particular, the way it addresses developing nations. And one upcoming event that Obama’s administration could make a significant appearance at is the Durban Review Conference (DRC/ www.un.org/durbanreview2009/), the follow-up to the United Nation’s World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance (WCAR; www.un.org/WCAR), due to take place in Geneva, Switzerland April 20-24, 2009.

The WCAR took place in Durban, South Africa, from August 31 through September 8, 2001 and had more than ten thousand participants. In 2001,the United States did not send a high-level delegation to the conference. Instead, former Secretary of State Colin Powell led a delegation of United States representatives to the event.

The federal government gave the conference short-shrift because it claimed too many WCAR participants wanted to talk about whether or not the Israeli government’s “Zionism,” as it affects the lives of Palestinians, constitutes genocide. Ultimately, the U.S. and Israel walked out of the conference and, since then, representatives of Israel, the United States and Canada have routinely claimed that the WCAR was merely a racist forum that blamed Israel, in particular, for the problems in Palestine. Canada has already declared that it will boycott this year’s DRC – and the Bush administration had planned to have the U.S. join France, Israel, and England in also boycotting the conference, particularly since Libya is the elected chair of the Durban Review's preparatory committee. Cuba serves as the committee's rapporteur, and Iran is an executive member.

This past December, Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, noted that country’s who want the DRC to fail are promoting misinformation about the conference. “…A widely repeated allegation [is] that control of the Review Conference’s preparatory process, steered by an organizational body of 20 states, has been seized by a group of three countries, namely Libya (whose representative is the Chair), Cuba (Rapporteur/Vice-Chair), and Iran (Vice-Chair). Such reports imply that these three states have an enormous amount of executive power. They do not. Chairpersons of bodies of this type fulfill an essentially functional role and are not in a position to push their own country's agenda.

“Such reports also routinely – and in some cases deliberately – omit to mention that, along with Iran and Cuba, there are 17 other Vice-Chairs including Belgium, Greece, Norway, Turkey, Armenia, Croatia, Estonia, Senegal, South Africa, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The role of the Rapporteur/Vice-Chair is to oversee reports on proceedings produced by U.N. staff. If those reports were in any way distorted, the other Vice-Chairs could – and would – intervene.”

“We really need to get support from the USA to participate in the Durban Review Conference in Geneva this April,” says Humberto R. Brown of the Black Radical Congress.

“President elect Obama has given two messages on the issue of reparations,” notes Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the attorney and plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against private businesses for slavery reparations: “that he supports education reparations and that he does not support government reparations. It is not clear what he will do with regards to Durban, but one of his advisors, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, is a leading reparations advocate. I would hope that he would at least send Ogletree [to the DRC].”

Farmer-Paellmann, who is also the founder and executive director of the Restitution Study Group, also says that “newly appointed Senator Roland Burris from Illinois was an attorney in my landmark reparations cases. Should all go well with his appointment, he'd be a great choice to be a part of an official U.S. delegation to Durban.”

Another attorney who helped represent Farmer-Paellmann is Roger Wareham of the December 12th Movement. Wareham says that the decision to attend the DRC has to be made by President Obama. “I don’t think it’s Hillary Clinton’s position, as his Secretary of State, to make that decision. Because she would probably side with her husband on this issue and his presidency – and the Bush presidency – did not support the WCAR.” (While she was running for the presidency, Clinton had issued a statement saying that she would “lead a boycott of the [DRC] conference should current efforts to rein in the forces of hatred fail.”)

“There are going to be a lot of advisors with opinions on this,” Wareham says, “but Obama has to be the one to decide. It’s a question of whether he’ll be swayed by them or not.”

Wareham contends that the U.S. walked out of the WCAR because one of the conference’s main subjects was reparations for African slavery. “Israel was not an issue initially, the U.S. used Israel as an issue so they could pull out of the conference. But we still take the position that reparations is the key issue. It is the key to development for thousands of people in the diaspora and in African countries.”

“A lesson learned from Durban,” notes Iman Drammeh, director of The Drammeh Institute, Inc., “is that Africans and the diaspora deserve a U.N. funded World Conference of their own; one that won't be contrived with issues that are not central to the historiography of African people. Since the day the U.S. delegation walked out amidst claims of anti-Semitism and charges that Israel was being vilified by pro-Palestinian groups, their dramatic exit has haunted the legitimacy of any follow-up conference.

“I think it will be up to the new administration to see through the muddle,” Drammeh adds. “I think the new administration's presence will signal a willingness to do just that, but I would not be surprised either way. Omowale Clay of the December 12th Movement said it best after the U.S. announced its walkout, ‘There is no precedent to the millions of bones of our ancestors lying at the bottom of the ocean. We are the precedent.’ How deafening has the government’s silence been on issues concerning its people at home? How unfortunate that we brace ourselves for a no show for Durban, on the eve of what some are calling a new day in America.”