Pious hopes and prejudices

THE WORLD CONFERENCE against Racism has run a tortuous course in a haze of controversies. A silver lining is the soft declaration of high principles and the related plan of routine action. Official India has heaved a sigh of relief too after facing anxious moments over a spirited but unsuccessful effort by some non-governmental agencies to place on the international agenda a politically sensitive question of alleged discrimination against the Dalits. From the beginning though, the U.N.-sponsored conference in Durban, which concluded during the week-end after an extended day's session, was rocked mainly by a fierce political row over Israel's presumptive racist policies against the Arabs. Equally lethal was a historically delayed clash over the ethical and economic consequences of the medieval-era slavery that the West imposed on hapless African captives. These issues were resolved for the immediate purposes of the conference by professional diplomats with a flourish of semantics. However, the countries directly concerned either with the implications of Israel's national psyche or with the lingering legacies of past slavery have remained unsatisfied. The United States led a campaign against the perceived bid by the Arab and Muslim countries to arraign the Jewish state in a forum which, in Washington's view, should have been concerned only with generic issues and not individual nations. As the chorus of arguments and counter-arguments reached a crescendo, the U.S. and Israel withdrew from the Durban meeting itself. Inevitably, the walkout raised the overall stakes in a forum dealing with all forms of discrimination and xenophobia.

The U.S.' allies and the Arab-Islamic bloc wrangled till the end and agreed upon a passage that did not blame Israel by name. While most Arab states were content with a declaration cognisant of the ``plight'' of the Palestinians under ``foreign occupation'', Iran as also Syria and Pakistan expressed varying degrees of dissatisfaction over the arguable inadequacy of this formulation. At the other end of the spectrum, Canada and Australia voiced reservations about the exclusive reference to a specific case, although the two participated in the negotiations to hammer out a compromise. The relative significance of present- day slavery-like practices and the period-specific wrongs of the original `sins' of the West also taxed the ingenuity of the delegates. With the historical slavery being recognised in the final documents as a notional but unjusticiable crime against humanity, the West appears to have insulated itself from possible legal claims for reparation. While it is debatable whether the U.S.' pull-out served any purpose of inducing the anti-West lobbies to adopt a less strident stand on issues of concern to Washington, the fact remains that the Durban conference was long on rhetoric and short on substance.

Nonetheless, there is also merit in the contentions of the U.N. Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi Annan, and the Human Rights Commissioner, Ms. Mary Robinson, that a conference declaration of principles is better than none at all. The idea is to discourage the worst elements in each society even if it is going to take time to combat them. A committee under the U.N. auspices may be set up to monitor the Durban follow-up. It is in this larger context that many diverse issues of interest to specific sections of the global community were raised in Durban. Of direct interest to India was the social status of the Dalits, whose representatives certainly put the issue of their alleged plight in prime focus within the public opinion circuits on the sidelines of the official conference. Somewhat alarmed at this, India's official delegation faced the challenge without spoiling its copybook but also without great finesse. The real question was not so much the constitutional privileges of the Dalits as their sense of fulfilment. The efforts within India at addressing this must be reinvigorated.

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