No unity at racism conference

There's been very little peace and love at this week's United Nations World Conference Against Racism. Instead of reconciling, longstanding enemies have stared each other down over ideological gaps that only seemed to deepen as the conference progressed.

Many participants say the conference - beset by dissent over the Middle East and debate about whether European nations owe Africans an apology - has failed to bring attention to the issues it was intended to address. And as hope dims for compromise over key issues blocking the conference's declaration and plan of action, some are beginning to wonder if the conference has done more harm than good.

"I think there is a venomous tone to the Durban Conference that is bad for the resolution of these issues, and terrible for the future of these conferences," says Ruth Wedgewood, a professor of international law and diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University in Washington and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The conference, which ends today, was supposed to launch an international fight against racism, much as the Beijing Conference in 1995 brought new attention to women's rights and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 jumpstarted the environmental movement.

Two previous UN racism conferences, in 1978 and 1983, had been tainted by cold-war politicking and largely disappeared into the dustbin of history. But there was hope that this conference, without those tensions, might put racism in the international spotlight and produce a strong, unifying declaration against racial discrimination that would pressure governments to pay attention to intolerance within their borders.

Although the declarations are not legally binding, international law experts say they carry a powerful message. "You do worry about the rhetoric that comes out of these conferences," Ms. Wedgewood says. "These kinds of declarations, particularly in human rights, gradually can be taken as evidence of what countries think is legally obliging. If ... 150 countries say that land-mines are a crime against humanity, and then you have a court ruling, suddenly that becomes widely accepted as an international standard."

It didn't take long for those hopes to be extinguished, however. At a parallel conference of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), shouting erupted between Jewish and Arab groups. The dispute quickly came to dominate the offical UN conference, which began several days later, despite earlier UN promises that those issues would not be on the conference agenda.

Then, four days into the meeting, the US and Israel pulled out, saying the conference had been "hijacked" by special interests. European nations, who also opposed references in the draft documents equating Zionism with racism and demanding an apology and reparations for slavery, stuck around in hopes of brokering a compromise, while quietly indicating they would not accept a declaration with such text.

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