US Under Increasing Pressure to Boycott UN Racism Conference

The Bush administration sees "no reason at this point" to participate in a U.N. conference on racism being planned for next year and will encourage other governments to stay away too, the State Department said Thursday.

This is the closest the administration has come to declaring it will boycott the event, but the comments fall short of an unequivocal refusal to go.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has come under increasing pressure in recent months to announce a boycott, because critics expect the conference to be a repeat of an earlier one marked by attacks on Israel and attempts to equate Zionism with apartheid.

The U.S. withdrew its delegation in protest from the 2001 gathering in Durban, South Africa. Advocacy groups say next year's meeting, which is supposed to review progress made since 2001, promises more of the same.

Although South Africa has again offered to host the gathering, no venue has been announced for the review conference. Those campaigning against it have labeled the meeting "Durban II," and the shorthand has stuck.

On Thursday, ads running in four U.S. newspapers and signed by prominent figures including Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and former CIA Director James Woolsey, called on Rice to announce that the U.S. will not go.

The planned conference, it said, "seeks not to combat racism, but to promote and fuel hatred toward Israel and America."

In the run-up to the original conference, a series of preparatory committee ("prepcom") meetings drew up the agenda. One of them, in Tehran in February 2001, adopted a text saying Israel's very existence as a Jewish state was racist, and calling its policies with regard to the Palestinians "a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity [and] a form of genocide."

Prepcom meetings for Durban II are now underway. The first was held last August, and two others are planned for later this month and for October.

Concerns of a rerun of Durban I have been fueled by the fact a 20-nation bureau set up to oversee the planning includes some of Israel's harshest critics -- Iran, Pakistan and Cuba -- and is being chaired by Libya.

Furthermore, the entire process is taking place under the supervision of the U.N.'s Human Rights Council, a body dominated by Islamic nations and frequently accused - by the U.S. government among others - of focusing disproportionately on Israel.

Canada earlier this year became the first government to announce it would not attend the conference, and was followed by Israel. Despite calls for it do so, the State Department has not taken the step.

Department spokesman Tom Casey said Thursday that the U.S. was neither participating in the prepcom discussions nor funding for the process, "and we see no reason at this point why the United States should participate in the meeting itself."

Casey also said that the U.S. "would encourage others not to participate in this event, again, because it shows every sign in its second version of being as noxious an event as the first one was."

Anne Bayefsky, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and editor of the "Eye on the U.N." project, said Thursday night it was a mystery to her why Rice remained averse, in contrast to her Canadian and Israeli counterparts, to saying on the record that the U.S. would boycott Durban II.

"A policy to stay away from a conference which subverts the fight against racism by becoming a forum for promoting anti-Semitism is something she ought to declare personally and unequivocally," she said.

Bayefsky called the State Department position - that the U.S. sees no reason at this point to participate - "a move in the right direction."

"But this isn't the time for subtleties," she said. "Madam Secretary, step up to the plate and tell the world this conference is wrong and the U.S. will not go."

'Bad actors'

Testifying on Capitol Hill earlier this week at a hearing on U.N. peacekeeping, Kristin Silverberg, assistant secretary in the department's Bureau of International Organization Affairs, also addressed the administration's stance on the racism meeting.

She portrayed the U.S. and Israel as working in close cooperation on the issue, saying both had decided not to take part in the prepcom meetings, apart from having "a junior officer sitting in the back of the room taking notes."

"The Secretary has said that basically we think there's absolutely no case to be made for participating in something that's going to be a repeat of Durban I," Silverberg told a House Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee hearing.

"We don't have any confidence that this will be any better than Durban I and so we and the Israelis have taken, I think, a similar position on this."

Silverberg said the fact that leadership positions in the planning process are held by some of the U.N.'s "bad actors," together with the involvement of the "Israel-bashing" Human Rights Council, did not give cause for optimism.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said it was important that "the U.N. knows that hate fest II will not be wittingly or unwittingly supported by the U.S. government."

See Earlier Story:
US Urged To Speak Out Now on Planned UN Racism Meeting (March 5, 2008)