Durban I retrospective
23 September 2021
On Wednesday 21 September, the United Nations hosted Durban IV at its headquarters in New York. A fortnight ago, the Jewish Board of Deputies, in conjunction with the SA Jewish Report, remembered the 20th anniversary of Durban I, the first World Conference Against Racism.
This conference held between 31 August and 8 September was something that had promised so much, especially to us South Africans newly liberated from our own institutionalised racism which the UN itself had termed a crime against humanity. Two previous UN conferences against racism had focussed solely on South Africa – for obvious reasons. Now after the collapse of apartheid and the especial horrors of Bosnian and Rwanda, there were huge expectations for this, the first human rights conference of the 21st Century.
There were widespread hopes that countries across the world would look within at their own human rights record and commit to creating a more caring, kinder and compassionate world, rooting out the evil of racism. We all hoped Durban I would be a beacon of hope, a moral north star for the global community. Instead as Professor Irwin Cotler has noted it became a truly Orwellian moment of anti-intellectualism and group think.
Instead of unity, there was division, disruption, distortion and afterward denial that anything untoward had happened. A conference against racism turned into a conference of racism – against Israel and the Jewish people, painting them as the enemy of all good and the embodiment of all evil, ending with an appeal for the destruction of the Jewish state.
Prof Cotler, an eminent Canadian jurist and former cabinet minister, was in Durban as part of the official Canadian government delegation. If he closes his eyes today, he can still see the marchers in the streets of Durban, the chants of the mobs 20 years ago. The atrocity of 9/11 occurred shortly after the Durban conference. As Prof Cotler said, “if 9/11 was the Kristallnacht of terror, then Durban was the Mein Kampf.”
It was an immensely traumatic time to be in Durban. I grew up there and to see copies of the blood libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion being sold openly on those streets; the violence, the thuggery and the naked hatred was deeply unnerving. I remember the pamphlets, the so-called Hitler Handbill, being handed out on the streets – paid for, we found out afterwards by the Bin Laden family; the Jihadist banners, literally calling for the extermination of Jews. After the conference I remember being filled with a profound sense of foreboding. The Tuesday after the conference, terrorists flew hijacked aircraft into the Twin Towers. The rest is history.
As Ambassador Tova Herzl, the Israeli ambassador to South Africa at the time, remembered the scenes around the conference were akin to the anti-Semitism of Nazi German in the 1930s. She remembered talking to her mother, “a graduate of Auschwitz” on the phone, looking out of her hotel window watching the mobs, as her mother watched the scenes on the news on Television.
“Now you know what it’s like,” her mother told her.
For Felice Gaer, the Durban conference was like a scene from William Golding’s seminal book Lord of the Flies. She remembered how conference secretary general Mary Robinson was openly heckled and intimidated by the mobs within the NGO conference after she refused to accept their resolution. Mary Robinson was openly booed when she responded to Fidel Castro’s two-hour long harangue on human rights by reminding the Cuban leader to look to the rights of his people – especially those in prison.
The UN failed in Durban. The protection of Human rights is the organisation’s most important mission, more vital than economic development or international disarmament, yet the same body allowed Durban II and Durban III, the fifth and 10th anniversary commemorations to be hosted by serial human rights abusers Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the late Muammar Ghaddafi. The UN Human Rights Council is not a court but a political body, its members are not chosen on how good their human rights records are but on the basis of realpolitik and expediency.
The horror show that was Durban did not occur organically; the hijacking and heckling was professionally organised and funded, letting the genie out of a bottle among a local population that had only just emerged from centuries of apartheid, to rally them by exploiting racial fault lines. The cacophony of hatred in the NGO forum, on the streets and in the stadium morphed seamlessly into the demonisation of a single country and its people that continues to this day. It provided the context for the wave of anti-Semitism that has characterised the last 20 years across the world and legitimated the most virulent and vicious form of racism imaginable.
Today, we live with the bizarre – and wholly illogical - dichotomy of a world that remembers the Jews who perished in the Holocaust every year only to demonise and criminalise their descendants for having the same faith. Today, 58.5% of all religious hate crimes in the US are against Jews, according to the FBI, yet the Jews only make up 2% of the US population.
Durban I was ground zero for anti-Semitism, spawning new forms of anti-Semitism, while re-igniting the old forms. We live in a world where there is now a hierarchy of racism; Jews are seen as white, powerful and privileged, totally ignoring the demographics not just of the faith but of the population of Israel. In the process, the fight against real racism and the persecution of minorities, many of them effectively stateless, such as the Uyghurs and the Rohingyas goes totally unnoticed.
For the South Africans that were at Durban I, the experience was traumatic, but also liberating. For people like Marc Pozniak who was at the conference as a 19-year-old university student, Durban awakened a passion in him to dedicate his life to activism. He went on to pursue a parallel career from the South African Union of Jewish Students of which he became president all the way through to the South African Board of Deputies, which he is vice president of today.
As he reminded us two weeks ago, we dare not give up the fight, we dare not stop engaging, but most of all we have to keep fighting to make it very uncomfortable for any would be anti-Semite in our country. Across the world, we have to speak up, speak out and act to protect the human rights of all people, not just Jews.
Two decades ago, the doctrine of Human Rights was perverted, instrumentalised and weaponised. The world cannot afford a Durban V and Jews alone cannot fight anti-Semitism and racism, instead we need to develop and harness a global constituency of conscience.
We have to disconnect from Durban and create a new framework that truly protects the victims, rather than pandering to the ideologues and entrenching their agendas.
Mary Kluk is national president of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. To view the webinar on the 20th anniversary of the World Conference Against Racism go to (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ8SSpwtfws)
