Preserving Inequality: Analyzing Obama's Boycott of the Durban Review Conference

[XXPANTHAXX]

By Kali Akuno
Monday, March 23, 2009

Attorney General Eric Holder was right, that when it comes to talking
about racism the United States is a “nation of cowards”. In bullying the
Durban Review Conference (DRC) to accept its suffocating terms of
engagement, President Obama, like the forty-three Presidents before him,
is following the time-honored U.S. tradition of denying and downplaying
the brutal reality of racism. As we go to presss, it is unclear whether
the DRC organizers will successfully resist Obama’s pressure.

The UN is convening the DRC to assess progress since the World
Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and
Related Intolerances (WCAR) held in Durban, South Africa in 2001. During
the week of April 20th delegates from nearly all UN member states and
hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) will gather in
Geneva, Switzerland to evaluate the steps governments have taken towards
the elimination of racism as outlined in the 2001 Durban Declaration and
Program of Action (DDPA).

The DDPA is a comprehensive document that covers
prevention-education-and protection strategies and specific measures to
eliminate racism, in all its forms, against indigenous peoples, people
of African descent, migrants, displaced people and others. The document
includes a focus on gender-based violence and trafficking, racial
profiling and a call for reparations.

For more information on the DRC and the 2001 Plan of Action visit
Durban Review Conference, 20-24 April 2009 .

The Durban Declaration and Program of Action (DDPA) helped reinvigorate
a critical dialogue about race, racism, restitution, and reparations in
Africa, Asia and Latin America. Since 2001 the DDPA has served as a
moral and political weapon to press for structural changes and
institutional remedies to eliminate racism and all its vestiges in many
of the societies in these regions.

Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, and Venezuela have each incorporated
DDPA principles into their respective constitutional and legal
structures including protected recognition for Africa and Indigenous
peoples, rights to ancestral lands, resources for cultural preservation,
and various “affirmative action” programs.

This was not the case in the U.S. First and foremost because the Bush
administration walked out on the WCAR proceedings, and did almost
everything within its power (including economic and diplomatic sanctions
against several nations) to undermine Durban and its outcomes. The
events of September 11th, 2001, occurring just days after the WCAR,
ceased nearly all discussion of the conference and its outcomes.

In the wake of September 11th the national debate about reparations and
how to eliminate the structural foundations of racism in the U.S. was
virtually silenced by the political policing of the Bush administration
and the domineering promotion of American nationalism by the
administration and corporate media.

Many oppressed peoples in the U.S. and nations throughout the world held
out hope that the Obama administration, with its promises of “hope”,
“change”, and open dialogue, would change the course of U.S. policy and
practice and fully engage the DRC and similar processes.

Obama’s decision to continue the U.S. governments boycott is an effort
to avoid confronting the systemic persistence of racism and xenophobia
and eliminate initiatives to redress past crimes against humanity. The
strong-arm tactics, particularly relating to the conferences Outcome
Document, are an attempt to bully the world into a limited, diversionary
conversation that avoids the primary issues of the day:

-Islamophobia
-The so-called “war on terror
-Israeli apartheid and the systematic cleansing of the
-Palestinian people from their land
-Reparations for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of the
indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere

The Obama administrations maneuvering to squash all principled positions
on these issues are more than a mere act of cowardice. Rather, it
demonstrates that the Obama administration has no fundamental intention
of breaking with the strategic orientation of its predecessors in
regards to eliminating the structural pillars of racism that shape the
U.S. “project” and the modern capitalist world-system itself.

The strategic requirement of the U.S. project is to preserve the social
structures built on settler-colonial foundations, and to maintain and
expand its hegemonic global position to extract the resources and
capital needed to maintain its “unapologetic” way of life.

The project is the direct result of the genocide and dispossession of
indigenous peoples and the colonial subjugation, displacement,
enslavement, and exploitation of African, Asian, and Latino peoples. Its
ideological pillars are white supremacy, divine providence, manifest
destiny, individualism, “exceptionalism”, and “free-enterprise”
capitalism.

The rationale for the administration’s boycott, outlined in the February
27th State Department’s press release must be viewed through the lens of
this strategic requirement. The press release was titled, “U.S. Posture
Towards the Durban Review Conference and Participation in the UN Human
Rights Council” (see
U.S. Posture Toward the Durban Review Conference and Participation in the UN Human Rights Council),.

The press release was harsh by diplomatic standards and reveals how
tenaciously the Obama administration clings to the prerogatives of the
imperial project. Sadly, however, the document being negotiated has gone
from bad to worse, and the current text of the draft outcome document is
not salvageable.

As a result, the United States will not engage in further negotiations
on this text, nor will we participate in a conference based on this
text. A conference based on this text would be a missed opportunity to
speak clearly about the persistent problem of racism.

The United States remains open to a positive result in Geneva based on a
document that takes a constructive approach to tackling the challenges
of racism and discrimination. The U.S. believes any viable text for the
Review Conference must be shortened and not reaffirm in toto the flawed
2001 Durban Declaration and Program of Action (DDPA).

It must not single out any one country [namely Israel] or conflict, nor
embrace the troubling concept of “defamation of religion.” The U.S. also
believes an acceptable document should not go further than the DDPA on
the issue of reparations for slavery (bold added).

It is important to look at the provisions of the original draft Outcome
Document issued on January 23rd, 2009 that the Obama administration is
objecting to (for full document see
http://www.un.org/durbanreview2009/p...ended19109.pdf).

The Palestinians, Israeli Apartheid, and Zionism

Paragraph 31: “Reiterates that the Palestinian people have the
inalienable right to self-determination and that, in order to
consolidate the Israeli occupation, they have been subjected to unlawful
collective punishment, torture, economic blockade, severe restriction of
movement and arbitrary closure of their territories. Also notes with
concern that illegal settlements continue to be built in the occupied
Arab territories since 1967.”

Paragraph 32: “Reaffirms that a foreign occupation founded on
settlements, laws based on racial discrimination with the aim of
continuing domination of the occupied territories as well as the
practice of reinforcing a total military blockade, isolating towns,
villages and cities from one another, totally contradicts the purpose
and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and constitutes a
serious violation of international human rights and humanitarian law, a
crime against humanity, a contemporary form of apartheid and serious
threat to international peace and security and violates the basic
principles of international human rights law.”

Support for the Zionist settler-colonial project is a corner stone of
U.S. imperialism. Maintaining the Israeli state is essential for U.S.
geo-strategic positioning, political control of the region and its
peoples, and vital resource extraction and control (oil, gas, and
increasingly water).

That the US is not only supportive of the Israeli apartheid matrix of
domination over the Palestinian people and their land, but is the major
financier, should not be viewed as an aberration of U.S. policy or
principle. The U.S. has a long history of giving uncritical support to
avowedly racist settler-colonial projects, like South Africa and
Australia.

In defending these projects, it is fundamentally defending and
justifying its own existence as a European settler-project vested in
maintaining its control over stolen lands.
In choosing to boycott the DRC in defense of Israel and its apartheid
system, the Obama administration is merely demonstrating its overall
commitment to these projects and the global system that reaffirms and
reinforces them.

Islamophobia and the Defamation of Religion

Paragraph 53: “Acknowledges that a most disturbing phenomenon is the
intellectual and ideological validation of Islamophobia…”

Paragraph 160: “Calls on States to develop, and where appropriate to
incorporate, permissible limitations on the exercise of the right to
freedom and of expression into national legislation;” [relating to the
defamation of religion, which the U.S. identifies as a threat to freedom
of speech and expression].

The Obama administration is opposed to the references against
Islamophobia and the defamation of religion because of the limits it
poses to the conduct of the U.S. post-September 11th strategy of global
containment. Although the Obama administration is no longer using the
“war on terror” slogan propagated by the Bush administration, the
fundamental imperial strategy remains and Islamophobia is its
fundamental ideological anchor.

Islamophobia seeks to equate the religion and practice of Islam with
“terrorism”, sexism, anti-Semitism, and anti-liberalism, and reduce it
to a racialized practice defined by people of Arab, North African,
Central and South Asian descent. This equation justifies the “othering”
of the religion and its adherents and renders them easy targets for
elimination.

Reparations, Slavery, and Genocide

Paragraph 156: “Urges States that have not yet condemned, apologized and
paid reparations for the grave and massive violations as well as the
massive human suffering caused by slavery, the slave trade, the
transatlantic slave trade, apartheid, colonialism and genocide, to do so
at the earliest.”

If the United States were to comply with the demand for restitution and
reparations for the crimes of genocide and slavery, the U.S., as
presently constituted, would fundamentally cease to exist. Complying
with this demand means that it would have to restructure its economy to
equitably manage and distribute the indemnity. And just as critically,
it would have to alter its relationship with indigenous peoples and
relinquish all claims to sovereignty over the lands it possesses.

Will Obama prevail?

As of March 17th, all of the critical points raised above have been
removed from the Draft Outcome Document. This evisceration is a direct
result of the bullying of the Obama administration and its allies: the
ex-officio imperial powers of Europe and their settler-colonial
offshoots (namely Australia, Canada and Israel) (see:
http://www.un.org/durbanreview2009/p...017-3-2009.pdf).

These states cannot afford - either structurally or programmatically –
to address the crimes against humanity that they profited from and/or
were founded upon. They also desperately don’t want to be confronted or
exposed for the failings of their present policies, practices, and
social outcomes.

This is especially true of the U.S. The eight years of the Bush regime
constituted one of the most egregious periods of racism, racial
profiling and xenophobia on a world scale in recent history. In choosing
not to “look into the past” as it were to prosecute the Bush regime for
its numerous human rights violations or seek justifiable restitution for
the multitude of its domestic and international victims, the Obama
administration is in fact sanctioning these crimes.

Obama rationalizes this sanctioning as an attempt to preserve racial
“harmony” and domestic social order against white reaction. In fact, it
breeds impunity and preserves the wholly inequitable status quo.
Answering for the crimes of the Bush regime is not the only reason the
Obama administration doesn’t want to engage the DRC however. It also
doesn’t want its weak civil and human commitments to be exposed and
scrutinized before the world. It is not an accident therefore, that
despite a person of African descent sitting as its head, that the U.S.
is leading the charge of sabotaging the DRC.

The revisions imposed by Obama constitute a major setback to the
international movement to eliminate racism, xenophobia, colonialism, and
imperialism. They preserve the status quo ante of race, power and
exploitation on a world-scale. And they are advancing U.S. imperialism’s
strategy of politically disarming the liberation movements around the
world that are striving to eliminate the status quo.

Eight years after the Bush boycott failed, the Obama boycott and
bullying tactics are shamefully on the verge of eliminating any
substantive discussion or outcome for the DRC. Anti-racist,
anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist activists throughout the world must
take decisive action to stop this political charade and reclaim the
space that is rightfully ours.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Kali Akuno is the National Organizer for the Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement (MXGM). MXGM is a mass organization struggling for the
self-determination of New Afrikan people within the boundaries of the
U.S.