Was Durban a failure?
By Betty Ruth Lozano
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This section is dedicated to news from the SISTERS network (Sisters in the Struggle to Eliminate Racism and Sexism). This network enables women to link up and exchange their experiences, generating solidarity, supporting one another through concrete actions. Its members come from churches as well as from groups and movements in civil society committed to eliminate racism and sexism.
Was Durban a failure? |
But things were not all bad, even though the United Nations Organisation (UN) seemed to be doing its best to give everyone a sense of failure - for instance, by failing to supply the interpreters that were needed both for the NGO forum and for the conference itself. Perhaps those who can communicate in English have never experienced the anguish of not being able to understand or make oneself understood. Among the participants from Colombia there was no-one of African or Indigenous descent who could communicate fluently in English, even in the official delegation. This has serious repercussions on the quality of participation - you can only participate up to a certain point. You cannot contribute as you would like to nor participate fully in the discussions as you had hoped - and you are dependent on other people. When documents were translated, the translations arrived late and many were of poor quality. This is not just a failure of communication, it is more than that. It amounts to the imposition of a linguistic hegemony which refuses to allow any other language to be used; one language setting itself up as the global language. Yet, as Fidel Castro said in his speech at the closing session of the NGO forum, we have to learn it in order to resist it. Along with other Latin friends I was able to take part in a workshop entitled "United to end racism". The experience we all shared was the sense of oppression we felt because of the domination of English. Some of the people there could communicate perfectly well in that language, indeed better than in Spanish, yet they saw this as an impoverishment and not a gain. There is a challenge here for all of us who do not speak English: how can we speak it without losing ourselves, how can we master it without allowing it to colonise us? I believe we have to work on the principle of constant resistance.
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Fidel Castro, the President of Cuba, said in his speech that this was a conference on racism, racial discrimination and all the other forms of injustice in this capitalist world covered by the phrase "and related forms of intolerance". In fact, this conference dealt with practically all forms of oppression produced by this discriminatory, racist western culture: discrimination based on gender, caste, racism, sexual orientation, apartheid, disability, etc... In this
respect, the input from the gender caucus concerning the intersections of different forms of oppression was extremely important. This concept made it possible to link up the different themes, and counter the assertion that many of them had nothing to do with the central themes of the conference, without losing political strength through fragmentation. Nevertheless, the Indigenous peoples are already proposing to hold a world conference dealing specifically with Indigenous issues as they were not happy about the plethora of themes at this event. So was Durban a failure? Obviously, a world conference cannot eradicate racial discrimination in all its forms but it can make an important contribution. Eliminating racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance requires a transformation in western spirituality, in other words, a change of civilisation which cannot be achieved through a world conference, especially not in the present situ-ation where the United States has set itself up as the supreme and uncontested head of this forum which is the United Nations. So much so that its withdrawal from the conference was seized upon by the communications media as an excuse not only to distort reality but to invent it by alleging that the conference was a failure. Commentaries to the effect that it was in the interests of the United States and the European Union to have the conference fail were already circulating in the corridors of all the Prepcoms.
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A section of the protest march through the streets of Durban during the UN World Conference against Racism. Called by the trade unions of South Africa the march made room for allmanner of groups attending the NGO Forum preceding the government conference. © 2001 Paul Weinbarg / WCC |
So was Durban a failure? Obviously, a world conference cannot eradicate racial discrimination in all its forms but it can make an important contribution. Eliminating racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance requires a transformation in western spirituality, in other words, a change of civilisation which cannot be achieved through a world conference, especially not in the present situ-ation where the United States has set itself up as the supreme and uncontested head of this forum which is the United Nations. So much so that its withdrawal from the conference was seized upon by the communications media as an excuse not only to distort reality but to invent it by alleging that the conference was a failure. Commentaries to the effect that it was in the interests of the United States and the European Union to have the conference fail were already circulating in the corridors of all the Prepcoms.
Unfortunately, at time of writing, we do not have the final document of the official conference, but it is clear that women of African descent gained more in Durban than they did in Beijing. As far as we were able to follow the final document, it does contain concrete references to our situation as victims, even if it does not take up the concept of intersections (and they still have problems with the concept of gender!). This was a proposal put up for discussion and it remains on the table to be discussed in greater depth in future debates (at both the official and the NGO level). To be sure, this concept of the intersection of the forms of oppression is difficult for most governments to accept, as they see only their particular interests. But - and this has to be said - it is also difficult for some discriminated groups who do not want to be associated with certain others because they consider their own claims will be degraded if they are lumped together with them. The greatest victims of this discrimination by the discriminated, on the whole, are those demanding the right to full expression of their sexual orientation. Very few wish to appear alongside them, so that gender and intersections remain a fiction2.
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The many thousands of people from very different backgrounds attending the NGO Forum offered a living image of the rich ethnic and cultural diversity of our planet. For all the different victims of racism, this was a unique opportunity for encounter, for recognition and solidarity or, if you prefer, res-ponsibility, because in the present circumstances in the world it is not a matter of some being saved - either we are all saved, or we all perish. When I first attended the preparatory events for the conference, I had the idea that discrimination and racism were topics that concerned only Black and Indigenous people, and that was the idea I took with me to the preparatory conference for the Americas in Chile. But there we met other groups of people, like the Roma people, of whom I had only a distant notion. I had sometimes seen them in my home-town and in other cities in Colombia, they had even offered to read my palm, I had heard the prejudices against them but, in my mind, they were simply "gypsies". I thought the Roma people were in Europe and they were something different. So it came as a shock, a slap in the face to find that the representative of the Roma people at the conference in Chile was a Colombian. Then there were the Dalit people in India, millions of people suffering discrimination based on a combination of caste and racism; the discovery that it is an illusion to think that apartheid had disappeared from the world, when the state of Israel is subjecting the Palestinian people to this crime; the meeting with many pale-skinned, blue-eyed Indigenous people from Europe, also suffering discrimination in their countries and regions, and all the other dark-skinned African Indigenous groups; realising that it is not simply a matter of defending the rights of homosexuals but also, as the final declaration of the NGO Forum of the Americas in Chile says, "gays, lesbians and bisexuals, transsexuals and transvestites"; in short, the empirical observation of something we already knew in theory: there are not two genders, but many genders. Well, perhaps not so empirical.
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| Betty Ruth Loszano © 2001 Paul Weinberg / WCC |
It is fair to say that no ethnic or cultural group obtained everything it was demanding and that some even experienced a set-back, like the Indigenous peoples who did not succeed in having article 27 deleted from the Declaration and the Programme of Action, even though it has repercussions for the rights recognised under international law. Thanks to lobbying by Africans and people of African descent, the final declaration by governments included the acknowledgement that "slavery and the slave trade are crimes against humanity and should always have been recognised as such, especially the transatlantic slave trade." Nevertheless, this aspect of the conference made us aware as never before of the global nature of the phenomenon of racism and we realised that, from the standpoint of the oppressed peoples of the world this is not just one more topic, it is the topic par excellence. The resistance coming from the United States also proved that this is the case, for the eradication of racism and racial discrimination touch on the most sensitive interests of first world countries, given that racism and racial discrimination underlay, and continued to underlie, the colonisation, evangelisation and marginalisation of our peoples. Western civilisation considers itself superior to all others and believes it has the moral, "messianic" obligation to save the others by colonising and evangelising them. So this is not simply a problem of educating the population not to be racist, nor is it simply a question of peaceful coexistence between "Whites" and "the others". It is a problem which has its roots in the economy that justifies the unequal distribution of wealth, determines geopolitical strategies etc. This is why the countries of the first world were not interested in accepting the linkage between poverty, colonial past and slavery, nor in adopting motions in favour of the Palestinian people, or including the Dalits on the list of victims.
The World Conference against Racism should not be seen as an event which took place in Durban, South Africa, from 31 August to 7 September of this year, but as a process which started from the moment the United Nations General Assembly decided in 1977 to hold this conference. Perhaps even before then, because the lobbying of the UN by various NGOs over a period of years helped to bring about this event. The process has involved many encounters which have brought us face to face with our own prejudices, and the prejudices of others. It has enabled us as organisations of people of African descent to look inward at ourselves, and we have often felt challenged by what we saw. For me the end result is our own growth as persons, as organisations, as networks. We cannot be the same after all we have experienced, with all the loves and hatreds. This process has contributed to many things and this could represent a substantial part of what this conference has achieved - plus the fact that we are certainly better prepared to tackle the next one! Let's start work on it now!
Betty Ruth Lozano is a woman of African descent born in Cali, Colombia.
Notes:
Translated from spanish
She was a member of the WCC delegation at the various preparatory events and at the conference in Durban. She is a sociologist.
WCC language service