Tough Lessons From a Conference on Global Human Rights

By Richard Magat

Less than a month before the September 11 terrorist attacks, a United Nations conference in Durban, South Africa, focused on racism, xenophobia, and related forms of intolerance. Leading American foundations and civil-rights groups deemed the meeting a success, even a milestone, for forthright declarations of the rights of such oppressed minorities as Gypsies, low-caste Dalit in India and other parts of Asia, indigenous people of Latin America, and Afro-Brazilians.

But those of us who knew of the conference only from media accounts regarded it as another injury to international comity, an injury that became all the more disturbing a month later with the terrorist attacks and the ensuing erosion of tolerance and understanding across the globe. The conference, which drew thousands of government and other participants from 193 countries, including some 1,000 nongovernmental organizations, was disrupted by forces that condemned Israel and sought to equate Zionism with racism. Meeting rooms were papered with crude, inflammatory anti-Israel posters and classic distorted facial caricatures of Jews. Anti-Semitic literature such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was on sale. The Bush administration ordered the U.S. delegation to pull out of the conference in protest.

Regrettably, the international news media focused almost exclusively on the anti-Israeli rhetoric at the Durban conference and ignored the important work that delegates sought to accomplish. While luminaries such as Mary Robinson, the U.N. human-rights commissioner, condemned the sensationalistic attacks on Israel, American foundations and charities were ineffective at steering the media spotlight toward more productive activities that nonprofit organizations successfully lobbied to include in the governments’ final statement.

Nonprofit organizations were less willing than governments to disown anti-Israel themes. Still, more than 80 nongovernmental organizations, led by those in Central and Eastern Europe, signed a statement disapproving language that singled out Israel.

Wade Henderson, executive director of the Washington-based Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, declared that legitimate human-rights issues in the Middle East were obscured by “fervent rhetorical attacks that generate more heat than light.”

The divisiveness should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the great array of nongovernmental organizations. They come in many shapes and under a variety of auspices — nation-based and international, even government-organized and political. Their values sometimes clash sharply with one another.

If the Durban conference holds a lesson for American nonprofit organizations that operate internationally, it is that they should rethink the ways in which they work with the news media, foreign governments, and nongovernmental organizations to advance human rights and civil society.

Among the key points that foundations and nonprofit human-rights organizations should take from the Durban experience:

• Responsible nongovernmental organizations seek attention for a range of vital human-rights issues, from land mines to poverty to political prisoners, but some nongovernmental organizations have less savory motives — ones that are purely political and anti-democratic. A Canadian participant concluded that the Durban conference demonstrated “what civil society becomes when it ceases to be civil. It is an unruly mob, a kangaroo court, a bunch of bullies and cowards.” At future human-rights conferences, American nonprofit groups will need to exercise a more sophisticated recognition of those differences.
• Stronger efforts are needed to brief journalists on the scene and their editors at home on substantive issues of international meetings like the Durban conference. Controversy too often crowds out positive results. Other U.N. meetings have been co-opted by radical elements. The spotlight on abortion at the U.N. Conference on Population and Development, in Cairo in 1994, and on Chinese attempts to hamper participation of nongovernmental organizations at the U.N. World Conference on Women, in Beijing in 1995, foreshadowed the heavily negative publicity given Durban.
• American civil-rights groups need to repair their relations with Washington and impress upon the Bush administration the importance of continual engagement with world leaders on human-rights issues. Leaders of American foundations and civil-rights groups were frustrated at Durban by what some critics saw as an abdication of the federal government’s responsibilities to foster human rights abroad. By walking out, the U.S. delegation lost an opportunity to influence the dialogue positively.
• Nongovernmental organizations from the United States and other democratic nations must become more sophisticated about constitutional and procedural matters. Huge conferences are tailor-made for chaos and confusion. Two years of preparation, much of it foundation-supported, preceded Durban, with grants to more than a dozen American and foreign civil-society groups, including the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights, which sponsored the Durban meeting. But progress was impeded by the presence of 41 nongovernmental-organization caucuses, unclear rules, and an overly detailed 65-page draft document by a body of nongovernmental organizations. Participants who focused on the Middle East were skillfully organized, and their parliamentary maneuvers were intricate and unrelenting.

In light of discriminatory acts against Muslims in the United States after the September 11 assaults, foundations and charities that focus on civil rights should make special efforts to include on their agendas discrimination against Muslim-Americans and racial profiling of people of Asian and Middle Eastern origin. At the same time, nonprofit groups should not apologize for American values, nor should they echo those who stress the international misdeeds of the United States while ignoring the nation’s rich humanitarian record.

Durban and the events of September 11 make it important that American foundations and the nonprofit world generally stay the course in supporting people outside our borders who work to advance the principles of democratic civil society. At the same time, Durban’s most enduring legacy for the American nonprofit world may be in the lessons it holds for future conferences on human rights.

Richard Magat, a senior fellow at Community Resources Exchange, in New York, is former president of the Edward W. Hazen Foundation.