From Durban II (arkiv)

Final Whimpers in Geneva

Durban II, the weeklong UN Durban Review Conference, ended Friday with no bang and many whimpers.

The compromise final outcome document was formally adopted by the delegates in the half-empty Assembly Hall of Geneva’s Palais des Nations after a day and a half of three-minute speeches by dozens of non-governmental organizations making often contradictory complaints.

They were followed up in a closing ceremony by governmental spokesmen for the national groupings who joined in the consensus - Pakistan for the 57-member Organization of …

The Calm After the Storm

It’s all over but the shouting in Geneva.

The final outcome document of the UN’s Durban II anti-racism conference was adopted today, the second day of the five-day meeting, without even a mumbling complaint.

Despite all fears, it skirts all the controversies - Israel, “defamation of religions,” Western reparations for the slave trade. The most important thing about it is all the controversial things that it doesn’t say.

In the middle of Tuesday afternoon, the conference chairman announced that the meeting’s Main Committee …

Successful Provocation

He apparently came to provoke, and he succeeded.

If anybody had expected Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be conciliatory, he disappointed with an impressive display of polemical talent. He even added to the traditional Great Satans and Little Satans of Islamic Republican rhetoric a call to end the hold of the permanent, veto-holding members over the UN Security Council - China, Britain, France, Russia and the United States.

And he was backed up by a claque of Iranians, including women in hejabs …

Trying to find consensus

At the start of the weekend before the UN’s Durban II conference in Geneva, the organizers were trying, really trying, to pull off a consensus that would allow things to go ahead and maybe even attract recalcitrant governments threatening a boycott, starting with the United States.

But feelings were still raw.

The opposite extremes amongst the debating diplomats in the windowless preparatory conference hall in the old League of Nations complex in Geneva seemed to be representatives of the Netherlands and Syria.

The …