Durban a sucess?

Madina Archives


Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board

Durban a sucess?
amatullah
09/12/01 at 05:09:59
Bismillah and salam,

Here is the perspective of Z Magazine on the Durban Conference on
Racism.

The Ruse of Israel: Durban Failures.

Vijay Prashad.

At the intersection of Durban's Grey and Queen streets sits the largest
mosque in the southern hemisphere, the Jama Masjid or Friday Mosque
(completed in 1927). A cool, spring breeze filters into the courtyard
where I'm spending some moments with a group of young believers, most of
whom have ancestors who rode the waves from India to southern Africa
almost two hundred years ago. They are curious about the World
Conference Against Racism (WCAR), just as I am about their lives and
this mosque.

This is the third WCAR, I tell them; the first two (in 1978 and 1983)
took place in Geneva and had as their ambit freedom for all South
Africans. It is fitting, therefore, that this WCAR be held in a free
South Africa, even as we had just finished a discussion about an
anti-privatization strike and of the privations of life after apartheid.
Little can compare to the indignities of the Herrenvolk state, and, to
the embarrassment of the youth, only a few elders in the corners of our
conversations intimated that there was less crime, even if less dignity,
during the earlier days. Nevertheless, the elders too recounted how the
center of Durban was almost entirely a white zone, how they would walk
hesitantly from the Indian townships of Chatsworth and Phoenix to their
jobs in the city, and then retreat every once in a while to the Indian
district near Grey Street. But if apartheid was a sharp form of
inhumanity, the current crisis of unemployment and insecurity is not any
less heinous because it is maintained so obviously by state force. While
brown faces now dominate everyday life in the center of the city, many
of those faces are gaunt with hunger and desperation.

The conversation turned, precipitously, to Israel. I suspected we'd get
there soon enough because anyone who talks about the WCAR seems to find
him or herself in this imbroglio. Besides many of the youth in the
courtyard had participated in the pro-Palestine march earlier in the
week, and a few posters to indicate that event adorned the entryway into
the mosque. My new friends seemed reasonably well informed about Israel,
about the restrictions to movement of Palestinians for work, of the
routine violence by the Israeli state against political figures, of the
miserable conditions of everyday life in the Authority. Ramallah became
Soweto or Chatsworth, Abu Mustafa became Chris Hani and the Pass Laws
seemed to come alive in the roadblocks and humiliations as Palestinians
tried to get to their jobs and hospitals in the state of Israel. For
these very liberal and heterodox Muslims, the conundrum of Israel was
simple: here is a state for one people (Jews) which retains a mixed
population because of historical circumstances and for its labor needs,
and for security and fiscal reasons it does not contemplate the
treatment of its fellows as equals.

This is all well and good, I said, but why is the issue of Israel at the
heart of the conference, indeed why has the United States pinned its own
participation here based on the question of Israel? The answer that one
often heard in Durban, both at the mosque and in the conference halls,
is that this has to do with the special relationship of the US and
Israel or perhaps with the Jewish lobby in the United States. Of course
the US executive is a Republican and if anything the "Jewish vote" is
mainly Democratic, so that the latter reason is specious. Furthermore,
the US does not always stand beside Israel with such ferocity. For
example, in recent months the Israeli government has been a bit
frustrated with the tendency of the US to be critical of its excesses,
such as the assassination of PFLP leader Abu Mustafa. Why should the US
alienate such a vast section of the world, and of its own citizenry, on
behalf of Israel? Or did the US really leave Durban only because of
Israel?

The issue at Durban was neither merely the question of an Israeli racism
nor mainly of definitions of race. The third WCAR built from the
heritage of the two previous meetings and from our current context of
neoliberal globalization. The first conference in 1978 trashed the
biological idea of race, and suggested that "race" was entirely a social
fiction. Following this it offered a strong condemnation of "the extreme
form of institutionalized racism" in South African apartheid, and it
suggested economic measures to liberate peoples around the world from a
racism embedded in our institutions. This was a far seeing document and
it set the trend for the decades to come. Five years later, again in
Geneva, the WCAR once again condemned South Africa, noted the sharp
oppression of women of color and of "indigenous people." The third WCAR,
following from the spirit of the 1978 meeting, was all principally about
the question of a remedy.

Many African and Asian nations, and most Africans of the diaspora, put
the issue of a formal apology for slavery and colonialism, as well as
concomitant reparations at the forefront of their Durban agenda. Chattel
slavery in the Americas and the colonial extraction of materials and
labor in Asia and Africa produced the values that fueled the industrial
revolution in northwest Europe and northeastern America. Without that
free labor, it is unlikely that we'd have such a disparity of wealth
across the globe: colonialism made whiteness a form of property, and
that possession was then cashed in by self-designated whites for the
resources of the world. The best justification for this is John Locke's
Second Treatise, where he writes that only those who use god's resources
("whites" such as himself) have title to the soil, whereas those who do
not (such as Amerindians) may be freely expropriated. The bill for
unpaid back wages was tendered at Durban.

Europe and the US of course did not want to pay that bill; indeed they
did not want to start the conversation about reparations. The former
colonies asked that slavery and colonialism must be deemed a "crime
against humanity," a formulation rejected by the European Union and the
US since it might, according to representatives of the EU, open
whiteness up to lawsuits. The Zimbabwean minister of justice, himself
rather compromised by the lawless land grabs, nevertheless was on point
when he said that the EU and the USA "are more worried about their
wallets than moral issues." The EU stayed the distance of the
negotiations, eager to tender an apology for slavery and colonialism and
ask that the world community, and particularly the former colonial
states, contribute to "restore the dignity of the victims." The United
States had already left the conference by the time these negotiations
came up, so that their representative did not have to reveal that the
dollar is far more important than the dignity of its own citizens. If
the EU at least came to the table with talk of "contributions," the US
government in recent years has shown that it is averse to even such an
approach (with the demise of even liberal measures, such as welfare and
other social programs, toward building the capacity of impoverished
people of color).

Israel provided the US with the high ground. Rather than deal with the
mess of history, the US could leave the WCAR on a white horse, as the
champion of a state that portrays itself as a victim. Israel bore more
weight for the US State Department than its own citizens, particularly
African Americans who, poll data indicates, overwhelmingly support some
form of reparations (often as a social investment fund rather than as
individual paychecks). The US NGO delegation, a full fourth of the total
NGOs at Durban, found that they had less input into the State
Department, and indeed felt treated as interlopers in a discussion among
the powers. The issue of reparations, then, was occluded by the question
of Israel.

We're drinking tea outside the mosque, and I'm talking to my two new
friends who migrated from Lahore a decade ago. We keep fighting each
other for land, he tells me, when we should be aware that the ground is
being taken away from under us. Neoliberal globalization wants to retain
the advantages secured by history and to undermine the limited gains
made by import-substitution style anti-racist justice. And the wily
guardians of the old order, such as the US, turn us away from those
issues, prevent a discussion of such problems, and make a tragic
situation the convenient scapegoat for their own mendacity. Durban's
failures, then, were occasioned less by the scattered debates that
taught us so much about the different forms of oppression around the
world. Culpability for the failure must be borne by the US and the EU,
both eager to protect their pocketbooks and to avoid the appearance of
callous racism rather than put the creditors at bay. No bill goes
unpaid: at least the capitalist core should know that!


Individual posts do not necessarily reflect the views of Jannah.org, Islam, or all Muslims. All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the poster and may not be used without consent of the author.
The rest © Jannah.Org