Stewart Stogel, CNSNews.com
Thursday, Aug. 30, 2001

The statement is a 45-page document listing social ills and possible remedies. It has prompted the United States, Israel and several other countries to consider boycotting the conference, which begins Friday.

Secretary of State Colin Powell announced Monday that he would not attend the conference, but it is not clear whether lower-ranking U.S. officials might participate.

Israel also cast doubt on its participation.

Publicly, Washington professes to be concerned about intentions to cast Zionism (calls for a homeland for the Jewish people) as a racist philosophy.

The United States, dating back to the Ford administration, has steadfastly opposed the "Zionism as racism" concept since it came to the floor of the U.N. General Assembly in 1975.

In fact, the reference to the allegedly racist aspects of Zionism is mentioned more than a dozen times in the draft statement, a copy of which was obtained by CNSNews.

The draft statement compares Zionism to the recent "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, referring repeatedly to the "ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine." It also mentions "the Zionist movement which is based on racial superiority."

Felicia Gaer of the American Jewish Committee is quoted as saying that such statements "revive the anti-Semitic canard of the chosen people ... it also undermines the right of Israel to exist by claiming that the founding philosophy itself is racist."

What About China, Cambodia, Africa?

Conflicts between India and Pakistan, China and Tibet, Japan and China, Japan and Korea, Russia and Chechnya, receive only passing references in the document.

The Holocaust of World War II, the massacres in Cambodia, the Nigerian civil war, the Somalia civil war, and the wars in Rwanda and Burundi are also reduced to footnote status in the proposed draft statement.

Slavery Concern

The statement displays a prominent concern with the plight and forcible deportation of Africans to the U.S. and Caribbean region. The fact that most of this occurred in the 19th and early 20th centuries is ignored in the draft statement.

The question of monetary compensation for all those Africans affected by slavery is also highlighted.

Such a legal responsibility by the United States and other African colonial powers such as the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal could expose them to enormous judgments.

Will Slave-Trading African Nations Pay Themselves?

One passage reads: "We recognize that states which pursued policies or practices based on racial or national superiority, such as colonial or other forms of alien domination or foreign occupation, slavery, the slave trade, and ethnic cleansing, should assume responsibility, therefore, and compensate the victims."

The statement continues, "States which pursued racist policies or acts of discrimination such as slavery and colonialism should assume their moral, legal, economic, political, and legal responsibilities within their national jurisdictions ... and provide adequate reparations to those communities."

One U.N. staffer noted that in her opinion, the U.S. and Europeans could never accept such responsibility, but she felt it would not be "politically correct" for those countries to say so publicly.

"How could Colin Powell stand up and oppose the references to slavery?" she asked.

Other items the statement seeks to address include a single mention of the plight of the Mestizos (a cross of Spanish and South American Indian blood) in Latin America, to those individuals affected by (unspecified) "genetic conditions" and "congenital disorders."

One U.N. staffer summed it up this way: "There is a lot of serious racism this conference needs to be concerned about. ... But, I doubt that any of it is really going to be addressed."

Copyright CNSNews.com

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