GENEVA, (Reuters) – A growing Western boycott threatens to undermine a United Nations conference on racism that Israel’s friends say could become a platform for scathing criticism of the Jewish state.
The United States announced on Saturday it would stay away, citing “objectionable” language in a text prepared for the Geneva meeting which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will address today, its opening day.
Australia, the Netherlands and Germany joined the boycott yesterday, and Italy is also expected to sit it out.
Canada and Israel have said for months they will shun the meeting, which the United Nations organised to help heal the wounds left by its last race summit in South Africa in 2001.
The United States and Israel walked out of that conference after Arab states sought to define Zionism as racist.
Australia said it shared U.S. concerns about the declaration for the follow-up conference, which omits explicit references to Israel and the Middle East but “reaffirms” a text adopted at the 2001 Durban summit which singled out the Jewish state.
“Regrettably, we cannot be confident that the Review Conference will not again be used as a platform to air offensive views, including anti-Semitic views,” Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said in a statement.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said: “The decision was not easy. But the German government thinks that, despite intense efforts especially on the part of the EU, the conference will be misused for other interests, just as the previous conference was in 2001.”
Human rights activists said that without diplomats from Western governments present the draft document may be reopened for negotiation during the week-long conference and possibly not agreed at all.
U.S. President Barack Obama, speaking at a news conference after the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, said that Washington wanted a “clean slate” before tackling race and discrimination issues at the United Nations.
“If we have a clean start, a fresh start, we are happy to go,” he said, explaining the U.S. position. “If you’re incorporating a previous conference that we weren’t involved with (and) that raised a whole set of objectionable provisions, then we couldn’t participate.”
The draft text was negotiated by diplomats in months of highly sensitive talks in Geneva. The United States largely stood aside and while EU countries were involved, they had reservations throughout.
Attempts to forge a common EU position on attending the conference proved futile.
