America's UN Boycott Backfires [View All]

[Better Believe It]

America's UN Boycott Backfires
By Barbara Crossette
Barbara Crossette is The Nation's United Nations correspondent. A former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, she is the author of several books on Asia, including So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995 and in paperback by Random House/Vintage Destinations in 1996, and a collection of travel essays about colonial resort towns that are still attracting visitors more than a century after their creation, The Great Hill Stations of Asia, published by Westview Press in 1998 and in paperback by Basic Books in 1999. In 2000, she wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, India: Old Civilization in a New World, for the Foreign Policy Association in New York. She is also the author of India Facing the 21st Century, published by Indiana University Press in 1993.

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The Obama administration and the United States as a whole will be haunted for a long time by the decision to boycott a United Nations international conference on racism and intolerance starting today in Geneva.

For the review that runs all this week, many nations have worked for months in bare-knuckle negotiations to create a report erasing offensive provisions, a report that the United States--a hoped for shining star with its first African-American president--could live with.

Instead, the United States turned its back on a chance to do more to enhance its image across the developing world than any grand tour of Europe could ever accomplish. Washington ran away from a confrontation that many struggling human rights activists in the poorest and often most repressed countries would have welcomed. A lot of nations could do with a stern lecture on tolerance and the treatment of minorities from President Obama. Now the brazen troublemakers have been ceded the floor. This "triumph" will embolden them and color other UN forums to come.

In the United States the reaction from human rights organizations and other interested groups was immediate. In a statement given to CNN, the Congressional Black Caucus said it was "deeply dismayed" by the decision. "Had the United States sent a high-level delegation reflecting the richness and diversity of our country, it would have sent a powerful message to the world that we're ready to lead by example," the caucus said. "Instead, the administration opted to boycott the conference, a decision that does not advance the cause of combating racism and intolerance but rather sets the cause back."

Juliette de Rivero, advocacy director in Geneva for Human Rights Watch, said: "The boycott plays into the hands of those who want the conference to fail. The only ones celebrating will be those who want to undermine efforts to defeat racism and protect rights."

Please read the complete article at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090504/crossette?rel=hp_picks

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U.S. will boycott U.N. conference on racism
By Laura MacInnis and Sue Pleming

GENEVA/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States will boycott a United Nations conference on racism next week, the U.S. State Department said on Saturday, citing objectionable language in the meeting's draft declaration.

The Obama administration, which kept its distance from preparations for the "Durban II" meeting, has come under strong pressure from Israel not to attend.

A draft declaration prepared for the conference removed all references to Israel, the Middle East conflict and a call to bar "defamation of religion" -- an Arab-backed response to a 2006 controversy over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that Western states see as a way to quash free expression.

Wood conceded there had been improvements to the document, but he said it was not enough.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090418/pl_nm/us_rights_un_7

- The declaration did not meet Israel's requirements which wants the UN's efforts to combat racism to fail. -

It appears that Israel has a great deal more influence and pull in the Obama administration than the Congressional Black Caucus and leading Black organizations such as the NAACP.