From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 00:11:47 -0400
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: Durban Summit: Bush Avoids Being Put in the Dock
Durban Summit: Bush Avoids Being Put in the Dock
Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit
Granma International Digital, August 29, 2001
<www.granma.cu>
Durban Summit Against Racism:
BUSH AVOIDS BEING PUT IN THE DOCK
. "...the current economic order imposed by the rich countries is not only
unjust, cruel, inhumane and counter to the inevitable course of history, but
also the bearer of a racist concept of the world" -- Fidel Castro, April
2001
by Julio Cesar Mejias Cardenas
DURBAN has already welcomed to South Africa more than 14,000 delegates from
194 countries who are deliberating on how to eradicate the human suffering
constantly eating away at life on the planet.
The city/port on the coast of the Indian Ocean, is host to the 1st World
Conference against Racism, Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Forms of
Intolerance, sponsored by the United Nations, but vetoed by that
organization's main debtor: the United States.
While thousands of voices will be calling for justice throughout the world,
due to the heavy burden of human distress at such levels of cruelty and
poverty, President George W. Bush is refusing to accept the demands of the
sufferers, much less sit down to talk in order to make the life of the
world's peoples a genuinely humane one.
That multinational capital, shaped over the centuries by the exploitation of
peoples and the suffering of slaves, is now opposed to being judged. The
rich nations of the globalizing North cannot believe that there is something
new under the sun: the angry protest of the oppressed.
Those nations that are imposing misery and death on entire continents,
devastating the environment and plundering the peoples, cannot face the
charge which is hanging over them.
Bush, for example, has stated that he will not attend because those present
are going to upset Israel by accusing its government of being racist. With
this attitude, the U.S. president is once more demonstrating his complacency
at the genocide being committed on a daily basis by the Israeli regime
against the Palestinian people.
Neither is the meeting to be graced by Colin Powell, secretary of state and
the first African American to ascend to such heights within Washington power
circles. It is thought that if Washington participates, it will does so in a
low-level capacity and on the condition that Zionism is not made synonymous
with racism, a thesis accepted by many Arab states.
In any case the United States has to face demands for reparations for the
holocaust provoked from 1619 to 1865 in its own country by the system of
slavery that tore Africans from their own land, a denigrating phenomenon
that passed into posterity as the slave trade.
Japanese Koichiro Matsura, director general of UNESCO, is insisting that
that phenomenon should be researched with maximum rigor, so as to forge a
universal awareness of the tragedy attributable to slavery.
Why should Bush and Powell attend a world conference that is to precisely
condemn the politics of the government they represent, whose police daily
oppress the African-American population or other ethnic and racial
minorities; or what could be termed the homicide of a young black father
with no criminal convictions by a white police agent a few weeks ago in
Philadelphia. An incident which led to huge street protests, but no
punishment for the perpetrator.
Although African Americans only constitute 12% of the total U.S. population,
they represented 62% of U.S. citizens sent to prison in 1996--the only year
for which figures are available--on drug trafficking charges. In case anyone
should be in doubt of the racist nature of U.S. politics, external and
internal, here is one more example: the attempt to present Mumia Abu Jamal
and other political prisoners as common criminals and frame them for crimes
they did not commit in order to convict and send them to Death Row. In real
terms, it does not suit Bush or Powell to be in Durban, as they would be the
first to be dispatched to the huge dock.
Apartheid, that ignominious regime of white supremacy, has ended in South
Africa, but at least 250 million people on the planet are still living under
the yoke of segregation and servitude.
Are those demanding of the former slave powers an explicit plea for pardon
for the brutal slave trade of former centuries in the right?
Does anyone doubt the cruelty and savagery of Israel's Zionist politics as a
manifestation of racism and discrimination at the beginning of the third
millennium?
Is not the AIDS crisis in Africa the bitter harvest of a global
discrimination which subjects it to ostracism as a consequence of five
centuries of racism, slavery and impoverishing colonialism?
Is not the anti-drug policy within the United States a racist one given that
the government uses it as a shield in order to persecute representatives of
ethnic and racial minorities?
Whether the powerful nations of the North like it or not, in Durban the
responses to these and other questions are going to be confirmed and,
moreover, the movement of the oppressed in their struggle for equal rights
will gain in unity and awareness. This could just be the beginning of the
pending revolution--hopefully peaceful--of the sufferers in search of
justice and peace.
(c) 2001, Granma International Digital.
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