M. Gabovich. Geneva. Day three

The conference continues to "spread out" - the impression of dissonance of groups and associations that actually do not pay attention to each other is growing. Until now (I am writing on April 23), the official segment continues, today at 13 o'clock a session of speeches by NGO representatives at the general assembly should begin. By yesterday's deadline, more than 110 organizations have registered, each of which, according to the regulations, gets three minutes for their speech - apparently, this "segment" will occupy the main part of today and all of tomorrow.

Representatives of many NGOs expressed disappointment that the final document of the conference was already adopted on Tuesday - it seems that many hoped to somehow influence it, although, as Ronald Eissens from the Netherlands Magenta Foundation constantly emphasizes in his blog, this should have been done during the 18 months of preparatory work. process, not during the conference.

In the meantime, high-profile events continue on the sidelines of the conference, organized primarily by various pro-Israel Jewish organizations: yesterday - I don’t understand how spontaneously - a “Conference against racism, discrimination and persecution” was held in another part of Geneva, at which, judging by the report , there were already familiar topics of "anti-Zionism - the new anti-Semitism", criticism of undemocratic Muslim states in which human rights are violated, and the inaction of the UN in the face of the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur.

The "clown" action that I wrote about yesterday, as it turned out, was organized by the European Union of Jewish Students. Formally, as one Russian-speaking activist of this organization told me yesterday, its French branch took responsibility, and as a result, only it lost its accreditation (unverified information).

It is interesting to compare the different level of coordination of different thematic and regional "caucuses". A number of European NGOs, dissatisfied with Durban-1, formed a caucus at the conference itself in 2001, which made a number of statements (see the book "After Durban", however, hard to access since the site of the NGO Network Against Racism died). And I watched the first steps of creating a caucus of Africans and people of African descent (Africans and Afrodescendants - a new collective term for me) yesterday, and now I am sitting at a similar meeting of a number of Latin American organizations: according to the representative of the all-Latin American "Human Rights Education Campaign", the level of participation of Latin American NGOs, in contrast to European ones, increased at the second conference, and although they are disappointed by the dominance of the Middle East, they still hope to be heard. The two aforementioned caucuses overlap somewhat, as there are a number of Hispanic and Caribbean activists of African descent among the initiators of the African caucuses. The highest level of coordination and organization, and even funding, is shown by the International Jewish Caucus, whose representatives claim to speak on behalf of all Jewish organizations represented at the conference (this is not entirely true: yesterday, for example, I saw two Hasidim with badges "Free Palestine! against the background of the Palestinian flag).

Again and again I am convinced that the watershed lines are not just between universalist human rights activists and ethnocentric "sacrifice advocates" (or rather, this very definition, for all its analytical merits, expresses a normative point of view, much more widely represented in Europe and among American Jewish organizations than in other countries and among African Americans): there are real regional differences, without taking into account which it is unlikely that it will be possible to move forward along the path of international dialogue. While in Europe (perhaps especially Eastern) the idea of ​​universal human rights principles has historically played a huge role, African and Latin American activists cannot forget the history of colonialism and often perceive exactly how universal norms are promoted and justified (and how they apply to the case of Israel and Palestinians) as a mechanism of Western domination and the suppression of their legitimate interests - the recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity, the struggle for "ancestral lands" in Latin America, etc. One can, of course, ignore the regional rootedness of these differences and consider "ethnocentrism" dangerous in all its manifestations, but then Western "universalists" themselves may face the problem of democratic legitimization of the principles they promote: "good" NGOs (not to mention states) in many countries "we don't have for you" (or few).

I can't write anymore now. For some additional observations, such as from the meeting of the High Commissioner for Human Rights with NGOs and the principles for selecting African participants, see my English blog: http://durbanreview.blogspot.com .