GENEVA — — While last week’s UN-led World Conference Against Racism made headlines with walkouts by delegates during Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel inaugural speech and for its general anti-Zionist timbre, a separate conference across the lake acknowledged Israel’s right to statehood.

MP Pierre Poilievre, parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper

The concurrent Conference Against Racism, Discrimination and Persecution – hosted by UN Watch and sponsored by a host of NGOs, including the Darfur Peace and Development Organization, the International Day Against Homophobia, the American Jewish Committee and the World Students Christian Federation – attracted more than 700 registrants, Canadian UN Watch intern Alexis Levy told The CJN.

Representing Canada at this alternate gathering in Geneva were Pierre Poilievre, parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Liberal MP and noted human rights advocate Irwin Cotler.

Other notable speakers at the event included French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, former Soviet refusenik and Israeli MK Natan Sharansky and Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz.

Poilievre said it was an honour to represent his government at the counter-conference and a privilege to be able to speak alongside Sharansky, Cotler and Dershowitz, whom he termed three of his “heroes.”

Poilievre recalled the UN’s founding principles and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights as “a model for all nations to strive toward” then proceeded to lament the nature of the UN’s Durban Review Conference, known as Durban II, saying the world organization’s event had “degenerated into a soapbox for those who would demonize the democratic State of Israel.”

Saying the UN’s Durban process had “fallen so short” of being useful as a forum for discussing racism that it was now “beyond the pale,” Poilievre proudly defended Canada’s January 2008 decision not to attend.

“My presence here today, at the real anti-racism conference, is to say to you and the world that Canada will never stop the fight against racism.”

Cotler’s address included a discussion of ways to uncover the neglected voices of victims and a critique of state-sanctioned cultures of hate in many nations today. He said that leaders such as Ahmadinejad belong “at the docket of the accused, not at the podium of the UN.”

He added: “The first and enduring lesson of the Holocaust and the genocides that followed, from Srebrenica to Rwanda, is that they occurred not only because of the machinery of death, but because of the state-sanctioned incitement to hate. It is this teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other. This is where it all begins.

“The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers, it began with words. These… are the chilling facts of history… the catastrophic effects of racism.”

The opening session of the counter-conference was moderated by Harold Tanner of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and featured Vatican adviser Father Patrick Desbois, who criticized the UN as “a principal of irresponsibility that engages in scapegoating on behalf of perpetrators so that they themselves are not accused of intolerance.”

Cotler cautioned listeners about a UN Human Rights Council that has adopted 32 resolutions since 2006 – 26 of which singled out Israel, and none of which made any mention of human rights abuses in Iran or Sudan’s Darfur region.

Later, this point was further articulated by Lévy, who asked the audience: “What happens if you are neither Israeli nor Palestinian? If you don’t fall into these categories you simply don’t exist. You have no voice in history. That is the scandal of Durban I and Durban II.”

Contrary to the UN-sponsored main conference, the counter-conference gave voices to those such as Gibriel Hamid, President of the Darfur Peace and Development Centre, and Ester Mujawayo, who lost her husband and parents in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and escaped to Switzerland to work as a psychologist with survivors of the massacre.  

Mujawayo’s address moved many in the audience to tears as she recounted her struggle to survive and rebuild a life for her three daughters.

Other speakers at the conference included former Miss Canada Nazanin Afshin Jam, an Iranian-Canadian who spoke of her family’s immigration from Iran and of the heart-wrenching cases she witnesses in her work as president of the international advocacy group Stop Child Executions.

Nazanin is currently advocating for Delara Derabi, a young woman who is on death row in Iran in violation of an International Covenant prohibiting the execution of children for crimes committed under the age of 18.

Durban II’s final declaration was ratified a full three days prior to the conclusion of the conference and included the item that prompted Israel and 9 other countries to boycott the meeting: a reaffirmation of the 2001 Durban document, which singles out only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, includes clauses designed to limit freedom of speech and enable Muslim anti-blasphemy laws, and politicizes the discourse on racism.  Notably, while it affirms the controversial 2001 document, the Durban II document does not directly single out Israel.

Last week, the UN also revoked the credentials of a number of Jewish activists who disrupted Ahmadinejad’s speech on the first day of the Durban Review Conference.

Of the 46 badges that were pulled for disruptive behaviour, the vast majority were from individuals accredited through Jewish organizations. Notably, the French Union of Jewish Students lost 21 badges.

Credentials were stripped as well from four members of the European Union of Jewish Students and one B’nai Brith member. Between them, French and European Jewish student groups had 370 members accredited, amounting to more than one-third of all the NGO activists at the conference.

Two members of an Iranian group were expelled for distributing “offensive materials” and an Israeli journalist was sent out for “screaming racist comments” from the gallery, according to UN spokesperson Rupert Colville.

But where the NGO Forum at Durban I was chaos and bedlam, activism at Durban II was limited by the replacement of an official NGO Forum for informal NGO side sessions, and by moving the conference to the safer, more neutral and more transparent grounds of Geneva.  These changes were in part a result of the advocacy of organization like the American Jewish Committee who were determined to prevent the anarchy of Durban I.

And whereas critics of Israel in 2001 drowned out pro-Israel voices, Ahmadinejad’s speech was met by denunciations in the media, including a rare rebuke by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. And after Ahmadinejad relinquished the podium, the next speaker, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store, called the Iranian president’s speech “incitement to hatred, spreading politics of fear and promoting an indiscriminate message of intolerance.”

For their part, pro-Israel protesters went on the offensive, interrupting Ahmadinejad’s speech and providing context to the Israel-focused tone of the conference with their own news conferences, demonstrations and Holocaust commemorations – the conference coincided with Yom Hashoah – in Geneva and beyond.

While the singling out of Israel surprised delegates at the 2001 conference, Israel’s allies worked hard in the months leading up to Geneva to ensure it did not devolve into a complete repeat of Durban I.

With files from JTA and Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf