Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-02-Speech-2-233"
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"en.20011002.9.2-233"2
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"Mr President, at the heart of my political group's approach to the Durban conference is a renewed determination to tackle racism and to discover what was positive about this conference. I say renewed because racism in its many forms has reared its head again, with the tragic events in New York and Washington. We have now a danger that a renewed wave of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism will come if we do not tackle racism and its root causes.
That illustrated the tragedy of this conference, because I felt I attended two conferences. One was a historic conference where delegations, like our own European Union delegation, were determined to register that racism is a major human rights issue. We were determined to define for the first time racism in its many international forms, whether caste, a contemporary slavery, or whether discrimination against minorities within our own European Union and indeed the candidate countries. We were determined to do something about racism, to show that with Article 13 we in the European Union had something to say to the rest of the world about how we were approaching our own problems.
Yet there was a second conference that I attended, full of confusion, of individual national agendas, a determination not to define racism in different countries because of an embarrassment as to what racism represented in those countries. The confusion arose over the much misunderstood issue of reparations, and indeed the very destructive issue of Zionism and the problems in the Middle East, overshadowed our conference.
We have to be determined that the first conference, with the ideals we as a delegation defined for it, are renewed in this House today. That requires a united front. It requires us not to just say that Durban was chaotic, therefore we will leave it that way for history. Instead, we as a European Union united, the Commission, the Belgian Presidency – which did an excellent job – those who attended the conference and all of us within this House who want to tackle racism must unite to go back to the original agenda. That original agenda is one which may embarrass some individual countries, but the action programme is now there. It is there for us to exploit and it is there for us to do something about. The issue is not whether this is a failure or not, it is about whether we can now make it a success by renewed determination within this House to get back to the action programme and make progress."@en1
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