Remarks to the Durban Review Conference

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Delivered by Imani Countess, Senior Director of Public Affairs, TransAfrica Forum

Mr. President, Madame High Commissioner, Honorable Ministers, members of the Conference Secretariat, colleagues and friends, thank you for this opportunity to briefly share the views of TransAfrica Forum, a U.S.-based non-governmental organization. 

On behalf of our Board Chairman, actor/activist and UN Goodwill Ambassador, Danny Glover, our Board of Directors, and our Executive Director, Nicole Lee, I want to extend our greetings and our deep thanks to the UN Human Rights Council for organizing this important conference to evaluate progress towards the goals set by the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. 

Like other U.S. participants, TransAfrica Forum deeply regrets our government's decision to boycott the Durban Review Conference.  As one Minister stated yesterday, we are bewildered by the decision.  In the United States we have made significant progress in the struggle to overcome racism, but the challenge of dismantling the structures of racism, discrimination, and intolerance, which are deeply engrained in every aspect of U.S. culture and society, is considerable.

TransAfrica Forum, the oldest and largest African America social justice and human rights organization focused exclusively on U.S. international relations, is particularly concerned with several aspects of international economic policy toward the Global South, which we believe work to entrench global inequality and underdevelopment. Specifically, as the Commission continues the work of implementing the recommendations of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, we hope that you will consider coordinating with other parts of the UN system as well as member states to address aspects of the global economic architecture that reinforce and entrench, what some have characterized as global apartheid.  

In particular, we urge the Council to ensure that the monitoring tools established to assess the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, also include benchmarks and objectives that member states can be encouraged to use when bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements, partnership agreements, and other trade mechanisms are structured.  Impact statements that accurately describe and assess how trade agreements affect minority, indigenous, marginalized, Africans, and African descendant communities should also be developed and weighed in the negotiation process, and protections guaranteed.

Additionally, the recent meeting of the G-20 has resulted in agreement regarding the revitalization of the International Monetary Fund, which has been promised a massive influx of new funding.  Yet, the Fund’s harsh economic conditions have historically resulted in the deindustrialization of many nations, particularly in Africa and throughout the Global South, thereby reinforcing paternalistic relations and external control of fragile economies.  IMF limits on budget allocations and restrictions on social infrastructure investment ensure an international double standard, where countries with large economies are able to democratically determine their spending priorities and developing countries are held hostage to conservative economic theories and formulas that are in large measure the cause of the current global economic crisis. We hope that the Council members will encourage a complete reform of the Fund and its sister organization, the World Bank.

We further call upon donor nations to end the practice of "phantom aid," which on the one hand perpetuates the myth of donor generosity, while in reality extends significant benefits to northern-based NGOs and businesses. This is particularly true of the United States.  Rather, economic development must be re-conceptualized as an investment in the global public good.

Moreover, if we are truly to overcome economic inequality, which disproportionately affects people of color around the world, northern nations must also end agricultural trade subsidies which undermine farmers and industry throughout the Global South.

The nations of Southern Africa remind us, apartheid was not just a system of racism and discrimination, but was coupled with a brutal economy of hyper-exploitation.  The same economic exploitation is seen in relationship between many nations of the Global North and the Global South today.

TransAfrica Forum is heartened by the reaffirmations of the DDPA, and looks forward to working with the Council, our government, and our NGO partners to further the implementation of the Declaration.