Durban | Thursday
DURBAN is set for potentially crippling protests on Thursday, as the bulk of heads of state attending the World Conference Against Racism jet into the city.
The leaders including Cuban President Fidel Castro and his Palestinian counterpart Yasser Arafat are among 15 heads of state, mostly African, that will attend the week-long United Nations conference starting on Friday.
Most of them will arrive on Thursday, although details of their arrival are confidential for security reasons.
Among those who will not be attending, is Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, who was approached by non-governmental organisations to speak at a special Landless Peoples’ Convention on the fringe of the WCAR.
National Land Committee president Jakes Hlatshwayo said Mugabe had declined the invitation because of security concerns.
Foreign Affairs officials have played down the apparent lack of interest from world leaders, saying the WCAR was being held at ministerial level.
Representative Ronnie Mamoepa described the added presence of 15 heads of state ”as the cherry on the cake”.
Meanwhile, Durban which is already experiencing traffic congestion because of blocked off roads around the WCAR venue and hotels, will have to brace itself for day two of the Congress of South African Trade Unions’ national stayaway.
The giant trade union federation, has been joined in the protest by the National Council of Trade Unions, the South African National Civics Organisation and the South African Communist Party.
They will be supported by Palestinian Solidarity activists and landless protesters, while the Pan Africanist Congress is also scheduled to hold a protest march.
The WCAR NGO forum on Wednesday was marked by clashes relating to the conflict in the Middle East.
Palestinian activists and supporters disrupted a session on anti-Semitism and clashed verbally with Jewish students. A squad of police kept a close watch as the session deteriorated into a shouting match, and Palestinian supporters marched round the venue with posters.
The meeting eventually resumed with breakaway groups – which included vocal Palestinian supporters – discussing particular aspects of anti-Semitism.
Rapporteur for the session David Matas said he was disappointed at what happened and he had ”hoped for better”.
”But the whole conference is a disappointment. It is a vehicle for racism rather than to combat racism.
”We, the Jewish people are the targets of that racism,” he said.
One of the Palestinians, Salem Abu Hawash, accused speakers of provoking the Palestinian supporters by saying that the 11-month intifada led to anti-semitism.
”It was only because some Palestinian people felt insulted.”
African National Congress MP Pallo Jordan, attending as a member of his party’s delegation, said the incident was ”utterly disgraceful”.
”I’m very disgusted with the people that disrupted the sitting,” he said.
”If the people who were disruptive think they served their political cause by behaving like that they’ve missed the boat completely.”
Earlier in the day, Jewish students set up a table in the open air and handed out pamphlets to delegates provoking the ire of a group of pro-Palestinians.
SA Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS) treasurer Michael Kransdorf said a group of Palestinian youth hurled abuse, which he claimed included hate speech, at the Jewish students.
Kransdorf said students tried to hand the Palestinians flowers, but these were rejected.
”We tried to explain that we are against violence from both sides.”
Kransdorf said one his colleagues was told that ”he does not want to talk to him when he has a yarmulke”.
He said that police intervened to protect the SAUJS group, but that the Palestinian protesters returned three times until they eventually moved on to protest outside the anti-Semitism session.
”Anti-Semitism has nothing to do with Israel,” Kransdorf said.
National Consultative Forum on Palestine member Cassim Kahn described the incident as a verbal altercation.
”Both sides shouted at each other, mostly in Arabic and Hebrew.
”The Jews feel that (the) United Nations is against them,” Kahn said.
Head of the joint operations centre at the NGO forum, Captain Strini Abbai, also described the confrontation as a verbal altercation.
The two groups were ”basically testing the waters”.
On media reports that a ”platoon of police” had to separate the two sides, he said: ”I have no such report.”
The conflict in the Middle East is a controversial issue at the WCAR, with the United States threatening a boycott because of what it believes is the conference’s anti-Israeli agenda.
However, the NGO forum has not balked from taking a stand on the issue and a final version of its draft declaration condemns the actions of the Israeli state for imposing an unjustifiable war against the people of Palestine.
The declaration also says the case of Palestine is one of the most serious cases of foreign occupation.
Earlier this week, an Israeli delegation attending the youth summit walked out of the two-day meeting after the majority of youth delegates supported a Palestinian resolution calling for Israel to be condemned as a ”foreign occupier”.
WCAR representative Susan Markham said earlier on Wednesday that the UN had not been informed of any boycott by the official Israeli government delegation.
Accreditation had been prepared for the Israelis, but she was not in a position to say whether these had been collected or not.
Foreign news agencies have reported that Israel plans to boycott the meeting along similar lines to the United States.
The US earlier this week announced the Secretary Colin Powell would not attend the WCAR because of what it believed was anti-Israeli language in the final draft of the conference declaration. – Sapa