Washington | Monday
PRESIDENT George W Bush’s top advisor on Sunday disdained the UN conference on racism for having “wasted” time on matters not related and defended the US decision to walk out.
“A lot of time was wasted on issues that were extraneous to the question that should have been pre-eminent in the conference,” national security advisor Condoleezza Rice told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“This conference paid far too much time trying to condemn Israel, and singling it out, and I think the US made the right decision to leave,” she said.
Delegates to the UN World Conference Against Racism adopted a text after eight days of tough and acrimonious talks in Durban, South Africa, that recognised the Palestinians’ right to an independent state and described slavery as a crime against humanity.
The two issues dominated the conference and prompted a withdrawal on Monday by the United States and Israel, which rejected originally proposed anti-Israeli language they described as “hateful.”
“We hope … that the final document is better. But the sad thing is that, and it is really too bad because I think the South Africans had something quite different in mind, the sad thing is that this conference was hijacked and that it didn’t deal with the agenda that it should have.”
Asked about the debate on whether reparations should be made to the descendants of former slaves, Rice said: “Slavery is more than 150 years in the past, and, of course, there’s a continuing stain. I’ve said very often, slavery was America’s birth defect. It was there from the beginning. But we have to turn now to the present and to the future.” – AFP