Hundreds of delegates to a world racism conference wrapped up six days of meetings with resolutions calling for rights to African citizenship and praise for Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s land redistribution programme.
African governments should grant full citizenship to black people worldwide, according to a resolution passed unanimously on Sunday at the end of the African and African Descendants World Conference Against Racism.
The forum brought more than 550 delegates from across the world, but its agenda was overshadowed by a vote on Wednesday to exclude whites from the conference. Russia, Cuba, South Africa, Colombia and France’s overseas territories abandoned the conference on Friday, with some calling the decision reverse racism.
Those who stayed, focused on issues of racial profiling, reparations for descendants of slaves and punishment for European countries that engaged in the slave trade.
In a unanimous vote on Sunday, delegates resolved that ”African governments give all Africans in the diaspora the immediate and unfettered right to return to any African state to claim their ancestral citizenship rights,” according to the resolution.
”We would welcome all black people to Africa,” said Sabelo Sibanda of Zimbabwe’s School of African Awareness. ”We won’t want them to just kick back and enjoy life with their dollars there, but to get fully involved because there’s a lot to be done in terms of developing those countries.”
Embattled Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe won praise for his land reform project, with delegates unanimously passing a resolution late on Saturday in support of his government’s land redistribution project.
”We applaud and support the courage and foresight of president Mugabe for embarking upon the land reform program,” the document stated.
Zimbabwe’s government has confiscated thousands of acres in white-owned farmland, and earmarked thousands more farms for seizure and redistribution to landless blacks. Mugabe says the measure addresses the legacy of inequitable land ownership left by colonial rule. The action, however, has led to a standstill in commercial farming. More than half of Zimbabwe’s 12,5-million people face severe food shortages, blamed on drought and the land reform program.
Black activists and lawyers at the forum also vowed during meetings to bring lawsuits against Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and Spain for the slave trade.
On Saturday, delegates singled out France for making Haiti pay millions of dollars before it would recognise its independence in the 19th century.
”Now we are demanding that that money be paid back with interest to Haiti,” said Maxi Fox, a Guyanese who pushed through the resolution with several other Caribbean delegates. Haiti gained independence in 1804, but France did not recognise it until 1838, according to the Web site of Haiti’s embassy in Washington. Details on other possible lawsuits, such as where they would be filed and exact monetary amounts, haven’t been determined.
The conference also unanimously condemned slavery in the African countries of Mauritania and Sudan. Mauritanian Bakary Tandia, co-chairman of the New Jersey-based Africa Peace Tour lobbying group, introduced the resolution. Arabs in Mauritania and Sudan hold blacks against their will, Tandia said. He charged up to 900 000 black Mauritanians, mostly women and children, work without pay as domestic servants and herders.
The resolution calls on the two countries to better enforce existing anti-slavery laws or pass new ones. The forum was billed a the follow-up to last year’s United Nations racism conference in South Africa. Some 200 delegates voted on Wednesday to evict whites and Asians from the deliberations, saying slavery was too painful a subject to discuss in front of non-Africans. More than a dozen white and Asian journalists, interpreters and delegates left the meeting. – Sapa-AP