Saying they’ll have no part in discrimination, delegations from South Africa, Russia, Cuba, Colombia and France’s overseas territories on Friday abandoned an anti-racism conference that voted to exclude whites.
The walkout, on the fourth day of the six-day African and African Descendants World Conference Against Racism, came after a day of negotiations failed.
”Cuba will never support any action aimed at segregating a group of people. Furthermore, Cuba believes that such a decision is intolerant and contrary to the purposes of this conference,” Maria Morales, the spokeswoman for Cuba’s delegation, told the conference reading from a prepared statement.
The South Africans said that the conference had gone adrift and that they could not endorse the decision to exclude non-blacks. It was unclear how many delegates left the conference late Friday, and whether all were black.
But most of the 250 delegates at the meeting hosted by the Barbados government whistled and cheered their approval as chairwoman Jewel Crawford of the United States stood by the vote.
”The motion will stand and the democratic process will be respected,” Crawford said. ”The motion of exclusion was the will of the majority because there are sometimes when we feel that we just want to have a meeting of our own.”
Ghanaian delegate Maya wa Taifa agreed, arguing that Africans are normally too generous for their own good and that ”our over-hospitality” backfired on the conference.
The move to exclude whites was proposed by the 60-strong British delegation, which said it was under the impression that the conference was entirely for blacks to discuss issues from racial profiling to reparations for slavery.
Some 200 delegates voted Wednesday for whites and Asians to leave the deliberations, saying slavery was too painful a subject to discuss in front of non-Africans.
Fifty delegates abstained and more than a dozen white and Asian journalists, interpreters and delegates left the meeting.
In an ironic twist Friday, delegates were shocked by an impassioned plea from Mauritanian Bakary Tandia for the conference to denounce slavery in the African countries of Mauritania and Sudan.
He said such conferences lay too much emphasis on demands for reparations from former white colonisers and ”hardly focus on what is happening on the continent, where slavery is alive in some places”.
Tandia, co-chairman of the New Jersey-based Africa Peace Tour lobbying group, said Arabs in Mauritania and Sudan hold blacks against their will. He charged up to 900 000 black Mauritanians, mostly women and children, work without pay as domestic servants and herders.
”These people are owned as property by Arabs and are so enslaved that they cannot even give testimony in a court of law … They have no rights,” Tandia said.
Conference organisers said they planned a resolution of condemnation before Sunday’s end to the meeting, billed as a follow-up to last year’s UN anti-racism conference in South Africa. – Sapa-AP