AFRICA & MIDDLE EAST: 'Colonial compensation' call fuels concern
Financial Times, Mar 23, 2001
By FRANCES WILLIAMS
South Africa, which will host a landmark United Nations conference on racism this summer, is fighting to head off a damaging north-south clash over demands that the US and Europe pay compensation for the past wrongs of slavery and colonialism.
The compensation issue has emerged as the most contentious in negotiations under way in Geneva on a draft declaration and plan of action to be issued by ministers at the end of the conference, to be held from August 31 to September 7 in Durban.
For instance, a regional preparatory meeting held in Tehran in February called for compensation for "policies or practices based on racial or national superiority such as colonialism, slavery, slave trade and ethnic cleansing. . . regardless of when they were committed".
Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, South Africa's foreign minister, said yesterday the west needed to acknowledge an historical injustice, but she hoped that compensation would be discussed in a forward-looking context, perhaps in the form of a development fund.
"We need to confront the past but not in a combative or confrontational way," she said, adding that compensation could be a way of closing the past and moving on. Some western countries have signalled their willingness to discuss a development fund, and many nations have moved or are planning to compensate their own minorities who have suffered discrimination. But there is strong resistance to calls for compensation at an international level that could open countries up to huge financial claims for historical wrongs.
"The compensation issue poses enormously difficult problems, and not just for the US," George Moose, US ambassador to the UN in Geneva, said this week. "We understand the sentiment but hope the conference will focus on how we can effectively tackle the problems that now confront us."
This was echoed by John Battle, Britain's junior foreign minister, who told the UN human rights commission yesterday that while there was a need to understand the past "the international community cannot afford to be diverted from the fundamental responsibility of dealing with the problems of contempor-ary racial discrimination".
When the conference was conceived in the mid-1990s the intention was to tackle contemporary forms of racism, xenophobia and intolerance in the light of inter-ethnic strife in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and the Great Lakes region of Africa, the emergence of neo-Nazi groups in Europe and continued discrimination against minorities and indigenous peoples.
However, human rights officials are concerned that these issues will be overshadowed by the compensation dispute, and by sniping over the conflict in the Middle East. Other delicate issues on the conference agenda include the role of affirmative action, the identification of particular groups suffering discrimination such as Gypsies and people of African descent, and how to tackle "hate speech" on the internet. www.unhchr.ch
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2000.