Why Durban II ignores the Declaration on Arab-Led Slavery of Africans

By Hillel Neuer, UN Watch, February 18, 2009

In 2003, in Johannesburg, South Africa, a conference on Arab-led slavery of Africans issued a declaration accusing Arab countries of:

  • "ethnocide of African people through forced cultural Arabization";
  • "historical and continuing crimes committed against African boys subjected to forced castration (of which the survival rate has been one in ten), to create a eunuch class";
  • "historical and continued taking into slavery of young girls to serve as slaves to their masters with no right to marriage unless prescribed by their masters";
  • "genocide against Africans, particularly in the Sudan";
  • "ethnocide of African people through forced cultural Arabization processes"; and
  • "incalculable damage on Africans and African society", for which "apologies and reparations are due to Africans." It's quite a damning indictment, on an issue many in U.N. circles would prefer to ignore.

With this in mind, the latest draft of the Durban II declaration includes a European-sponsored proposal on the "need to similarly address the trans-Saharan slave trade and the slave trade in the Indian Ocean."

However, the proposal is bracketed - which means it's under dispute. Why would anyone challenge the historical fact of the Arab trade in African slaves?

Because the Durban conference of 2001, contrary to its stated purpose, was never organized to objectively examining racism around the world. Its true purpose was someting else entirely. The exercise was initiated by African regimes to raise blame Western racism as the original and remaining cause of Africa's ills. In other words, Robert Mugabe's abuses are not the cause of Zimbabweans' misery, but rather imperialist Britain or capitalist America.

Not that there weren't several legitimate historical grievances included in the mix, but the point is that the purpose was always to point the finger at a very specific target, rather than to objectively address victims of discrimination and intolerance in all continents and countries. Far from it.

With anti-Western rulers exercising a controlling majority of the U.N., any other narrative on this issue - which might diminish or add nuance to the grievance premised on exclusively Western culpability - is excluded.

On this particular issue - as on others - Durban II is and will be the same. The bracketed provisions in the draft text hinting to the Islamic slave trade were proposed by European states, but will never survive the negotiation process. They'll be nixed under forceful objections from Third World states, especially the mighty Arab and Islamic blocs.

What is worse, the issue of the Arab slave trade is virtually ignored by most NGOs involved in the Durban process. Such activists generally hold a strongly Tier Mondiste worldview, which similarly explains poverty and other world problems by pointing to the West as a rapacious exploiter of the Third World - essentially the modern leftist's adapation of the imperialist notion of the noble savage. This worldview is threatened by any narrative involving a perpetrator that is non-Western.

Will any expert on Arab slavery be seen in Geneva during the week of the Durban II conference, to put a spotlight on this buried history? Don't bet on it.

This article is reproduced at DurbanReview.org with permission of UN Watch, please contact them for any copyright requests.

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