Be Prepared

Friends,

 

Having had bare on a fortnight to regather ourselves from the slings and arrows of the 9^th Council session, we have this week found ourselves back in the trenches for the second substantive session of the Preparatory Committee for the Durban Review Conference – a two-week time-waster of the highest order second only to the succinctly named “Intersessional open-ended intergovernmental working group to follow up the work of the Preparatory Committee for the Durban Review Conference”.

 

As so it is of late that I have found myself struck by vivid recollections of my youth – days of dibs and dobs, khakee shorts, scarf and woggle, during which time I held as an ancient wisdom the Scouting movement’s motto “Be Prepared”. It is the Durban Review process that has evoked these memories of a springtime past, as few things have received as much preparatory attention as the Durban Review Conference.

 

Let’s take stock.

 

There’s the Review Conference itself. Next, a Committee to prepare for the Conference. Then an intergovernmental working group to follow-up on the Committee. One wonders whether, at this session, an even more nonsensical mechanism will be created and charged with the worthy task of “following up on the follow-up work of the intergovernmental working group on the Committee preparing for the Review Conference”. Time will tell.

 

At the first substantive session of the Preparatory Committee it was decided that the Review Conference would be held in Geneva next April. As for this session - prepare for a programme of polemic. On the table are all the organizational aspects of a Conference to review progress in tackling racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, as manifested through phenomena as diverse as racial profiling and genocide.

 

We recall that, with little over six months on the clock until the Review Conference, one State has boycotted the event and a handful of others hang in the balance – a state of affairs that the High Commissioner is committed to correcting through use of her Good Offices as Secretary-General of the Review Conference. The OIC, African and Asian Groups want the DDPA reopened and padded with contemporaneous issues. The EU wants the vault left sealed and an external audit conducted via clipboard from behind shatterproof glass.  

 

True to the great piece of theatre it is, the Durban review process is infused with tragedy: the failure of most States to seize the Review Conference as a precious opportunity to address racism and discrimination in earnest and with honesty for the egregious, universal scourges that they are. This opportunity seems lost to politicking, good sense is all but common, and the middle ground is a field too far.

 

An equally worrying yet strikingly familiar motif of the review process are the crude attempts to clip the wings of civil society participation, namely in the organizational segments of the preparatory process. Again, NGOs find themselves reduced to battles to be seen and heard, while States beat the drum and sing the song of the importance of partnership with civil society.

 

The combined result of The Tragedy of the Review Process and the gagging of civil society is that many of the major NGOs - to whom the Review Conference’s credibility is intricately melded – are tempted to take their bats and balls and stroll away.

 

Having laid our scene, I turn over to you now, friends. And in so doing I press – I plead – that civil society’s role at the Review Conference and in its preparatory process(es) is a crucial one. Herculean efforts must be made to recalibrate real issues and genuine commitments as the centre of the review process and as the natural content of the Conference’s outcome document. And the outrages that sullied the NGO Forum at Durban – while the individual actions of a disgraceful few – must not be repeated.

 

The stage is set, comrades: old battles will be re-enacted; tired scripts will be recited; actors will play to their audiences. Yet civil society has the potential to deliver the most important, heartfelt and compelling of performances. It’s time to prepare.

 

SS.