BY NORM DIXON
JOHANNESBURG — An alliance that includes South Africa's emerging grassroots activist movements was formed on July 29 to organise mass protests at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR).
The eight-day WCAR will be held in Durban's plush International Conference Centre, next to the Hilton Hotel, beginning on August 31. A spokesperson for the alliance said 15,000 people may join the main protest set for September 1.
The Durban Social Forum (DSF), as the alliance has called itself, includes the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, which is fighting electricity cut-offs, the Concerned Citizens Forum (which has militantly fought evictions and water cut-offs in Durban), the Landless People's Movement, Jubilee 2000 (which demands the cancellation of Third World debt), the Anti-Privatisation Forum, the Treatment Action Campaign (which is campaigning for the government provision of anti-AIDS drugs), the Alternative Information and Development Centre (which campaigns for cancellation of the apartheid debt), and the National Consultative Forum on Palestine.
In a media statement, the DSF said that the WCAR protests would be "a focal point for all extra-parliamentary, people-driven and mass-based organisations that wish to express concerns both of a local and global nature". It went on to say: "It is our belief that the particular form that globalisation is taking (neo-liberalism) and the present economic policies of the South African government can only lead to greater divides between countries in the North and South. Within South Africa these policies can only lead to the deepening of poverty and social misery."
The African National Congress government has failed to deliver on its promises to address South Africa's apartheid legacy of an appalling housing shortage and widespread land hunger. In cities around the country, most of which are run by ANC administrations, people who cannot afford to pay rent, and water and electricity accounts, are being evicted and their basic services disconnected.
Critics point out that the ANC's neo-liberal economic policy is widening the gap between rich and poor and worsening rather than alleviating the problems created by the racist apartheid system.
Landless People's Movement spokesperson Andile Mngxitama said major issues concerning the landless would be discussed during the Landless People's Assembly on August 30. Mngxitama said landlessness in South Africa was caused by racism and is continuing today.
The US government on July 26 announced it would boycott the WCAR if the conference includes the questions of Zionism and reparations for slavery and colonialism on its agenda.
A two-week meeting in June in Geneva that was to draw up an agenda and declaration for the conference ended in deadlock over whether Western countries that prospered from slavery and colonisation should apologise for the suffering caused — and pay compensation. African governments demanded both, but Western governments, led by the US, Britain and Canada, resisted.
The proposed declaration prepared by African governments described the slave trade as "a unique tragedy in the history of humanity, a crime against humanity which is unparalleled" and said slavery, colonialism and apartheid "have resulted in substantial and lasting economic, political and cultural damage to African peoples". It demanded an "explicit apology" and the establishment of an international compensation program.
A meeting of southern African and European Jubilee and other anti-debt movements, held in Johannesburg June 29 and 30, condemned Western government moves to remove reparations from the WCAR agenda.
"A conference on racism that doesn't discuss slavery, colonialism and apartheid, and the need to repair the damage done, will at the outset fail be able to deal with the issue of racism", the activists from 10 countries stated. "Reparations are an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and send a message that human rights violations should not be repeated.
"In this light, the delegates opposed the attempt to remove the issue of ongoing discrimination against Palestine from the agenda... Victims of human rights violations have the right to seek justice, and resolved to develop plans for alternative forms of popular action for reparations during the UN conference."
If the US and other Western governments succeed in dictating the terms of the WCAR agenda, it is likely that the September 1 protest will be even larger than organisers expect, swelled by non-government organisations that otherwise would have restricted their opposition to racism to pious statements within the WCAR.
In a joint statement on August 2, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the South African Communist Party and the South African National Civics Organisation condemned the threatened US boycott: "Too often, the United States resorts to blockades and military acts to blackmail and bully wherever it does not find its way. Now that this bully would not be able to use veto power in the conference, it is resorting to threats of boycott and blackmail. As predicted, Colin Powell and Koffi Annan, who themselves rank among the victims of racism, are trying to outdo each other in the service of their masters."
COSATU, the SACP and SANCO urged their structures in every South
African province to join the march in Durban on September 1.