On the sidewalk outside the Durban International Convention Center last September, members of India's lowest "untouchable" castes staged a hunger strike. They were protesting their government's refusal to let the issue of caste come before the United Nations' World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance (WCAR). On the terrace of the nearby convention-center hotel, meanwhile, their government's official delegates to the WCAR sat among the world's other ministers, presidents, and generals, lunching and chatting about cricket matches. Occasionally, the ring of a cell phone pulled one of them away from the table for an earnest conversation. To the press and the representatives of their country's most oppressed citizens, they would only say that they were busy and promise to talk about caste "when we have some time." But the Indian delegates, like those from most other governments at the conference on racism, never did find the time to discuss discrimination occurring inside their own borders.
The WCAR, held during the first week of September in Durban, South Africa,was an unprecedented gathering that organizers hoped would finally give voice tothousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that represent minoritypopulations and historically oppressed groups ranging from American Indians andEuropean Gypsies to Afro-Brazilians. At the NGO Forum preceding the conference,the groups were expected to agree upon a list of the gravest issues, which wouldthen be put before the world's governments. The ultimate goal of each group wasto gain enough international support to have its particular concerns included inthe WCAR's final declaration. While not legally binding, such UN declarations havetraditionally established norms of internationally acceptable conduct, standardsthat might eventually shape the laws and behavior of nations.
The WCAR may have been a disappointment to many of those who attended. Butcontrary to reports in much of the Western media and rhetoric from the U.S. andIsraeli governments, the WCAR was not a "circus" characterized by rampantanti-Semitism and ubiquitous Israel-bashing so much as it was a battle betweenNGOs that came to accuse their governments of human-rights violations andpolitical elites hell-bent on denying them. In speeches and behind closed doors,the world's governments tried to cover up and minimize the grievances raised bythe NGOs, either dismissing them as exaggerated or insignificant, or, whenunavoidable, reverting to the universal mantra "That's an internal affair."Despite the oft-quoted speeches of South African President Thabo Mbeki andSenegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, which described a world divided between richand poor nations, it quickly became all too evident that the real divide inDurban lay not between first-world and third-world nations but between thepolitical class everywhere and its subjects.
By far the most visible group protesting government trampling oftheir rights were India's Dalits, or untouchables, also known as "ScheduledCastes and Scheduled Tribes." Although caste-based discrimination is technicallyillegal under the Indian constitution, it remains prevalent throughout ruralIndia because of ingrained social attitudes and the influence of 3,000-year-oldHindu law. Dalit organizations cited the recent incineration of 40 housesbelonging to untouchables in the northern state of Maharashtra, as well as thefrequent assaults, rapes, and murders of Dalits throughout the country, asgrounds for UN attention to the issue. The National Human Rights Commission ofIndia documented 98,349 reported crimes against Dalits between 1994 and 1996,including 1,660 murders, 2,814 rapes, and numerous other offenses: Dalits forcedto eat excrement and drink urine, for instance, or publicly stripped and paradedthrough their villages.
Dalit representatives said that little has changed since then. Worse still,hardly anyone is ever convicted of these crimes. According to a recent article inThe Hindu, a Madras newspaper, the conviction rate for perpetrators of crimes against Dalits in 1998 (the most current data available) was a mere 1.14 percent. A 1999 Human Rights Watch report found that many cases of abuse are not even acknowledged, or "registered," by police; and when cases do get registered, the charges are often diluted as a result of widespread police corruption. Evidence also suggests that the caste affiliation of police officers leads them to side with upper-caste perpetrators rather than Dalit victims; and even in the few cases that the police pursue, justice comes slowly, owing to a lack of the special prosecutors and courts that their cares require.
The National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) came to Durban demandingrecognition of caste-based discrimination in the WCAR declaration. VelupannKaruppan, an NCDHR leader, told me that as a Dalit "you cannot take water fromthe general well, you have to take it from a separate well. You cannot bury [aDalit's] dead body in the common place; you have to use a separate burialground." He gestured toward a companion, who gave his name only as Shekhar. "Hecannot enter into the temple even though he is a Hindu," Karuppan said.
"We have been deprived of all the facilities which a human citizen shouldhave," Shekhar added. "I don't have citizenship rights in [my] country. I don'ttake water in the public place, I don't walk in the public streets; they'reprohibited. So what citizenship rights do I have?"
The Dalit caucus arrived in Durban with a formidable publicity army of morethan 200 representatives. (The more typical NGOs sent five to 10.) By the time theofficial conference opened, NGO delegates and journalists from all over the worldwere sporting vests, shirts, stickers, and buttons with the slogan "Include Castein WCAR." But widespread popular support and a great deal of sympathy from theinternational press were not enough to counter the international clout of theIndian government and the game of diplomatic hardball it played.
In the months before the conference, the Indian delegation dominated draftingcommittees and threatened economic pressure against other countries in itscampaign to keep caste off the agenda. Human Rights Watch, other NGOs, and adissenting Indian member of parliament present at the Geneva preparatory meetingin August characterized the behavior as "sabotage." Upon arrival in Durban,India's resistance only hardened. Though UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan made apoint of referring to victimization based on descent in his opening speech to theconference plenary, the Indian government consistently condemned any attempt bythe United Nations to address the issue. Speaking to the same body, IndianMinister of State for External Affairs Omar Abdullah lashed out at his critics:"There has been propaganda, highly exaggerated and misleading, often based onanecdotal evidence, regarding caste-based discrimination in India." He went on toinsist that "we in India have faced this evil squarely," citing affirmative actionprograms for Dalits, Article 15 of the Indian constitution (which prohibitscaste-based discrimination), and a 1989 law against caste-based violence--thePrevention of Atrocities Act.
His argument was not terribly convincing. As NCDHR representative Shekhar toldme, "Though there is a constitution, it is only available on paper." Later, in anaddress to the conference plenary, Dalit spokesman Paul Divakar embarrassed theIndian delegation by pointing out that the "propaganda" cited by Abdullahconsisted exclusively of reports from the government's own Human RightsCommission. As for India's Prevention of Atrocities Act, Shekhar was hardlyexaggerating when he said it "is not being implemented at all." The Indian HumanRights Commission reported in 1994 that only two of the country's 22 states hadset up the special courts the act requires; and according to Human Rights Watch,to this day none of the states has implemented the act in its entirety.
Nevertheless, Minister Abdullah remained adamant that India's constitutionaland legal remedies are enough and that the United Nations has no business takingup the issue. "It is neither legitimate nor feasible nor practical," he said,"for this World Conference or, for that matter, even the UN to legislate, letalone police, individual behavior in our societies."
"They say it's an internal matter and you don't need to go to the UN,"Karuppan told me one evening. "I told them we've waited 50 years to get reliefand you have not solved the problem, so we had to go to the outside... . Theyshould have a time limit to get it done ... five years, 10 years. But 50 yearshave passed and nothing happened."
Most WCAR delegates, however, seemed to conclude that their own interests werebest served by backing the status quo. The Dalits came away from the conferencewith verbal support from Canada, Guatemala, and Norway, but with no more legalprotection or official UN recognition of their plight than when they arrived.
They were not the only group given short shrift. Those speakingfor present-day slaves in Africa received even less attention from the WCARdelegates than the untouchables did. As the conference wound to a close, Africandemands for an apology and reparations for the transatlantic slave trade of theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries prompted fierce debates, but the issue ofslavery in Africa today was never even raised at the official conference.
Garba Diallo, a black Mauritanian living in exile in Denmark, came toDurban as the representative of the African Liberation Forces of Mauritania.During the NGO Forum, he pleaded for consideration of the historic and continuingenslavement of blacks in Mauritania by lighter-skinned Arabs, a practice that hasbeen documented by the international press and numerous antislaveryorganizations. Diallo was joined by representatives of El Hor ("The Free"),Mauritania's oldest antislavery organization, as well as the New York-basedCommittee for the Defense of Human Rights in Mauritania (CDHRM). They describedtensions between Mauritania's Arab ruling class and its large black minority thathave existed since the country gained independence in 1960. The Arabizationpolicies of the Mauritanian government, including land-confiscation laws,marginalized the country's so-called free black ethnic groups--the Fulani, Wolof,Bambara, and Soninke--and boiled over in 1989 into a border war with Senegal,during which tens of thousands of Mauritania's free blacks were driven intoexile.
Diallo and his colleagues, however, are most concerned about another group ofblacks in Mauritania who have long been enslaved by Arab masters and rarelychallenge their condition. Nor is that condition always apparent to foreignobservers. As French sociologist Amel Daddah has written, slavery in Mauritaniadoesn't look like the slavery of American and European textbooks. "Theimage--widespread in the West--of 'whites' cruelly subjugating 'blacks' loses itsclarity there," he says. These slaves, who over the generations have come toshare the language, religion, and culture of their Arab masters, are said to viewtheir enslavement as an inevitable part of the Mauritanian social hierarchy. Allof this has made Mauritanian slavery extremely difficult to fight.
Slavery has technically been abolished three times: first by the Frenchcolonial administration at the turn of the century, then at the time ofindependence in 1960, and finally by military communiqué in 1981. Butlittle has changed. The Mauritanian government insists that the practice isillegal, yet it continues to offer compensation to slave masters upon the freeingof slaves. Genuine enforcement of abolition laws, as Daddah has written, wouldrequire acknowledgment of the continuing practice of slavery. And that wouldstrike at the very foundations of this Islamic republic--for the precepts ofIslam, which strongly discourage the enslavement of other Muslims, are at oddswith Mauritanian tradition.
Thus, Mauritania pursues a deliberately murky path. Many slaves are nownominally "free" and enjoy the right to vote. But as Bakary Tandia of the CDHRMexplains, "the slavery issue is very subtle. For example, if a man wants to runfor mayor he will approach the slave owner with the most slaves... . Slaves havebecome a political power in the hands of their masters. Since they are allowed tovote, they will vote based on his instructions."
In the words of Moctar Teyeb, a former slave, who spoke not long ago to asymposium at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance, black slaves inMauritania continue to be "bought and sold like property and bred like farmanimals." Yet despite such testimony, very little criticism of the Mauritaniangovernment was heard during the racism conference. And it was not onlyMauritanian officials--worried that a poor human-rights record would jeopardizeoffers of debt relief and their recently forged alliance with the UnitedStates--who worked hard to sideline the issue.
The massive amount of attention focused on apologies and reparations for thetransatlantic slave trade led other African nations, and even some NGOs, toignore Mauritanian slavery altogether. Acknowledging its existence, in theirview, would have deflected attention from the African case for reparations andseverely weakened it. As Diallo related with disappointment, a number of NGOsinitially signed on to the antislavery cause but then backed off to maintain a"perceived African front."
"There is some sort of pseudo-solidarity of the third world," he told me."It's always much easier to divide things into black and white, oppressor andoppressed. You don't need to think. You can just say, 'Enslaved and colonized bythe West, so we are victims.' That's why they want to keep this imaginedthird-world solidarity. They don't want to discuss intra-third-world andintra-African conflict."
Frustrated after a day of tireless lobbying, he insisted: "Before we cantalk about reparations and transatlantic slavery as a crime, we have to clean ourhouses... . If we accept slavery now in the twenty-first century and we don't doanything about it and we don't condemn it ... then morally we cannot talk aboutother slavery because it means we accept it. If we accept this," he went on,"then why shouldn't we accept the other slavery? For international opinion totake us seriously and recognize the crime against humanity of the slave trade,then we have to start from home."
Eventually, Diallo and his colleagues mustered enough support to getMauritanian slavery mentioned explicitly in the NGO Forum's final document. But atthe conference of government delegations, the issue never even reached the floor.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan opened the WCAR by beseeching thedelegates: "Let us admit that all countries have issues of racism anddiscrimination to address." Likewise, Justice K. Ramaswamy of the Indian HumanRights Commission had urged delegates to operate in a "spirit that is genuinelyinterested in the furtherance of human rights, and not vitiated byself-righteousness or by political and other extraneous conditions." But by theend of the week, it was clear that few nations were willing to heed their calls.Mauritanian slavery, like Indian caste discrimination and so many other issues,went unmentioned in the final UN declaration, though a vague statement recognizedand condemned the fact that "slavery and slavery-like practices still exist todayin parts of the world."
Not surprisingly, many NGO delegates and activists left Durban exhaustedand dejected. The diplomacy of denial at the WCAR had triumphed over the cry forhuman rights. For India and Mauritania, where protecting oppressed groupswould have compromised their international image, there was no room fornegotiation. But the efforts of some NGOs did create a worldwide audience for anumber of issues that until now have gone largely unnoticed. "As a result of thisconference," noted Smita Narula of Human Rights Watch, "even thesecretary-general of the United Nations has acknowledged the gravity of work- anddescent-based discrimination, and India will have a hard time from now onavoiding international scrutiny." That may not be the relief from violence andinjustice that NGOs had hoped for, but these issues are now on the table and theworld will have a difficult time ignoring them.
