Syria appealed for tolerance at the United Nations on Tuesday as diplomats tried to brush off remarks by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that triggered a walk-out from a major conference on racism.
The morning after Ahmadinejad referred to Israel's "totally racist government," causing dozens of Western delegates to leave, Syrian delegation leader Faysal Mekdad said differences of opinion should be expected at big UN conferences.
"In Syria we consider this to be natural, as such differences could be healthy. Yet we cannot allow for differences of opinion to paralyse our efforts to achieve a world free of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, foreign occupation or intolerance," Mekdad said.
Pakistan's delegation chief, Nawabzada Malik Amad Khan, also called for continued participation at the week-long meeting, saying: "In our view engagement rather than estrangement is the better course of action." UN officials and human rights campaigners criticised the European Union and other states whose representatives left the plenary in the middle of Ahmadinejad's remarks, saying they should have stayed and presented different views instead.
"The best response to this type of event is to reply, to correct, and not to walk away, not to withdraw and boycott the conference," UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said on Monday evening. "If that happens, who is going to provide a rational response to what had been said?"
Others took aim at the United States and other Western states which have boycotted the whole conference to avoid giving legitimacy to criticism of Israel. Arab efforts to define Zionism as racist caused the United States and Israel to leave the last major UN conference on racism, held eight years ago in South Africa.
"The sad truth is that countries professing to want to avoid a reprise of the contentious 2001 racism conference are now the ones triggering the collapse of a global consensus on the fight against racism," the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said. Most of those who walked out on Monday rejoined the conference later and will address the meeting and take part in drawing up the final declaration.
MIDDLE EAST FOCUS Despite efforts by Pillay and others to steer the meeting away from the Middle East conflict, Israel and its policies on the Palestinians again dominated proceedings on the second day. Palestinian Foreign Affairs Minister Riyad Al-Maliki was applauded when he denounced the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as "the worst violation of human rights" and "the ugliest face of racism and racial discrimination."
"The continuation of the suffering of the Palestinian people which faces the worst form of racist policy by the occupying power must stop," he said, calling Israel's West Bank barrier a "wall of racial segregation". Washington's main reservation about joining the meeting was an introductory line in the draft declaration that "reaffirms" the text adopted eight years ago. While the Geneva document excludes references to Israel and the Middle East, the 2001 text included six paragraphs on those subjects.