Monday April 20, 2009

Iran president to address shunned U.N. racism summit

By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) - A United Nations conference on racism shunned by the United States and many of its allies opens on Monday when a speech by Iran's president, also regarded with suspicion by the West, will be the focus of attention.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad waves before a meeting with Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz in Geneva April 19, 2009. (REUTERS/Anja Niedringhaus/Pool)

Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Italy are among the countries avoiding the summit on fears it will be a platform for what U.S. President Barack Obama called "hypocritical and counterproductive" antagonism towards Israel.

France will attend the "Durban II" meeting but will walk out if it is used as a platform to attack Israel, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Monday.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the only major head of state who accepted a United Nations invitation to take part in the meeting in Geneva, which U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will also address on Monday.

France, like Britain and the Czech Republic, is sending its Geneva ambassadors to the meeting but will not dispatch top officials.

The Iranian leader's speech, coinciding with Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, could overshadow the summit which the United Nations wants to focus on easing ethnic and racial tensions that threaten migrant workers and minorities.

Ahmadinejad has said Israel should be "wiped off the map" and questioned whether the Nazi Holocaust occurred.

Kouchner, saying its representatives would walk out if there were any open antagonism towards Israel by Ahmadinejad, told France Info radio: "We will not tolerate any excesses, any provocation."

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said the failure of the 27-member European Union to agree a common position on the meeting was a huge disappointment.

"Going there and acting as a silent witness does not pay in the end: you only risk becoming complicit to it," he said in an interview with Italian daily Il Giornale.

The United States and Israel walked out of the last major U.N. race conference in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 after Arab states sought to label Zionism as racist.

U.S. SEEKS 'CLEAN START'

An introductory paragraph "reaffirming" the language of the 2001 meeting declaration, which singled out Israel for scrutiny, proved most controversial in the run-up to the Geneva summit.

U.S. President Barack Obama, speaking at a news conference after the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, said Washington wanted a "clean slate" before tackling race and discrimination issues at the United Nations.

"If we have a clean start, a fresh start, we are happy to go," he said, explaining the U.S. position. "If you're incorporating a previous conference that we weren't involved with (and) that raised a whole set of objectionable provisions, then we couldn't participate."

The U.S. Human Rights Network, an umbrella organisation of 300 activist groups, decried Washington's decision to stay away from the summit, three months after Obama became the first African-American U.S. president.

His election "does not close the chapter on racism in the U.S.", it said. "It doesn't end the U.S. obligation to challenge racism globally. On the contrary, the world is looking to the Obama administration to take a leading role in this struggle for racial justice and human rights."

And Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, said the absence of the U.S. and other Western powers "strikes a blow at U.N. efforts to fight racism."

"Instead of isolating radical voices, governments have capitulated to them," advocacy director Juliette de Rivero said.

(Additional reporting by James Mackenzie in Paris, Gilles Castonguay in Milan, Jan Strupczewski in Brussels and Sue Pleming in Washington)

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