World Conference Against Racism
07 November 2001
Two major events of autumn at the ERRC were the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and a lawsuit against the United Kingdom in connection with the practice of stationing liaison officers at the Prague airport, apparently to stop Roma from coming to Britain.
The ERRC sent a delegation of more than fifty activists (about forty of them Romani) to the World Conference. Our group was huge even by the standards of the massive event in Durban. Our aims were maximum visibility and the establishment of the Romani issue as among Europe's most pressing race concerns. Morag Goodwin, who accompanied the ERRC delegation, describes in these pages ERRC efforts surrounding the World Conference, and we also publish in this issue the speech of Anna Červeňáková, another one of the members of the ERRC delegation in Durban, to the NGO Forum preceding the main governmental event. Also included here is an ERRC press release, issued after the ERRC joined a statement with a number of other NGOs, primarily from Central and Eastern Europe, distancing ourselves from the documents adopted at the NGO Forum.
Those who followed the proceedings of the World Conference in the media are aware that it was not the most orderly of spectacles. It was particularly difficult in Durban to have a clear idea of what was going on at any given time. I remember at one point around four days into the main governmental event hearing a rumour that the organisers of the NGO Forum were at that very moment holding a press conference to announce that they had adopted the final version of the NGO Declaration and Plan of Action. I arrived at the press conference just in time to hear an angry group of journalists berating the organisers for not being able to provide a single copy of the adopted document. And then of course there were the regular shouting matches between Israeli and Palestinian groups (some of the latter of which were caught distributing pro-Nazi propaganda), the Italian delegate who turned up murdered in his hotel by a number of prostitutes (the local press reported four, then eleven), and the evident fact that all around us in post-apartheid South Africa, all is very obviously not well in race relations.
At some point during the conference, I ran into Irena Grudzinska Gross, a woman who among other things has been extensively involved in the events leading up to and following the World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. In a moment of scepticism, I asked her whether in her opinion any of what was transpiring before our eyes had any value at all. Yes it did, she said. But not now. She went on to recount how, in her opinion, the value of the Beijing event emerged for the most part post-Conference. Beijing had provided a framework for women's groups from all over the world to meet, to exchange contacts, and to establish a resolve to get on with political work back home. In her view, the value of the World Conference Against Racism will be revealed primarily in the months and years after the World Conference.
It is early December as I write these words, nearly three full months after our return from Durban. In post-Durban, one of our group has gone to work for the Czech Ministry of Justice and another one has taken up a post with the OSCE mission in Bosnia: Roma are increasingly finally being hired into national and international administrations. Will they be effective in advancing Roma rights? Time will tell. Another member of our group came quite close to winding up in jail for non-violent civil rights activities he organised in Germany in 1990. Obviously there is much work still to be done to democratise Europe. Most members of the ERRC group have gone back to the NGO work in which they were engaged in their home countries prior to the World Conference. As one participant in a roundtable on the future of the Romani movement, published in these pages, puts it, they are involved in "a lot of small-scale initiatives and all of them together will give us a sign of the direction or directions in which we have to go." Or, as another member of the ERRC delegation in Durban said, "The future belongs to the grassroots."
Materials related to the World Conference are in a special section in the middle of this issue. Other materials published here address the wider context of Romani political participation and mobilisation. Among the articles included here is a theoretical overview by Peter Vermeersch of Roma and politics; an interview with the OSCE's Nicolae Gheorghe; a portrait of one Romani mayor in Macedonia; an article on Roma in the June 2001 Bulgarian elections; and an assessment of the effectiveness of the Hungarian minority rights framework in empowering Roma. Also inside are a number of news items - including information about the ERRC lawsuit against the U.K. - concerning developments in the growing hostility in Europe to migration, a hostility increasingly focussed especially on Roma. Closer scrutiny of this front line in human rights work in Europe is the topic of an upcoming issue of Roma Rights.
