WCAR Updates
Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, Mass March in South Africa Against the WCAR
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA (August 31) — On the opening day of the United Nations’ sponsored World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, almost 20,000 persons marched in an anti-government demonstration to protest the failure of the South African government’s land reform policy for the poor, and its anticipated sale of the telecommunications industry, electrical
utilities and other state-owned properties to private entrepreneurs. According to March organizers they also wanted to let the world know about “this fraud of a conference for the corporate rich, while the poor suffer”, as one marcher put it on his picket sign. Myself and a small group of Americans, Asians, Europeans and others left the Non-Government Organization portion of the conference to march in solidarity.
The COSATU General Strike and the Treachery of the International Marketplace
DURBAN (August 30) — South Africans have raised marching for freedom to an art form. Today 100 WCAR/NGO Forum delegates, myself included, responded to a call by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) to join the Durban march against privatization of public services. Singing and dancing in a combination cultural, political, military event, we marched for four hours. Didn’t know Zulu chants? No problem, they taught us. In the second day of a national political strike, the streets of Durban were filled with wave upon wave of union contingents — some 30,000 people.
Despite U.S. Pullout, Debate Over Reparations Continues
Humberto Brown, International Secretary of the U.S.-based Black Radical Congress, is on a mission. He came to the World Conference Against Racism to talk about reparations, and he’s going to
keep doing it, with or without an official U.S. presence. Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the U.S.’s withdrawal from the conference Monday night over what he called “hateful language (that equates) Zionism with racism.” Soon after the announcement, Brown joined the hundreds of American nongovernmental organizations protesting outside the UN conference center. Groups from all across the U.S., including the National Indigenous Rights Network, immigrant and migrant associations, and the ACLU, affirmed that even with their government gone, “We, the people, are still here!”
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA — When the UN World Conference Against Racism begins on Friday, August 31, in South Africa, the issue of environmental racism will be missing from the agenda. Just 10 minutes south of Durban, the city playing host to some 20,000 conference participants, lies a valley of toxic chemical pollution whose noxious gasses will be unavoidably inhaled, yet programmatically
ignored. Also … reports are emerging of yet another suspected local pipeline leak, courtesy of Shell and BP.