Fergal Keane: Expensive talk will not stop the spread of racism

'All that Durban will achieve is to inspire more fear and division and waste a great deal of money'

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Israel-Palestine dispute dominates racism talks

What is it about Durban? One of the most beautiful cities in the world, miles of surf and golden sand, a year-round gorgeous climate and they have to keep blotting its image with these useless and expensive charades. I love Durban and I wouldn't begrudge any man or woman a holiday there ... just so long as they spend their own money. This morning in South Africa's Indian ocean city, thousands of delegates will file into the main hall of the UN Session on Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance for a second day of blather paid for largely by the South African people. About eighty per cent of the £11m cost will be borne by a nation that has millions of homeless, many millions more without basic living provisions, an army of unemployed and millions dying of Aids without medical care. The conference comes just a year after another gigantic waste of time and money – the UN conference on AIDS in Durban.

Doubtless it will help gratify the ego of South Africa's President Mbeki, but it is a shocking waste of money. Under the cloak of a fuzzy universalism, the UN has gathered together a disparate collection of states and interest groups with the public aim of achieving agreed declarations on racism and "related intolerance". The international conference culture is synonymous with an age of gesture politics. It suits governments so they can appear high minded while continuing to place narrow domestic concerns above the common good; it allows the lobby groups the titillation of rubbing shoulders with the rich and the infamous leaders of the world. And, of course, everybody enjoys a junket.

In recent weeks, we have seen just how hopeless is the aim of achieving any agreed declaration beyond the one we all signed up to at the inception of the UN half a century ago, namely that racism is bad and we should fight against it. But since then, the Security Council and the institutions of the UN have failed on every significant occasion that they have been called upon to prevent ethnically-inspired slaughter and discrimination.

The Arabs, Israelis and Americans will never agree on anything in such an openly hostile arena, the Indians will refuse to accept that the caste system is a form of racism, the Western Europeans and Americans will refuse to accept that slavery was a crime against humanity, and on it goes. Thus the debate about racism becomes a shouting match; instead of the complexities, we get cheap sloganeering and rampant hypocrisy.

There isn't a state in attendance at the UN conference which doesn't practise or endorse some form of racism. Many of the African nations which condemn the West for its colonial past are governed by the world's most skilled and ruthless manipulators of ethnic rivalry. Others allow slavery and bonded labour or wage genocidal war against ethnic minorities.

And what about the liberal democracies of the West? The Americans continue to execute and imprison blacks and Hispanics in vastly disproportionate numbers, and the governments of Western Europe compete to erect barriers against the black and brown people of the developing world.

Look east to Russia where xenophobia thrives and to the lands of the former Soviet Union where anti-Semitism is bubbling away. This is before we even get started on gender equality and the abuse of women.

Consider the fact that one Robert Mugabe will be among those to address – and doubtless be cheered by – the delegates. Mr Mugabe has directed a campaign against white farmers in his country. Their whiteness and the colonial smash-and-grab policies of their ancestors render them immune from liberal sympathy and he understands this well. In speeches and exhortations he has singled them out for contempt. The fact that Mr Mugabe's government enthusiastically persecutes black Zimbabweans doesn't alter the fact that he is persecuting the farmers because they are white. But he will be cheered by the delegates because he represents an easy-to-follow, easy-to-swallow version of contemporary reality.

What we see in Durban is close to the great OAU and non-aligned summits of the 70s and 80s when the crooks and despots who ran much of the developing world would gather at great expense to scratch one another's backs and fulminate against the West. The mass slaughter of Hutus in Burundi and Tutsis in Rwanda was conveniently overlooked at these conferences, just as the Arab world sat silent in the face of mass murder and torture in Iraq and Syria. It was easier to unify and denounce apartheid South Africa and Israel than to face the devils in one's own backyard.

Thankfully, much of the world has moved on from such dangerously myopic politics. In Africa there is a generation of activists who believe the culture of victimhood paralyses Africans and allows corrupt leaders to cling to power. They run small human rights organisations and independent newspapers and they are the voice of a growing democratic opposition.

One such voice is Joe Seremane, who is the chairman of South Africa's opposition Democratic Party. I first met Mr Seremane in 1986 during PW Botha's State of Emergency. He was working for the South African Council of Churches and, when we met, his office was full of young victims of torture looking for somewhere to hide. Joe Seremane is no Uncle Tom, and when he says that "heaping recrimination upon recrimination" won't serve the cause of racial harmony I am inclined to agree. He opposes the Durban conference as an "expensive mental exercise." That is a polite version of "complete waste of time".

This is far from saying that a debate about slavery should not happen, or that there is no place for apologies. One of the most powerful books I read in the last year was Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, which recounted the mass murder and slavery in Leopold's Congo. The Belgian colonial era is a dark area for Brussels and there has yet to be a full accounting. A first step might be making the book required reading for every Belgian schoolchild over fourteen.

But a grand apology by the West for slavery will end up satisfying neither the interests of justice nor history. The states and individuals who benefited from the slave trade – and they included many Africans and Arabs – must look to the past and see where apology and reparation are necessary and helpful. As for the myriad forms of racism (what the UN calls "related intolerance") which poison the world, you fight the ones that you recognise as evil or you make a choice to do nothing. Either way, the fight is an individual choice and not the property of bellicose sloganeers in Durban.

If you want to know how to fight racism, there are plenty of organisations to join. There is an international community of conscience which fights on an hourly basis through groups like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and which knows how many poorly funded and unpublicised NGOs there are in the developing world. If a fraction of what is being spent in Durban was given to these groups, they could have more impact than all the hot air and bile generated over the past few weeks. Racism is fundamentally about fear and the manipulation of fear. All that Durban will achieve is to inspire more fear and division and waste a great deal of money. The struggle continues.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent