AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to The War and Peace Report, Resistance Radio. I’m Amy Goodman. You were just listening to “No Justice, No Peace” from One World Tribe, here on Democracy Now! in Exile.

Well, it’s been almost four months to the day since the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance was launched in Durban, South Africa. For 11 days, from the end of August through the beginning of September, the newswires crackled with the controversies of the conference, although not a lot of U.S. media covered it much: the dispute over reparations for slavery, the uproar over language equating Zionism with racism, and, of course, ultimately, the U.S. delegation’s pulling out of the conference.

But then, just days after it all ended and a true discussion might have begun, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, a third drove into the Pentagon, and the newswires that had been broadcasting from Durban went dead. The controversies, as well as the gains and many lessons, were largely forgotten.

But as feminist scholar and longtime activist Charlotte Bunch insisted at a gathering of the Durban Women’s Group in early December, the lessons of the context of the U.S. so-called war on terrorism — the speech was delivered at a conference sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. We’re going to go to that speech, and then, when we come back from our break, we’ll hear an interview with Marwan Barghouti, the secretary-general of Fatah and a central figure in the Second Intifada. Right now, feminist scholar Charlotte Bunch.

CHARLOTTE BUNCH: As several people have said, looking at the U.S. media coverage, you would have the impression that the World Conference Against Racism was actually about the Middle East. And so, we wanted to start with, what it was really about, from our point of view, setting the record straight, is all the variety of issues that you have just heard. And I think it is instructive, however, to talk about how the U.S. government behaved at the World Conference Against Racism and the way in which it used the Middle East conflict to cover up its behavior. And in particular, I think the obsession of the U.S. and its behavior at this conference is particularly instructive after 9/11. And many of us who were either still in Durban or, as Catherine Powell said, just arrived back the minute it happened, there was some way in which, of course, we were all shocked by the horrible events, but, in some way, I think we were less shocked, because of what we had seen at the world conference and the way the U.S. behaved, and our own repulsion with our own government in the Durban process.

The Bush administration attitude toward the World Conference Against Racism was, essentially, “Do it our way, or we’ll go home.” That was basically its position. And I think it was a forerunner to what we now see post-9/11, which is, essentially, “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.” There is a consistency in the way the government behaved in Durban and what we’re dealing with today.

And that’s consistency I want to speak to because I think we need to be clear that the Bush administration played havoc with the World Conference Against Racism even before we got to Durban, in the entire preparatory process at the Commission on Human Rights in March, April, when the U.S. got bumped off of the commission because even our allies were so disgusted by the government attitude toward the business of that commission meeting. And also, in the preparatory process, there was a constant threat to go home, as if that would somehow make everybody go along with the U.S. And that was, I think, one of the most profoundly disrespectful attitudes that the U.S. government has exhibited, disdainful of the months and months of government and NGO preparation for the conference of the hundreds and thousands of people who saw this as an important political arena, and the way in which the Bush administration treated all of us is indicative, I think, of the problem we’re up against.

Now, I do want to say that I think that the Bush administration used the issues of the Middle East to avoid the issues of the conference. As Gwen said, they didn’t want it to happen in the first place. And so they used a real conflict in the world. And let’s remember that at the moment of Durban, this conflict in the Middle East was at a very volatile point, and it is one of the main conflicts in our world, that the U.N. and the world powers have not solved for 50 years. So, what burden was put on the World Conference Against Racism that it was supposed to deal with all the other problems of racism in the world in their multiple manifestations, that you’ve heard some of tonight, and at the same time solve this problem? I mean, it was an absurd starting point to think that this conference should bear the weight of somehow solving something that the U.N. has not solved in these past 50 years.

I also think we have to distinguish between a variety of things that were happening, and in particular between a legitimate critique of Israel or any other government as a government and issue of antisemitism. And what we saw the Bush administration doing was conflating any critique of the Israeli government and calling it antisemitism. And that did not serve the cause either of antisemitism or of any interest in resolving the conflict in the Middle East. And I don’t say that there was no antisemitism in Durban. We live in a racist world. There were manifestations of all kinds of racism even within Durban, of white racism, of antisemitism, of many kinds of racism. So, it’s not to say that nothing — that there was no antisemitist member present, but to be really clear about the way the U.S. government used that issue to avoid dealing with racism, to avoid dealing in particular with the issues of the U.S. government responsibility for slavery, for colonialism, for reparations, etc.

So, I think, in the face of 9/11, it’s really important to start by understanding how the U.S. government has positioned itself in the world before that and how that connects to what we’re dealing with afterwards. Now, I think that if we start from that disdainful behavior in the global arena, that has characterized particularly the last year, but also the last few decades of the refusal of the U.S. to pay its dues, the refusal of the U.S. to sign and ratify most of the human rights treaties, etc., kind of came to a peak in Durban, in the sense of the way in which they really didn’t care about that conference.

And we need to remember that that was not the only alternative that the U.S. government had, that there are other alternatives to walking out when you don’t get your way, just as there are other alternatives to bombing. There are alternatives when a country — we’ve all worked in the U.N. arena — disagrees with other countries about the document. First of all, you work for your position. You try to convince people. Secondly, you compromise. Third, if necessary, you take reservations.

But the U.S. couldn’t be bothered with going through those processes, because it was essentially not interested in this conference having anything successful happen. And so it was playing its cards to make sure that there was no real product of the conference that they were committed to having to endorse. So, the action of walking out before it was even over, before you even knew what the final language was going to be, was, I think, indicative of an attitude of not wanting the conference to succeed, first, and, secondly, being unwilling to be bound by anything the conference set afterwards, so making sure that the U.S. government was not there.

Now, I say all of this because I think that, unfortunately, much of this discussion that we all came back from Durban ready to have, of course, has been shunted aside by the horrible events of 9/11. But I think that they are connected. I think they are linked. And I think that if we look at how the U.S. government behaved in Durban, it might help us to deal a little bit with how we’re behaving now. And I think that the best phrase I can think of is the one that William Fulbright coined in Vietnam, which is “the arrogance of power.” The arrogance of power epitomized the U.S. behavior in Durban toward other people.

I think that many of us hoped that the 9/11 tragedies would lead to an opportunity in this country for some reexamination of the U.S. position in the world. I think we hoped. We held our breath. I was in South Africa for a week hearing conversations that made me hope that the U.S. would begin to reexamine its foreign policy, to think about its place in the world.

But, unfortunately, as we all know, that has not been the response of the U.S. government. And instead, we have seen the U.S. government once more flaunting multilateralism, but this time in the name of a coalition that it is coercing and leading, rather than allowing real multilateral responses. I think we had an opportunity. We had a moment when there was sympathy for people in the United States unlike anything I’ve experienced in my whole lifetime. I was in Durban. The sympathy was overwhelming of people. Everyone, even the hardest critics of our government, were sympathetic about what had happened. But we are losing that opportunity by the kind of behavior of our government at this time.

And I think the refusal of the Bush administration to even take seriously the other alternatives to war, to even explore the other alternatives to justice, to explore international tribunals for terrorism, that Mary Robinson called for when she talked about crime against humanity on September 11th — the refusal of the government, the most unbelievable refusal of the U.S. government in face of all of these events, to continue to oppose international agreements, to continue to have congressional resolutions against the International Criminal Court, to be prepared to say we’ll send troops to the Netherlands, a friendly country, before we will allow any American to be brought before the International Criminal Court, the refusal last week in Geneva to sign onto germ warfare inspections in the face of all the fears in this country of germ warfare, and yet we are — the government, that government that says it represents us, is the one refusing, when 143 other countries say we must do this.

OK, 30 seconds, it’s impossible. All right. Anyway, to bring this to a close, I think that what we saw in Durban was a kind of ridicule strategy, an attempt to ridicule the conference, in many ways, by the U.S. And I think we now see a lot of manipulation. But the context is still there. We must remember that we are in a several-decades-long campaign of right-wing forces in the United States to make sure that the United Nations is not effective or is destroyed. And I think that Durban was a part of that. We are in the midst of a campaign now, I think, with Bush’s military tribunals, that will undermine the last remnants of hope for an international human rights system, if allowed to go forward, because we will have no voice left in the United States, which has already been hypocritical, but we will have no voice left to speak out against military tribunals in the rest of the world, if they proceed in the United States, etc., etc.

So, I just want to say that it seems to me that the spirt of Durban that Anita sort of called us to in the beginning, the spirit of Durban of dialogue among civilizations, of dialogue about what it is that we have all suffered and what we have learned and how we could build another world, is being further eroded every day by our current government policies. So, it seems to me that it’s really urgent that we develop truly multilateral alternatives to the current war that our government is engaged in.

I’ve been a part of a group that had developed something called the 12 points to stop the war and support women’s human rights, which we had on the table outside. Some people in the New York Say No to War group have recently written a document, which I have here for those who want it, calling on the Democratic leadership in Washington to become a leadership and to actually become an opposition, to call for some bipartisan dialogue. There are many different efforts you all know about.

But I want to link it, in kind of closing, to — that attitude we saw in Durban was the exact opposite of what Anita talked about. What we saw from the U.S. government in Durban was the exact opposite of what Anita talked about at the dialogue of the NGOs about how we could begin to change the world we live in. And I think the racially coded term of so-called defending civilization that the Bush administration has been using is really at the heart of the issues that we were facing in Durban and the issues that we face following 9/11. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been listening to Charlotte Bunch, executive director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Douglass College, Rutgers University, in New Jersey. When we come back, we go to the West Bank to an interview done with a Palestinian leader in hiding. Stay with us.