International Day against Racism - EDITORIAL

On October 26, 1966, the UN proclaimed March 21 as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, more commonly referred to as the International Day against Racism. 
The day commemorates the massacre of March 21, 1960 at Sharpeville in South Africa, where the white minority government of then South Africa ordered its police to fire on unarmed demonstrators gathered to peacefully protest the country’s ‘pass laws’. 

Pass laws were one of the dominant features of the country’s apartheid system until it was effectively ended in 1986. It was a form of an internal passport system designed to segregate the population.
When demonstrators gathered on March 21, 1960, the South African police, without attempting to disperse the crowd, opened fire on demonstrators. Evidence at South Africa’s ‘Truth Commission’ revealed police continued to fire on the fleeing crowd, resulting in hundreds of people being shot in the back. 69 people were killed and more than 300 injured.

Today, 45 years later, while commemorating the massacre at Sharpsville, we cannot, but be put in mind of the ongoing tragedy of racism worldwide. Millions of people the world over continue falling victim to racism and racial discrimination. Since the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) and its associated atrocities, Muslim communities the world over have become targets of racism. What has been forgotten however is that the vast majority of people who fell victim to IS violence were themselves Muslim by faith. The Voice of America in 2016 reported that, ‘by far the vast majority of victims of terrorist attacks over the past 15 years have been Muslims killed by Muslims. In one instance, an IS suicide bomber struck a Kurdish wedding ceremony in southeastern Turkey, killing more than 50 people’.
.Just a few years ago, former US President Trump referred to African nations as ‘shit holes’. The former President also placed stringent restrictions on travel to the US for citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Subsequently he included another six countries in what came to be called the ‘Muslim ban’.  In the US, even at time of writing, Asia-Americans are being subject to racist attacks by white Americans. In the Middle East, Israel continues to oppress Palestinians, creating modern-day Bantustans where Palestinians are confined to live with a minimum of food, drinking water, medical services, education and employment facilities etc. Western nations have been prompt to condemn particular forms of racism, but avoid taking responsibility for their own racist behaviour. 
An example of this double standard was best exposed at the September 2001 United Nations Anti-Racism Conference in Durban. At that conference European nations refused to accept culpability for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, claiming that only modern-day slavery could be called a crime against humanity because slave trade was legal at the time! 

Meaning that laws in particular former slave-trading European nations like the UK, Holland, Spain and Portugal permitted the slave trade and were therefore just and legal.
By this standard, Sri Lanka cannot be charged for War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity or be prosecuted for human rights violations against minorities; as government is covered by the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) as well as by legislation permitting Covid-19 fatalities to be cremated.
Rosebell .Kugmire, a UN staffer writing in the ‘Guardian of July 6, 2020 reveals the United Nation Organisation itself is not free of racial bias. At the time the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign was sweeping the US, present Secretary General António Guterres was forced to backtrack on his note to staff that suggesting they shouldn’t participate in Black Lives Matter (BLM)!

 She adds that in another case, a new recruit from a conflict country who was tasked with producing a key document for the unit – a big task for someone coming from outside the organisation. 
A few days later, a supervisor, a European white man, said: “If she doesn’t have my strategy by the end of the day, I will put her on the next plane back.” She had literally fled that country, bullets raining, and survived as a refugee before joining the UN.
This is not to condemn the UN out of hand. But the world body is badly in need of reformation. In today’s reality the world body is heavily weighted in favour of white-skinned folk and their particular biases. The mere setting apart of particular day’s highlighting particular issues will not change this situation.