RIGHTS-TRADE: Activists Seek To Combat Globalisation’s Evils

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, May 12 2000 (IPS) - Globalisation has given new life to racism and xenophobia and the issue must be addressed urgently by the international community, human rights activists say.

Next year’s World Conference Against Racism, to be held in South Africa, will provide the perfect opportunity to explore the ample evidence linking the rise of intolerance with the rapid march of globalisation, and adopt measures to stem that tide, they agree.

The conference, says UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, will provide the international community with an ideal platform to remedy a trend that has “increasingly ugly, xenophobic undertones to it.”

“Looking at the roots of racism and xenophobia in the modern world, the importance of the economic dimension is immediately apparent,” Robinson told the First Preparatory Meeting for the anti-racism conference, held earlier this month.

This is apparent, she added, in the “fortress mentality” that is assuming global dimensions, where richer countries are determined “to defend their prosperity against perceived external threats.”

By way of an example, she pointed to the discrimination people from the Third World have to endure when they go to richer countries in search of a better life. “Migrants are exploited and blamed for economic ills that have nothing to do with them. Refugees, displaced persons and asylum seekers in search of safety are treated harshly and, more and more often, turned away,” the top human rights advocate says.

Robinson’s views are supported by another human rights organisation, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW). The increasing international labour force in the global economy has given rise to new forms of discrimination on “an enormous scale”, HRW says.

Women migrants suffer particularly, the group adds, as a consequence of trafficking and forced prostitution, in the lack of protection in their work places, and in the constraints of family life “imposed by migration and statelessness”.

According to Robinson, such concerns can be understood in light of the “institutionalisation of xenophobia,” where some states have “implemented measures against migrant workers.”

These issues, rights activists agree, were not evident during the two previous world conferences to combat racism and racial discrimination. The need to defeat apartheid dominated the agenda when the world’s human rights community converged in Geneva in 1978 for the first world conference.

The resolution stemming from that gathering declared that any doctrine of racial superiority “is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and has no justification whatsoever.” This racist ideology was deemed by the conference as a crime against humanity.

A similar pattern emerged five years later, during the second conference to combat racism and racial discrimination in Geneva. And at that 1983 gathering, the conference acknowledged that little had been attained in combating apartheid and called for severe measures to be imposed against racist ideologies.

A programme of action flowing out of this conference even requested the Security Council to consider imposing mandatory sanctions against the South African government for its apartheid policy.

Since then, says Patrick Taran, the director of Migrants Rights International (MRI), a non-governmental organisation, other virulent forms of racism have surfaced, posing new challenges.

Traditional views of racism, he argues, focused on skin colour as “the fundamental demarcation on which discrimination, intolerance and exclusion is based.” In its current manifestation, though, racism has been taking place “across distinctions, where characteristics other than skin colour are the lines of demarcation.”

In an article he wrote for an MRI publication, Taran stresses that next year’s conference would have to address such shifts. The relationship between globalisation and racism does require “considerable attention.”

Manolo Abella, who heads the International Migration Department at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), agrees with such concerns. Studies done by the ILO have revealed that in many parts of western Europe the “fortress mentality” is evident.

This is the consequence of “insecurity among those in rich countries due to global competition, difficulty of older workers to adjust to rapidly changing organisation of production and slow rate of growth in many European countries,” remarks Abella.

For that mentality to change, people must be assured that they have “not lost control of their borders.”

According to Doug Hellinger, the executive director of the Washington D.C.-based public-policy organisation Development Gap, multinational companies have also contributed to the spectre of racism in the global economy.

Production for the markets of the richer countries are dominated by the multinational subsidiaries in the Third World who display little regard for their host country’s workforce, he points out. “Our experience is that there is little respect for the people of these countries, mainly people of colour, nor for their societies, which are being totally restructured, along with their economies, without their agreement.”

The multinationals have been helped by such organisations as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, he argues. “It is no surprise who the winners are.”

For Robinson, next year’s conference will have to address these realities, thus ensuring that the benefits of globalisation are “more widely shared”. If not, she warns, globalisation will become “a further barrier to poorer countries participating fully in the international economy.”