PRESS CONFERENCE ON 'STATE OF THE WORLD’S MINORITIES' REPORT

PRESS CONFERENCE ON ‘STATE OF THE WORLD’S MINORITIES’ REPORT

Launching a first ever comprehensive report on the state of the world’s minorities, Mark Lattimer, the Executive Director of Minority Rights Group International, said today at a Headquarters press conference that the targeting of minorities, including by Governments, was no longer the exception, but the norm in today’s wars, and that the real tragedy was that “we could have seen it coming”.  

The Minority Rights Group International is a non-governmental organization working to secure the rights of ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities and indigenous peoples worldwide, and to promote cooperation and understanding between communities.  The report issued today -- State of the World’s Minorities 2006 -- details how States in every region of the world repress the rights of their minorities, or even deny their existence. Joining Mr. Lattimer was Gay McDougall, the United Nations Independent Expert on Minority Issues.

Mr. Lattimer said that, with major anniversaries last year of the destruction of the Nazi death camps, the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre and the anniversary of the Khmer Rouge killings, world leaders had agreed that the promotion and protection of the rights of persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities contributed to political and social stability and peace, and enriched the culture of diversity and the heritage of society.  Despite their promises of “never again”, however, the reality on the ground around the world did not match that rhetoric.

In every region of the world, minorities and indigenous peoples had been excluded, repressed and, in many cases, killed by their governments, he said.  Far from celebrating diversity, far from recognizing the contribution of minority rights to the promotion of stability and peace, many Governments continued to see minorities as a threat and, moreover, as a threat to be violently repressed.  In extreme cases, where the situation had deteriorated into civil conflict, such as in the Sudan, Burma and Iraq, there were whole communities living under threat. 

He said that, since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the world’s ability not only to predict mass killing or genocide, but to understand the main factors that made it much more likely, had advanced enormously.  That had enabled his organization to produce a table of peoples living under threat, by using indicators from the World Bank and from leading conflict prevention institutes, among others.  The first of two trends that emerged was the preponderance of people in Africa living under grave risk from long-running situations, such as in the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Somalia.  In other African countries, such as Ethiopia, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, the situation had deteriorated last year, he continued.  The threat had increased, but those situations were not as widely recognized.

A second trend concerned the several States where repression of minorities was directly linked to the ongoing, United States-led war on terrorism, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and countries covering the Caucuses and Central Asia, he said.  In situation after situation, Governments justified the repression of their minorities by referencing the war on terrorism.  In Iraq, where Iraqis were awaiting the final results of the parliamentary elections -- a huge step forward for democracy in that country -- the likely result was a further increased division between ethnic or religious groups.  

He said that, at each stage in Iraq’s management since the 2003 war, mistake after mistake had been made.  Those mistakes had encouraged a division by ethnicity or religion, whether the decision of three years ago to split up the membership of the Iraqi Governing Council by ethnicity or religion, and the subsequent ethnic patronage that characterized the whole Iraqi bureaucracy, or, more recently, the one-sided criticism of the terrible killings by the Iraqi insurgents, amid the failure to criticize the very grave violations of the rights of Sunni civilians by the governing forces in the country.  At no stage had Iraq’s slide into civil war, based on ethnic or religious grounds, been stopped. 

More generally, the greatest danger in the anti-terrorism campaign was the tendency for States to justify their actions in relation to the support they received in the United States-led effort to fight terrorism, he said.  Never more than today, when there might be yet another announcement by Al-Qaida of forthcoming terrorist attacks, was the world as conscious of the grave threat to democracies around the world.  But the measures taken against terrorism were counter-productive and, in many cases, devastating to minorities.  Curtailing civil liberties in the United States and other western countries was rightly debated, but when the history of the war on terrorism was written, perhaps the greatest strategic mistake would be the failure to criticize other Governments around the world for mass abuses against minorities.  Those were, in effect, turning what should be a struggle against terrorism into a war on minority civilians. 

Ms. McDougall explained that her mandate was a new one, in the context of the United Nations Human Rights Commission.  Her focus would be to promote the declaration on minorities rights, along four areas of special concern:  protecting the existence of minorities under threat; protecting and promoting their cultural identity when that was threatened by forced assimilation; ensuring that the right to non-discrimination was fully respected and enjoyed by minority groups; and ensuring that those groups were given their full rights of participation, particularly in the events that most affected them.  Every chapter of the report was useful, but it was perhaps even more important in the aggregate. 

A look at the picture of minorities under threat around the world and the details provided in the book were alarming, she continued.  Violating minority rights and ignoring minority issues put entire societies at risk.  In some countries, human potential was wasted; in others, ignoring or violating minorities’ rights risked political, social, economic or political instability.  Other countries faced community rebellion, civil unrest and armed conflict.  Further along that spectrum, minority rights violations might lead to crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity.  The options for stopping genocide and crimes against humanity dwindled dramatically once the bloodshed started. 

She said that that was why early warning signals were so critical to identifying the countries at risk, before the descent into violence began.  Even when situations did not descend into extreme genocide violations against a community, there were risks to the peace and to political and social stability.  Examples in the past year alone included the rebellions in France by disaffected minorities and the expulsion of Haitians by the thousands in the Dominican Republic. In the United States, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina had unmasked the current legacy of racial disparities that continued to threaten the country’s political and social fabric. Respect for minorities’ rights was not all about violence, bloodshed and genocide, but also about diverse societies living up to their fullest potential, she said.

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For information media • not an official record