The United States and Israel are lobbying hard in an 11th-hour attempt to have the U.N. Human Rights Commission cancel an invitation to Yasir Arafat to address its current session here Thursday.
John Bolton, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, arrived from Washington to take charge of the effort. But there is little chance it will succeed, inasmuch as the Palestine Liberation Organization chief has received and accepted the invitation.
Nevertheless, the U.S. delegation organized a special hearing Wednesday for the European Group at the Human Rights Commission’s annual gather- ing, to listen to a recording of a wiretapped telephone conversation purported to be between Arafat in Tunis and the PLO’s Paris representative, Ibrahim Souss.
In it, Arafat vilifies Jews as “dirt, filth and trash.” The transcript has already been broadcast by Cable News Network, which says it got the tape from “a Western law-enforcement agency.”
The Americans say they are disappointed by the lethargic reaction of the Europeans to the Arafat invitation. They are especially disturbed by the commission’s acquiescence to Arafat’s request to speak from the podium, an honor reserved for heads of state.
That precedent was established when Arafat addressed the Human Rights Commission in 1988. He had complained that speaking from a chair in the hall would be a “terrible humiliation.”
“The bureau made a mistake accepting his demand in 1988 and is repeating it today,” a senior American diplomat remarked.
‘A CYNICAL EXPLOITATION’
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Yitzhak Lior, stressed “Israel’s very strong position that Yasir Arafat should not take part in this meeting” in a letter to the Human Rights Commission chairman.
“It is quite obvious that his appearance can make no contribution whatsoever to the theme of human rights observance throughout the world, and will amount to no more than a cynical exploitation of this forum for political purposes,” the Israeli envoy wrote.
In an unrelated development Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev created a stir when he suggested the United Nations create a special police force to protect human rights around the world.
His proposal was a radical departure from decades of insistence by the Soviet Union that citizens rights were an internal affair.
Earlier, the commission heard a report on religious intolerance, delivered by Andree Farhi, representing the International Council of Jewish Women. The council has non-governmental organization status on the U.N. commission.
Farhi spoke of cases of racism and anti-Semitism in Europe where, she said, more than 200 Jewish cemeteries were vandalized in 1991 in Germany alone.
She referred to video games in Japan in which Adolf Hitler is the hero; the election of a former Ku Klux Klan leader and self-proclaimed American Nazi, David Duke, to the Louisiana state legislature; and the success of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s neo-fascist National Front in France.
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