From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Mon Aug 19 2002 - 13:49:14 MDT
Islamic Bloc, Christian Right Team Up to Lobby U.N.
By Colum Lynch
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, June 17, 2002; Page A01
UNITED NATIONS -- Conservative U.S. Christian organizations
have joined forces with Islamic governments to halt the expansion
of sexual and
political protections and rights for gays, women and children at
United Nations conferences.
The new alliance, which coalesced during the past year, has
received a major boost from the Bush administration, which
appointed antiabortion activists to key positions on U.S.
delegations to U.N. conferences on global economic and social
policy.
But it has been largely galvanized by conservative Christians who
have set aside their doctrinal differences, cemented ties with the
Vatican and cultivated fresh links with a powerful bloc of more
than 50 moderate and
hard-line Islamic governments, including Sudan, Libya, Iraq and
Iran.
"We look at them as allies, not necessarily as friends," said Austin
Ruse, founder and president of the Catholic Family and Human
Rights Institute, a New York-based organization that promotes
conservative values at U.N. social
conferences. "We have realized that without countries like Sudan,
abortion would have been recognized as a universal human right
in a U.N. document."
The alliance of conservative Islamic states and Christian
organizations has placed the Bush administration in the awkward
position of siding with some of its most reviled adversaries --
including Iraq and Iran -- in a cultural
skirmish against its closest European allies, which broadly support
expanding sexual and political rights.
U.S. and Iranian officials even huddled during coffee breaks at the
U.N. summit on children in New York last month, according to
U.N. diplomats.
But the partnership also has provided the administration an
opportunity to demonstrate that it shares many social values with
Islam at a time when the United States is being criticized in the
Muslim world for its continued support of Israel and the nine-
month-old war on terrorism. "We have tried to point out there are
some areas of agreement between [us] and a lot of Islamic
countries on these social issues," a U.S. official said.
"The main issue that brings us all together is defending the family
values, the natural family," added Mokhtar Lamani, a Moroccan
diplomat who
represents the 53-nation Organization of Islamic Conferences at
the United Nations. "The Republican administration is so clear in
defending the family
values."
Lamani said he was first approached by U.S. Christian non-
governmental organizations, or NGOs, at a special session of the
U.N. General Assembly on AIDS in New York in June 2001.
Liberal Western activists and governments, he said, had offended
the religious and cultural sensitivities of Islamic countries by
proposing that a final conference declaration include explicit
references to the need to protect prostitutes, intravenous drug
users and "men who have sex with men" from contracting AIDS.
"It was totally unacceptable for us," Lamani said. "The Vatican
and so many NGOs came up to us saying this is exactly the same
position we are
defending."
The Islamic-Christian alliance claimed an important victory at the
U.N. children's meeting last month.
The Bush administration led the coalition in blocking an effort by
European and Latin American countries to include a reference in
the final declaration to "reproductive health care services," a term
the conservatives believed
could be used to promote abortion.
The U.S. team included John Klink, a former adviser to the
Vatican at previous U.N. conferences; Janice Crouse, a veteran
antiabortion advocate at Concerned Women of America; and Paul
J. Bonicelli of Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., a
Christian institution that requires its professors
teach creationism.
The Christian groups and Islamic countries have been seeking to
build on those gains at subsequent U.N. gatherings, pressing for
greater restrictions on abortion at an annual meeting of the World
Health Organization last month and later at a U.N. preparatory
conference on sustainable development in Bali, Indonesia.
"The rest of the world saw a shift in the debate" at the children's
summit, said Patrick Fagan of the Heritage Foundation, a
Washington policy group. "It wasn't just pure defense. They are on
the offensive here."
Some Western countries and liberal activists say they are alarmed
by the influence of the Christian right at the United Nations,
where more liberal women's rights organizations have held sway
for the past decade.
"They are trying to undo some of the landmark agreements that
were reached in the 1990s, particularly on women's rights and
family planning," a U.N.-based European diplomat said. "The
U.S. decision to come into the game
on their side has completely changed the dynamics."
"This alliance shows the depths of perversity of the [U.S.]
position," said Adrienne Germaine, president of the International
Women's Health Coalition. "On the one hand we're presumably
blaming these countries for unspeakable
acts of terrorism, and at the same time we are allying ourselves
with them in the oppression of women."
The World Policy Center, a Mormon group established in 1997 to
promote family values through an alliance that includes
conservative Christians, the Catholic Church and Islamic
governments, is holding a conference next month
at Brigham Young University School of Law. It will bring
antiabortion advocates and legal critics of the United Nations
together with more than 60 U.N. diplomats, including delegates
from conservative Catholic and Islamic countries.
Ruse first outlined his strategy for maximizing the conservatives'
leverage at the United Nations at a 1999 meeting in Geneva of the
World Congress of Families, a gathering of advocates of
conservative family values. It involves "lavish[ing] all our
attention" on a coalition of 12 antiabortion countries that are
willing to fight for their cause at U.N. sessions, he said. Religious
leaders and politicians in the United States and in these select
countries in the developing world should be persuaded "to
encourage
these governments to defend life and family at the United
Nations."
He also boasted that his tactics were beginning to seize the
initiative from advocates for the rights of children, women and
gays. "Our team was in a tiny conference room leaning over the
backs of diplomats, assisting with the drafting of the conference
document," he said.
"We broke all the rules of U.N. lobbying, which forbids leafleting
on the floor of a U.N. conference. We had our people fan out
across the floor of the conference and we placed this letter in the
hand of every delegate."
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