Croatia will boycott the conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Durban Declaration on Antiracism, which will be held on the sidelines of the opening session of the 76th United Nations General Assembly.
Countries other than Croatia opting out of Durban IV are Israel, the US, Canada, Bulgaria, Australia, Germany, the UK, Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and France.
The original Durban Conference in 2001 singled Israel out as a perpetrator of racism in its official declaration. Earlier drafts had also called Zionism a form of racism.
The conference’s NGO Forum called Israel an apartheid state. Participants distributed antisemitic materials at the event, including the antisemitic conspiracy theory text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and flyers saying the world would be a better place if Hitler had won World War II.
At the 2009 Durban II Conference, then-president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied the Holocaust and said it was a “pretext” for Israel to oppress Palestinians. He was invited to speak again at Durban III in 2011.
