A/50/476
English
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by the side of the road.
sentences.
The three men were given suspended one-year prison
77. Lastly, it should be pointed out that international organizations have not
been free of some manifestations of racism with regard to Blacks. The fortyeighth World Health Assembly resulted in the indictment of the Director-General
of WHO, Hiroshi Nakajima, who, on 21 January 1995 at a meeting of a subgroup of
the WHO Executive Board is said to have made comments that were considered
racist, stressing the difficulty that African employees at the organization’s
headquarters had in "conceiving, drafting and completing working documents".
The Director General subsequently expressed his apologies to the African
countries and peoples.
E.
Racism and racial discrimination against Arabs
78. Recent attacks perpetrated in France, the Middle East and the United States
of America tend to reinforce anti-Arab feelings in the West.
79. In the United States of America, a wave of anti-Arab hatred occurred after
the deadly attack which destroyed a building housing federal offices on
19 April 1995 in Oklahoma City. Some media and political personalities were
quick to attribute, rather imprudently, that act to terrorists from the Middle
East. "Insults, broken windows, smashed windshields, such was the penalty
imposed on Arab-American victims after the attack (...)". 38/ Walls were
decorated with the message "Arabs go home"; some were threatened with death for
what "their people" had done. The baby of Suhair al-Mosawi, a 26-year-old Iraqi
refugee, was stillborn after the mother had been molested by Americans. A man
even proposed on a television channel that Arab-Americans should be interned in
camps "as was done for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War".
80. Public condemnation is not the only form of racism caused by such attacks,
for which very frequently there is an attempt to find a predictable culprit as
speedily as possible. The civil war in Algeria prompted French authorities a
year ago to step up a pressure on the North African population by increasing the
number of round-ups, identity checks and arrests of persons of Arab origin
suspected, rightly or wrongly, of being linked to Algerian Islamist groups. The
recent deadly attacks in Paris, attributed, without complete certainty, to an
Islamist terrorist organization, have demonstrated a psychosis which readily
feeds on anti-Arab racism.
81. Arabs in France, whether they are of French nationality or not, are,
according to the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, the first
victims of racism and racial discrimination. Indeed, approximately two thirds
of the racist acts recorded in 1994 were directed against North Africans. 39/
82. On 6 August 1994, a young man from a Harki family was subjected to racist
insults by a band of inebriated youths and drawn into a fight. His body was
discovered the following day at the foot of a cliff.
83. On 1 May 1995, during the traditional parade by the National Front,
supporters of this extreme right-wing party threw a Moroccan into the Seine,
/...