Madame President,

I am pleased to be able to address you on behalf of the Conference of Nongovernmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CONGO). We are an independent, umbrella association of some 360 national, regional and international NGOs, associations and networks in consultative relationship with the United Nations. Our Mandate is to promote the common aims of our members in supporting and enriching the United Nations Charter through ensuring broad NGO participation in United Nations ongoing debates and major events.

We care that diverse voices are heard. When, as part of our efforts to strengthen our regional outreach, we sensed low participation of African women's voices in the process leading to Durban, it became one of our priorities to ensure that they be present. We became partners in a pre-conference of African women held in Dakar in June and are pleased that so many are participating here. In Geneva we assisted in preparations for the conference, and here we helped organize and chair the morning briefings for NGOs during which space and opportunities were given to different caucuses to express their views and impact the conference.

During the United Nations world conferences of the 1990's, NGOs were partners in helping to shape an ambitious worldwide agenda, including children, population, social development, women, food and habitat. This one, though, is uniquely personal. The conference is about the way all of us live our individual lives, since as is being belatedly recognized, no nation, no person can be said not to harbor some form of racist attitude. It challenges, because it is about universal intolerance, injustice and prejudice that produce untold suffering. These are all alive today, and their roots run deep into the past.

NGOs have stepped forward during this process to give voice to victims of racist structures, conduct and attitudes. Their compelling testimony and advocacy has given life - a human, flesh-and-blood perspective - to government discussions here.

Different perceptions of past and present wrongs make it difficult to find all agreed common language, but for NGOs the important thing is that their pleas are being heard and that they are all committed in their different ways to form a global alliance against racism. NGOs came here with a strong belief in the capacity of the United Nations to facilitate the climate and mechanisms to address, redress, rebuild and reconcile actions or omissions of the past and meet vigorously the wrongs of the present. They will go home inspired by the solidarity they have found. However difficult current negotiations on the outcome document may be, we still believe that this conference will be a milestone in a process which will lead to a new era in which racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia will be thrown into the dustbin of history.

'I have a dream' said Archbishop Tutu yesterday. 'I have a dream that we enter this new Millennium in which my humanity is bound up with your humanity, in which I AM BECAUSE YOU ARE.'

We share this dream. As CONGO we stand ready to participate in the global alliance against racism as a partnership based on mutual trust with governments, international agencies and other members of civil society to implement and monitor commitments made here in Durban for a new society without racism.

At our triennial General Assembly last November, CONGO adopted far-reaching recommendations to combat racism, racial discrimination and intolerance. They are to engage in overcoming fear of what is different, fear of the other, fear of the loss of personal security, and they are to promote diversity as gift and value. In finding the right balance between respect for diversity and the affirmation of our universality as human beings with equal rights to human rights we will come closer to our goal of a world that reflects the hopes of "We the Peoples of the United Nations," in whose name the United Nations was founded.

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