It was this last scenario that concerned a small meeting organized by Habitat International Coalition (HIC), an international Nongovernmental organization (NGO), at the Coastland Conference Center on Tuesday. At the panel a statement of cooperation written by Miloon Kothari, Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, was read by Davinder Lamba, the panel's moderator and head of the HIC delegation to the World Conference against Racism (WCAR).

Three scenarios were discussed, with a common theme of the dominant culture systematically destroying the villages and displacing the peoples of the minority cultures. Probably the most contentious issue, as paralleled throughout the WCAR all week, was that of the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

"At this point, the state of Israel blames the Jewish National Fund, being the principle authority in this, and the Israel land authority, who claim that a bit more than 93 percent of the land in Israel is state land or owned in perpetuity for Jewish nationals and most estimates claim that about 70 percent of the lands of the occupied West Bank and a third of the Gaza strip and also parts of occupied Jerusalem have likewise been claimed for Jewish nationals," said Joseph Schechla, a representative of HIC who has been working with the Palestinians for 15 years.

Two Israeli citizens were present at the meeting, representing an NGO. "Israel has a real problem with racism in the sense that the representatives of the state of Israel cannot defend the state of Israel because Israel does not have a constitution," said Shula Koenig of the People's Movement for Human Rights Education (PDHRE). "I think the representatives found it very difficult to defend in any way the exclusion of the state of Israel. One should separate between the state of Israel, Zionism, and Judaism, and that I don't think happened in the convention."

"Israelis and Palestinians are basically playing cards in the hands of the US delegation. Basically, the US did not come to Durban because she did not want to face the issues of slavery and reparations. By using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and actually, I think, also intentionally inflaming it, they've managed to repress the whole issue of slavery and reparation altogether," Koenig said.

Both Shula and Schechla agreed that if the evidence of Israeli racism had only been put into terms as the facts and figures of lands confiscation and displacement of peoples, rather then getting mired down in Zionism, the argument would have been much more effective.

It is such arguments that HIC is helping NGO's to put to China, a recent signatory of the International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, to argue against the occupation of Tibet. "The problem in Tibet is that even people who are generally concerned with the environment or cultural issues, they were punished for creating an unstable environment and destroying the unity of china," said Sonam Dagpo, Department of International Relations of the Exiled Tibetan Government. "These crimes were very severe so if you did find anyone speaking of housing or land they would be arrested or imprisoned." The covenant names housing as a human rights, and HIC is trying to help local Tibetan NGOs, most based in Dharamsala, India where the Dalai Lama resides, to use the legal framework to help protect Tibetans.

In Turkey the situation is not so easy; the Kurdish people, the largest displaced people in the world, are stretched across Iraq, Turkey and Greece. But Turkey, like Israel, say Kurdish NGOs, systematically destroys Kurdish villages uprooting an already displaced people. "Thirty Kurdish villages were destroyed by the Turkish government for the sake of tourism, they said. Thirty big towns-more then three million people displaced by the Turkish government," said Nazmi Gur, Migration and Humanitarian Aid Foundation.

One of the issues not discussed on the panel was land reform in Zimbabwe, where it has had some of the bloodiest results of late. In Zimbabwe, like many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a minority of whites owns the majority of the land. In Zimbabwe the issue has been postponed many times by since independence in 1980 from England. Last year the government under President Robert Mugabe began encouraging blacks to openly take the land back from the whites, inciting a series of high profiled murder and beatings of white farmers.

"Well you must know that in some places in Africa land reform is going very, very badly," said South African Nobel Literature Laureate Nadine Gordimer. "I mean look at Zimbabwe, it's an absolute tragedy. But you must remember that they've had 21 years to begin to do it in a peaceful and reasonable way and they apparently did nothing, they waited until we got to a crisis point, people have said all these years have gone by and we haven't gotten our land back."

Another issue that she sees as a problem to land reform is the lack of training of potential black farmers that the return of land would require. "Many, many people have been in urban areas for generations. They have no idea how to farm anything. If you put them on that land it's just going to become an unproductive slum. Some people, many people, want urban land, housing land where they can live and work. Admittedly agricultural land must go back to the people, but you need to have big training schemes, the children and grandchildren of those who owned the land could say, Right I want to be a farmer this was our land, we're getting it back, now I want to learn how to run it productively," said Gordimer.

But again the problem of race sometimes overshadows the problems of land and economics. "We support President Mugabe," said Viola Plummer, an NGO representative from the Durban 400, a group representing people of African descent in North America and the Caribbean. "We support the people and the government of Zimbabwe to take back their land. How many black Africans were killed in Zimbabwe from 1998 to 2001? Has there been since independence from 1980 till 2001 has there been one white farmer, policeman, scout, tried and convicted for killing one black person? So this double standard doesn't apply to whites killing black farmers."

Often it can be a conundrum, does forgiveness come first and then peace and prosperity? Or can peace and prosperity foster forgiveness? In Zimbabwe, as in Tibet, Turkey, and Israel these issues must be sown together.