“We hope to promote the emergence of an international ecumenical movement in solidarity with Dalits and other similarly affected groups, in order to break the silence, and to work for an end to this form of oppression and exclusion, and for the liberation of those under its yoke,” said World Council of Churches General Secretary Samuel Kobia and his counterpart in the Lutheran World Federation, Ishmael Noko.
They made the statement in a letter inviting 100 participants to meet in Bangkok from March 20-24 at a global conference to raise international awareness about the human rights and justice concerns of the Dalits.
The WCC says that there are an estimated 250 million Dalits in South Asia.
The Bangkok meeting is taking place a month before a United Nations meeting in Geneva to review progress towards the goals set in Durban, South Africa, at a 2001 U.N. conference on racism.
The organizers of the Bangkok meeting say they hope their conference, “taking place close to the Durban Review process, will draw international attention to an issue that the international community has so far failed to take up with sufficient seriousness and commitment.”
They said they were disappointed that the 2001 Durban conference had “failed to explicitly address caste-based discrimination”. The review conference in Geneva is, they stated, “an opportunity to highlight again the situation of Dalits and other similarly excluded communities around the world, whose concerns were not recognized by the original world conference.”
Organized by the WCC and the LWF and hosted by the Christian Conference of Asia, the Bangkok meeting seeks to gather church leaders, Dalit activists, theologians, and representatives and rights advocates of similarly excluded communities around the world.
