Pillay blasts disinformation around U.N. race meeting

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay smiles during a news conference during the last day of the Durban Review Conference on racism at the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva April 24, 2009.

GENEVA (Reuters) - U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay denounced Friday what she called a "widespread and highly organized campaign of disinformation" surrounding a U.N. conference on race.

Pillay, speaking on the final day of the weeklong meeting, said it had been an overall success despite being dogged by controversy. She did not spell out who may have been behind Internet articles depicting the conference as a "hate-fest."

"Already the propaganda machine is starting to wind up, to term this conference a failure. And I quote, a 'hate-fest', and all the rest of it. This is extraordinary," she told a news briefing in Geneva.

"It was very difficult, I had to face a widespread and highly organized campaign of disinformation," she said.

In a speech Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced Israel as a racist state. His remarks caused dozens of delegates to walk out, further tainting the Durban II review meeting which the United States, Israel, and seven other countries are boycotting.

"Yet no one has really written up the true story of this conference, a strange rough-and-tumble affair full of smoke and mirrors, I must admit, and yet very definitely a success story with plenty of goodwill as well as plenty of bad will of the type I have described," Pillay said.

Pillay, a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor from South Africa, was pressed to identify who was behind the campaign.

"I feel that it's one or two sources, since the same language was carried by very many media. But here I found that maybe some orchestration was involved in the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) who participated," she said.

One activist group -- the French Union of Jewish Students -- had registered 194 people to attend, she said, adding: "So these are clues that give me an idea that there was certain orchestration in the kind of disinformation."

Her office stripped that group of its accreditation on Thursday for attempting to disrupt the conference, along with the accreditation of two other groups.

The meeting Tuesday adopted an outcome document or final declaration with 182 countries, including Iran, joining the consensus, according to the United Nations.

(Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Charles Dick)