Why pick on Mugabe when Africa is teeming with tyrants? 

Rod Liddle 
On the face of it, Gordon Brown's determination to boycott the Europe-Africa summit if Robert Mugabe is invited, seems thoroughly decent and principled. The meeting, due to be held in the sort of halfway house of Portugal, would not be a very agreeable affair even without Zimbabwe's Big Bob; a few days of European leaders being blackmailed for money by a bunch of unscrupulous thugs and culminating in some ghastly, cringing statement of apology from whitey for slavery, or colonialism, or not letting Egypt into the Eurovision Song Contest. 

But given our official disgust at Mugabe's regime, Brown surely cannot go; he will have to send a suitably down-market underling. I suggest Margaret Beckett. 

There's a bit of truth, too, in the allegation that the prime minister has attempted to "multilateralise" our problems with Zimbabwe and has unfairly singled Mugabe out for special opprobrium. 

This point has been made by the president of neighbouring Zambia, Levy Mwanawasa, and he knows well of what he speaks. His own "election" to high office in 2002 was, of course, rigged, according to independent observers. 

His party – called, hilariously, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy – apparently used vast sums of state cash in its electioneering and happily tampered with the ballot boxes. 

Since the election, Amnesty International report that there is "widespread harassment and intimidation of people perceived to be critical of the government" as well as continual and flagrant abuses of human rights, opposition leaders peremptorily locked up and plenty of beatings from the police for anyone who steps out of line. 

Meanwhile, some 75% of Levy's benighted subjects live in what the United Nations describes as "absolute poverty", on less than a dollar per day. Cheated in elections, beaten by the police and starved. You can understand Mwanawasa's genuine puzzlement: just what is it, exactly, that Mugabe is doing that's so wrong? 

Indeed, according to Amnesty International, Zimbabwe does not figure in the top 10 of African countries for what it calls "horrendous" human rights abuses; it comes instead towards the top of the second division for unlawful detentions, beatings, torture and executions Suya and lalo and fellow cahorts did you read that  ). According to Amnesty, there are at least 24 other African countries in which, like Zimbabwe, freedom of expression simply does not exist and there are none at all where it is entirely free and untrammelled. 

And all is not exactly rosy in Nelson Mandela's South Africa, where the white liberals who fought for the overthrow of apartheid are now getting the hell out as quickly as they can. 

It is true that with an inflation rate of a commendable 7,500%, Zimbabwe punches slightly above its weight in the great African league of staggering economic incompetence. But that alone should not be enough to cast the country as a terrible anomaly. It is anything but: it is, if we're honest, entirely typical. 

If Robert Mugabe has his invitation withdrawn, the European leaders will still be sitting down for talks with megalomaniac and corrupt bullies, tyrants, despots, criminals and purblind Marxist ideologues, a substantial proportion of whom will depart office having fleeced their country of every last penny they can lay their hands on. 


Note: forwarded message attached.
       
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