Shame on Mugabe’s stooges

16 May 2007

Rian Malan is appalled that Zimbabwe has been put in charge of Sustainable Development by the UN — and says it is symptomatic of the way in which Mugabe is indulged by foolish go-gooders from New York to South Africa

On the day that Bob Mugabe’s genocidal regime acceded to the chair of the UN’s Commission on Sustainable Development, I found myself in the lovely Cape village of Franschhoek, once a Boer farming town but now more French and precious than Provence. Even as bitter debate broke out in the distant UN, I was checking into a luxurious hostelry and trimming my nostril hairs in preparation for meeting such luminaries as Liz Calder, publisher of the Harry Potter books, and the glamorous American novelist Siri Hustvedt, author of Things I Loved. I had come to participate in the inaugural Franschhoek Literary Festival, but my thoughts were in New York with the UK Environment Minister Ian Pearson, who was attempting to explain to African diplomats that one could not appoint a malignant regime like Zimbabwe’s to the chairmanship of anything, let alone a committee on development. The Africans did not take kindly to this. ‘It’s an insult to our intelligence,’ explained Boniface Chidyausiku, Zimbabwe’s UN ambassador. The African bloc agreed, and Pearson went down in flames, victim of what the press called an ‘overwhelming’ snub to the West.

I would not presume to liken my experience to Pearson’s, but I stood at his shoulder in the righteous fight and paid the price, shouted down as ‘pathetic’ by an eminent white liberal at a posh dinner attended by such grandees as Bevil Rudd, grandson of Rhodes’s right-hand man, and Mrs Astor, widow of David Astor, for many years publisher and editor of the Observer. If it seems odd that events in New York should have almost instant repercussions at posh dinners in Africa, well, it shouldn’t. The world has grown tiny and the march of history has turned Franschhoek into a playground for Europe’s civilised rich. Also resident here is Tokyo Sexwale, a revolutionary turned billionaire who is often seen dining at Le Quartier Français, ‘South Africa’s finest restaurant’, or shopping for delicacies at shops such as Le Verger. An excited socialite told me Sexwale was in town for the festival weekend, entertaining no less a personage than President Mbeki himself. In such rarefied air, the wise man watches what he says about Zimbabwe. I was not up to it, however.

I first saw Robert Mugabe in the flesh at a UN Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002. His arrival on the podium was preceded by US defence secretary Colin Powell, who was booed and jeered, and by Tony Blair, who met with similar indignities. Mugabe, on the other hand, was greeted by a tumultuous standing ovation. I wrote it off as a passing fad. At the time, black power fanatics were still pumped up over Mugabe’s ethnic cleansing of white farmers, and one assumed their enthusiasm would wear off once the consequences of Mugabe’s folly manifested themselves.