Two must read articles from the US press...
From the Weekly Standard:
Constructive Engagement? by Jack Bloom, author of Out of Step (which I highly recommend).
South Africa took up a two-year nonpermanent seat at the United Nations Security Council in January this year. It was quite predictable, although human rights groups expressed surprise, that South Africa used its new seat, along with permanent members China and Russia, to reject a resolution calling on the military junta in Burma to stop human rights abuses. The quip was made that the government "has yet to meet a dictator it does not like." |
From the New York Times:
South Africa Lowers Voice on Human Rights
Examining theories about why South Africa has taken its controversial (and indefensible) positions in the UN Security Council when we are supposed to be a 'beacon of human rights' the New York Times article theorises...
A third theory, a hybrid of those two, is that South Africa’s leaders have yet to decide whether they are democrats or the revolutionaries of two decades ago, railing against seemingly immovable establishments on behalf of seemingly lost causes. The powers in those days were the United States and Britain, powers inimical to the Communists who were the financiers of black liberation movements in the 1980s. “What you have here is the continuing, ongoing tussle over whether the A.N.C. is still a protest movement or the governing party of a responsible member of the international community,” said a retired American diplomat with decades of Africa experience. “They’re reflexively against anything we’re for — we in the States, we and the British, we in the North. It’s more Chinese than the Chinese.” |
Steve,
I disagree with the quip that the South African govt "has yet to meet a
dictator it does not like."
Last year, at Ronno Einstein's BEYOND VICTIMHOOD Wits lecture, the
great non- physicist branded me " a dictator" when I had the temerity
to try and ask him a tricky question.
He certainly used the term "dictator" in a pejorative sense. I did not feel that he liked me and I doubt that he will invite me for tea when Bob Mugabe next visits.
Just for the record,Na'eem Jeenah of The FXI states that my emails make him puke and Ferial Haffajee (editor of The Mail and Guardian) has requested that I should no longer Cc her. Virginia Tilley has also
given me the cold shoulder.
Jane Duncan (exec director of The FXI) does not respond to my emails but if Na'eem is telling the truth, it is also because they make her puke. You would have thought that freedom of expression activists would
have been made of sterner, stuff but it seems that a bit of linguistic
argy-bargy results in extreme nausea and a rush to the lav.
Posted by: The Dictator / Embittered Correspondent | March 28, 2007 at 00:12