Blogoir

You come from Africa. Now you are an American.

Are you an African-American?

Yes, but only if your skin is dark enough!

What's worse, if your skin happens to be not-so-dark and you put yourself in the new category of 'white African-American' as nothing else seems to fit, dark-skinned people who are less African than you are but who call themselves African-Americans can claim to be offended.

And get you into big trouble.

Look, this one is easy.

There is a simple test for African-Americanness.

Put a pencil in someone's hair.

If the hair is curly enough to hold it, that person is an African-American.

If not, sue the hell out of someone impertinently and insultingly claiming that noble status.

Hey, that pencil test thing is cool. Where did you get the idea? 

Remember my disagreement about South Africa's Peaceful Transition?

Well, it was so peaceful that they have made a movie about all the violence:

"The period between [Nelson] Mandela's release from prison [February 1990] and the first democratic election [April 1994] was extraordinarily violent. More people died in that four-year period than in 30 years of apartheid," Bang Bang Club director Stephen Silver, says.

"This is one of the stories of South Africa's political freedom that's not been told."

Don't you just love the unconscious institutional racism - the idea that a story involving huge numbers of killings of Africans is 'told' only when prosperous white people get to tell it, and does not exist until they decide to do so?

My case rests.

What exactly was wrong with apartheid?

At root the act of defining people in arbitrary phoney 'racial' categories then allocating them special territories accordingly ('homelands').

Just as happens in some bookshops these days (HT Ed Driscoll):

What a great idea! Putting all the novels about black people in a single section! Why didn’t I think of that? But wait—wait—how many of the characters have to be black before the novel does go into that section? Does just one black character make the whole novel black or is there a special section for mulatto novels with characters of both colors?

And if all the novels about black people are in the black section, does that make the Literature section the white section? Why don’t we call it that then? I’m confused.

And hey, what about The Adventures of Augie March—do I find that in the Jewish section? No, don’t be an idiot. Important novels about Jews trying to find their place in America go in the Literature section, of course. What are you, an anti-semite?

Only important novels about blacks trying to find their place in America go in a special section of their own. Anything else would be hateful. 

Got it now?

This story of the ghastly township violence in South Africa against real or suspected lesbians - 'corrective rape' - has drawn a lot of attention.

The ferocity and brutality of Simelane's murder sent shockwaves through Kwa Thema, where she was much known and loved for bringing sports fame to the sprawling township.

Her mother, Mally Simelane, said she always feared for her daughter's safety but never imagined her life would be taken in such a way.

"I'm scared of these people ... She was a sweet lady, she never fought with anyone, but why would they kill her like this? She was stabbed, 25 holes in her. The whole body, even under the feet."

South Africa has a unique combination of wonderful people and natural assets, and quite amazing violence.

How many people do readers know personally who either have died in car crashes or were murdered?

In my professional and personal life I have known former Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic who was assassinated in 2003. And that's about it.

Apart from when I was in South Africa, where in four years I knew about 14 people killed on the roads or murdered. This is a formidable statistical spike.

The obvious argument is that 'apartheid' is to blame for everything bad which happens in South Africa - its poisonous legacy must last for decades.

Yet there is more to it than that. The way the anti-apartheid struggle evolved in the 1980s away from the tough, radical but thoughtful self-disciplines of the Black Consciousness Movement (Steve Biko et al) into explicit Marxist ANC/SACP-sponsored revolutionary terror aimed primarily at fellow Africans (not 'whites') is in my view a central factor.

Which is why I am delighted that when one types South Africa peaceful transition into Google, this comes up near the top of page one.

South Africa did not have a Peaceful Transition.

It had a Really Violent Transition which still continues, in large part of course because of the callous racist degradation that apartheid imposed on that country's majority for so long.

In part too because of a vile culture of the-means-justify-any-ends necklacing, crucifictions and other nameless horrors which went on in the townships in the 1980s, as the ANC/SACP tried to wipe out opposition by whipping up psychotic violence among children and teenagers. Twenty years on, look what these people are doing now. 

And also, interestingly, because progressive establishments there and more widely have not wanted to accept that South Africa has a powerful traditionalist un-European African tradition with its own norms of exotic violence, which if anything was isolated from modernity by powerful walls apartheid erected.

I recall a top Black Consciousness activist telling me in 1991 that a big post-apartheid philosophical problem would be how to deal with authentic African values in that country (witchcraft etc) which had flourished well away from modernising urban eyes and which were quite incompatible with a 'modern' democratic state.

Such subtleties have not featured much among the multi-racial ANC elite who took over the government and who (albeit uneasily in some cases) indeed pronounced the unique moral rectitude of the full package of modern 'European' urban rainbow liberal values (gay rights etc), with scant regard for more traditional 'African' sensibilities.

Thus these new horrors.

And some bafflement? Is it OK to condemn such behaviour out of hand? Or does that give legitimacy to racist Westernist ideas of cultural supremacy?

We think that what people get up to in bed is their private matter. But what if other societies do not?

Does that make us 'better'? Who are we to be 'judgemental'?

A vile mess.

From top to bottom.

I liked Clare Short when I first met her in Bosnia a couple of years later. Her febrile anti-Americanism aside, she was tough-minded, down-to-earth and perspicacious on Bosnian issues.

Why did someone as smart as Clare Short get that letter to the Zimbabwe government so wrong?

Let's look at the context.

In November 1997 New Labour were settling down after their landslide election win.

The old Overseas Development Administration had been hived off from the FCO to create a new International Development Department (DFID) . It was full of zealous officials thrusting to show how neo-socialist development policies could 'eradicate' world poverty under DFID's brilliant leadership, with a bit of help from Clare and Gordon. And to show how they could brush aside wimpy/fusty FCO advice on how to deal with foreigners.

Clare Short herself was unlikely to be over-impressed by what the Conservatives may or may not have promised Mugabe by way of land reform support.

Plus Mugabe came from the nationalist/socialist/Africanist tendency of African liberation movements, not the Soviet-led communist tendency: he was not "one of us" in Labour Party terms.

On the substance, New Labour at home positioned themselves as "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Why not also be "tough on underdevevelopment in Africa, tough on the causes of underdevelopment in Africa"? This meant having little sympathy for weirdo Mugabe policies likely to make Zimbabwe's position worse, not better.

Thus the scene was set for clever, cocky officials to serve up a draft letter from the Secretary of State to the Mugabe government in Harare which proved just how tough and confident New Labour (and New DFID) would be.

And this is what they did, I suspect loftily not bothering to run it past the fuddy-duddy FCO in London and/or the High Commission in Harare to check tone and wisdom alike.

Thus are far-reaching bureaucratic blunders made.

Did this letter cause the ensuing national economic collapse and the thousands of deaths and injuries which will leave Zimbabwe limping badly for decades to come?

No.

But was it a piece of startling incompetence which made a difficult situation much worse?

Yes.

Clare Short signed this letter but forgot or ignored a Deep Rule of Diplomacy: "it is not what you say - it's what they hear".

Harare heard 'rude and patrionising'. This allowed the most extreme members of the Mugabe elite to portray their stupid greedy policies as a natural pan-African response to British in-bred neo-colonialist racism.

Memo to next British government:

If you win a serious election victory, do not expect foreigners to be as excited about it and your new policies as you are.

Be Bold. But Think.

And on day one put a firm instruction round Whitehall that no (no) policy-significant message from a Minister to another capital gets issued without it first being run past the in-country Embassy or High Commission, to check that your best intentions won't be spoiled by getting the tone all wrong. 

"It's not enough to be right. You also need to be convincing."

In Zimbabwe the Africanist tendency led by Robert Mugabe is making one last heave to destroy 'white farmers'.

The so-called power-sharing deal which is meant to start to pull Zimbabwe out of its crisis leaves the Agriculture Ministry in Mugabe's hands. So, out they go:

At the meeting in Chegutu, Johannes Tomana, the attorney-general who has himself been allocated a seized farm - is reported to have said there had been "unnecessary delays" in farmers' trials as a result of their legal representatives challenging the constitutionality of the process.

Party time!

The greatest book written about Africa from a 'white' perspective is My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan. He describes in gory detail just how far 'whites' have to go to reach true acceptance in Africa.

So far so clear.

But read this fine Standpoint discussion about Western assistance to Africa between Dambisa Moyo, Daniel Johnson and Richard Dowden.

Dambisa has written Dead Aid, a book which describes the way Western development aid to Africa has created chaos. She puts a strong emphasis on self-respect:

So how do you get to the place where Africans can walk into a room and they're equally respected as business partners? They're not going to get to that point if they continue to depend on aid, where you're constantly with a begging bowl.

Places like India and China - they still have an enormous part of their population living in poverty, and yet nobody feels sorry for the Chinese, nobody feels sorry for India. We treat them as equal partners on the global stage. We want to hear what they have to say. That's because they aren't sitting there, waiting for a big cheque to come in from abroad.

I have long suspected that, bizarre as it may seem, Mugabe is operating in some way according to this logic. He wants to force Zimbabwe to rock bottom as one perverse way to end this dependency on 'white'/settler thinking in all its forms. To wipe the Zimbabwe slate clean of European values and residual power, as the basis for restarting the country on exclusively African terms.

Of course whatever purist logic might be attractive in this position is far outweighed by the death and corruption his policies have caused. But I confess some sneaking sympathy with the Africanist ideal, since it is just so awful to see the patronising way the West (and the UK) has dealt with Africa for so long.

Mugabe's own treatment here in London at the hands of New Labour may well have led him to his final ruinous Africanist fundamentalism. The infamous letter sent by Clare Short to the Zimbabwe Land and Agriculture Minister in 1997 is the classic example of what I mean.

How many deaths have resulted from this ponderous, condescending and downright stupid text drafted by priggish DFID apparatchiki who simply failed to understand the psychological issues at stake?

So, as expected, good money drives out bad at last in benighted Zimbabwe. The authorities have started to allow people to trade in real money and not scraps of paper covered in zeroes.

Or, for now, not covered in zeroes.

I had an interesting discussion this afternoon with someone writing a thesis on the Responsibility to Protect:

• That each individual state has the primary responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. And it is also a responsibility for prevention of these crimes.

• That the international community should encourage or assist states to exercise this responsibility.

• The international community has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means to help protect populations threatened by these crimes. When a state “manifestly fails” in its protection responsibilities, and peaceful means are inadequate, the international community must take stronger measures, including collective use of force authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII.

In its strict form as adopted at the 2005 World Summit, this new international principle/norm/standard/requirement lays down that states have to protect their own citizens from certain international crimes. If a state manifestly fails to live up these responsibilities, the international community may intervene including by force if necesary.

It does not say that states have to protect their own citizens from their own rulers' policy incompetence leading to mass deaths or other large-scale disasters. Nor does it say that states have to protect their citizens from the impact of natural disasters.

All of which creates unhappy moral contradictions. It is OK for the international community to jump over the sovereignty fence and stop a Bad Leader killing or expelling his/her own people.

But not OK to jump over to stop a Bad Leader plundering the country, less directly but just as surely leaving millions to starve or die of disease for generations to come.

And not OK to give help to people starving after a natural disaster, when a Bad Leader refuses to let in foreign help.

In each case the Bad Leader's badness and/or malign selfishness causes massive deaths.

Yet in the first case lives may be saved. In the others, hundreds of thousands of people may be left to die as the world glumly leans on the sovereignty fence watching it happen - the victims are collateral damage of that national sovereignty principle.

The main thing, of course, is that African statesmen should noisily insist that the West must not intervene to stop these African 'non-criminal' disasters, but instead must pick up the tab anyway once they are unstoppable:

... former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan led calls for world leaders to help rebuild Zimbabwe's economy.

If there is a moral case for helping Zimbabwe's people out of a horrible hole, is there not an identical moral case for stopping its odious leaders steer the country deeply into it?

Whatever happened to our Moral Foreign Policy?

Or even Enlightened Self-Interest?

Matthew Parris writes eloquently about the role of Christianity in African development:

In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different.

Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

His point is that a traditional passive 'tribal' mind is Africa's main problem:

But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

The answer?

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described.

... Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

But what if in some way the rest of us can not fathom, Africa as a space just does not want to be liberated to walk tall amid global competition, or at least is impervious to any attempt to liberate it?

What if Africa's problem is that we think Africa has a problem?

A senior anti-apartheid intellectual/activist once told me that one of the best-kept secrets of the anti-apartheid struggle was the fact that apartheid had - through its massive policies of enforced 'separate development' - kept alive lots of African traditions and attitudes which otherwise would have been lost to pell-mell modernity. A precious legacy.

Our old friend time-scale again.

Which is more likely?

That in 50,000 years' time New York and Beijing and London will be glorious cities, full of clever and successful human beings?

Or that somewhere in a warm spot a simple man will be sitting under a tree in what a long-lost civilisation called Tanzania, gazing contentedly at Mt Kilimanjaro because it is just there?

Does 'bad' money drive out 'good' money, as Sir Thomas Gresham claimed back in the mid-C16?

This turns out to be Complicated.

See Wikipedia on the subject, as well as this lively and elegant analysis.

The issue arose because once upon a time the core standard of value was gold. Governments might cheat by circulating coins with less (and less) gold in them. So if you had coins it made sense to try to use not your best gold coins to buy things but rather the 'debased' coins, to get rid of them.

Hence a tendency for better gold coins to be hoarded, and bad ones to dominate the market-place: 'Bad' money drives out 'good' money.

Of course it all depends on what part of the sequence you are considering. Our good friend Timescale reappears.

Keeping your best money at home might be seen as the good money driving the bad money out of the house. In this sense the good money is lying low, waiting for the bad money to disappear as (eventually) the market system will break down without Honest Money.

Back in real life, in my experience people want to use real money. So when currencies deteriorate, people use better alternatives. Good money starts to drive out bad money.

As in Mugabe's Zimbabwe:

Prices went the other way, tripling on Thursday alone ... "You'd think that these numbers would cripple us, that we might as well stay in bed. But people find other ways and the way is to sell in US dollars."

Mugabe's most dramatic recent concession to reality was the recognition of the US dollar and South African rand as the real national currencies of Zimbabwe these days.

The government spent months trying to suppress trading in foreign currency but underground supermarkets sprang up in garages and warehouses stocked with imports from South Africa.

Restaurants and shops took foreign money under the counter. With rapid devaluation and the shortage of Zimbabwe dollar notes, the middle-class began to pay their maids and gardeners in hard currency.

Eventually, the government faced the reality that there was only anything in the shops at all beyond a few vegetables and eggs because of trading in foreign currency - in part driven by the 3 million Zimbabweans who have fled the country, mostly for South Africa, sending money home. It legalised the use of US dollars and rand in September but the effect of that has been to make it impossible to buy almost anything without foreign currency... 

Of course the incompetence required to create this situation has to be hidden:

Cash has been in desperately short supply because the government cannot print fast enough to keep up with hyperinflation. Officially inflation stands at 231m percent, but that was in July. Since then the central bank has regarded economic statistics as a state secret.

It al comes down to Honest Money. Which requires Honest Government.

Could Zimbabwe happen here in the UK? Surely not!

Yet Guido is worried about a small proposed change in the law here:

The 1844 Banking Bill ensured transparency in the operations of the Bank of England. It has been good enough for over 164 years...

... means (if I recall correctly) "too little too late" in Afrikaans.

You know things are looking bad for President Mugabe when Archbishop Tutu calls for him to step down:

The Nobel Prize winner told Dutch television that Mr Mugabe should be removed by force if he refuses to go.

Archbishop Tutu said Mr Mugabe had ruined "a wonderful country", turning a "bread-basket" into a "basket case" ... I think now that the world must say: 'You have been responsible, with your cohorts... for gross violations, and you are going to face indictment in The Hague unless you step down.'"

Or maybe not.

A senior Dutch diplomat who previously did high-level jobs in Africa told me the other day how he had been present at an African Summit.

Mugabe had turned up unconscionably late. Yet all the assembled leaders had waited for him and then gone down on their knees to greet him - he was an Elder Statesman. "I'll never forget that."

In Africa it seems that it does not matter how many of your own people you cause to die.

The main thing is to keep doing it for long enough, well into your old age, and you'll be revered.

At least by other African leaders.

Remember this one about South Africa's peaceful transition from apartheid?

Try to imagine the howling of fury had apartheid leader PW Botha denied the African population of S Africa the drugs needed to give sick people a chance to fight HIV - and 300,000 people had died as a result.

You're right.

One can not imagine it.

Genocide indictment maybe?

See by contrast the mumblings of embarrassment when T Mbeki does just that.

And he is still hovering around claiming to be a credible mediator for Zimbabwe, where the health system is collapsing as the Mugabe clique crash the country into the ground.

Forner President Carter says that the plight of Zimbabwe is 'worse than we could have imagined'. True no doubt. But that says more about the impoverishment of his knowledge and imagination than it does about the enforced impoverishment of Zimbabwe.

Back in the mid-1980s when the AIDS drama had not yet soared up the policy agenda, our High Commissioner in Zambia wrote a famous Despatch back to London about the likely devastating impact of AIDS on that part of Africa.

It was probably one of the most influential FCO reports ever written, in lurching policy thinking in a quite new direction.

Despite this prescient warning well before the ANC came to power in S Africa, we alas are now reduced to modest gestures after incalculable damage has been done.

By the leading architect of that famously 'peaceful transition'. 

Polly Toynbee's volume rises in direct proportion to the slide in share prices.

Her latest rather freewheeling thoughts open thusly:

A remarkable 10,000 people marched on Trafalgar Square at the weekend to hold the government to its promise to end child poverty.

This somehow reminded me of my visit back in 1987 or so to Red Location, one of the most awful apartheid South African 'townships' near Port Elizabeth.

Named after the rusting corrugated iron barracks there, it is now the site of a sharp new museum commemorating the anti-apartheid struggle.

When I passed through back then, the desolation and poverty were all too obvious. The sanitation was beyond description - only a handful of blocked semi-public WCs for hundreds of people.

At that time the memory of Bantu Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement was still fresh, even if the BCM as such was under attack from the communistic ANC/SACP who wanted no rivals. Those townships where the BCM had a presence seemed to feature a greater emphasis on self-help and self-reliance.

I later went to visit veteran communist leader Govan Mbeki (father of the now fallen Thabo, then recently released from Robben Island) at his little house. This recalls that memorable encounter.

I described to G Mbeki my visit to Red Location - surely the ANC as the local power should be doing more to motivate the people living there to clean things up a bit and try to improve their lot.

"It's not the job of the people to do the job of the government", retorted Mbeki, tetchily.

Which of course may be true. Yet what a bleak practical philosophy that attitude brings with it: a willingness to let people rot - if not to encourage them to rot to pep up their sporadic militancy - until the state fixes things.

Toynbeeism (as befits the Guardian with its Broad Left anti-libertarian outlook) is all about collectivist compulsion. How inspiring that supposedly poor people march to demand that not so poor people give them more money! And not by choice, but by force of the weight of the state.

The then Ambassador at my first posting in Belgrade was Sir Edwin Bolland. As we trundled round former Yugoslavia on long car journeys he would talk of his upbringing in a mining community in northern England in the 1930s, a brutish poor existence. Amidst the deprivation the working-class families invested heavily in self-help and education, setting up hard-working study groups with a view to improving their lot and giving their children a better chance.

If as seems likely we all need to take a 'back to basics' new look at what works and what does not in sustaining modern society, maybe that should include a hard look at the role of the state in dumbing down over many decades those principles of self-reliance and self-motivation, in favour of ignorant demands that 'the government' take more and more decisions for us?

Is Zimbabwe's political power-sharing agreement good or bad for Zimbabwe?

If anything is deemed to be better than total collapse, it might be seen as good (for the time being, until it isn't).

But it sets a wretched precedent.

It has all the moral stature of a deal between a reasonably honest citizen and the mugger who attacks him. To keep the peace and 'prevent more bloodshed', the mugger gets to stay gripping the citizen's arm to stop him moving freely - and to keep a large share of the money he stole from him.

Should my and your taxpayers' money go to prop up this absurd situation?

Not in any serious quantity.

Maybe as in the case of utterly incompetent banks looking to go bust, honourable attempts to stave off the worst only make the worst even worse when it finally happens?

Are international tribunals for war crimes suspects a Good Idea?

And if so, are they being Done Well?

If not, does that mean that the Idea is in fact not so Good?

Two excellent pieces on these themes: one by John Lloyd, the other by Bill Montgomery.

It goes without saying that there are going to be shortcomings in any process of this sort, especially if the accused is bent on turning the whole affair into a circus as the best way of confusing the issues and trying to 'relativise' his/her guilt.

To this end Vojislav Seselj is putting in a powerful performance (NB a rare example of courtroom transcripts being Not Suitable for Work?).

Likewise any such Tribunal needs to rely on certain cooperative countries' police/military forces to arrest and hand over suspects, and to provide hard evidence perhaps from Top Secret sources.

This means that those countries inevitably start to have some influence over the timing of arrests and even the issue of indictments. Political and other calculations creep in. "You help us - we help you."

So if Milosevic had to be indicted, surely Croatia's President Tudjman who also played his part in some ghastly events should be too? Indeed. 

Yet somehow the indictment with his name on it was never quite issued. 

Did some governments not want that to happen and suggest that ICTY delay matters as Tudjman was ill? Tudjman generously solved the problem by dying. Unindicted - his reputation undeservedly intact to that extent at least.

Similarly Bosnia President Izetbegovic was under ICTY investigation when he died in 2003, when investigations were dropped. Was it really not clear by 2003 (ie almost a decade after the Bosnia conflict) that Izetbegovic too should face some war crimes indictments? Why was it all dragging on in this way?

Lloyd's article includes the following quote from a senior disillusioned British observer of ICTY:

And I saw that the UN, which is supposed to supervise, has no moral compass. It enjoins even-handedness, on ethnic grounds, not on grounds of justice.

Maybe in the circumstances of what happened in former Yugoslavia, which most people would see as some sort of ethnic civil war, this sort of thing is not only inevitable but desirable? If justice is to be seen to be done - most importantly among the communities involved in the fighting - all the issues need a fair objective airing?

NB All of which is not - of course - to say that each leader was "equally guilty".

One thing is for sure. If ICTY and other such Tribunals can not find a way to deal with intimidation of witnesses as happened in the case of indicted Kosovo leader Haradinaj, the process might as well not continue.

To carry on and reach unsatisfactory verdicts when this is going on simply shows weakness, and tells ICTY indictees and their supporters that the worse they behave, the better the outcome - for them.

Exactly the opposite of the message ICTY was set up to send?    

In Sudan too the authority of UN-led international processes is now being directly challenged.

Will ICC keep its nerve and follow through by indicting President al-Bashir?

Tempting as it is to disagree on sight with everything written by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian, I did think about this one arguing the case against the International Criminal Court indicting the President of Sudan.

Spared as I am from knowing the slightest thing about Sudan, what might I offer by way of First Principles?

JS distinguishes this case from the indictment against Slobodan Milosevic:

The Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, was under military attack from Nato. Negotiations had been cut off. Ultimately, they were renewed but only with the good offices of the Russians who had shown no enthusiasm for the Hague tribunal's indictment.

All sort of true enough. But not the best argument for politically and morally supporting that indictment.

The point is that up Milosevic's indictment we all had been tempted to keep a number of policy eggs in his basket ("better the devil you know", "we have no choice but to deal with the people in power", "realpolitik has to prevail" etc etc).

This meant not throwing our full weight behind the democratic opposition, who consequently were even more demoralised: "even if we do everything we can in these appalling conditions to make Serbia a decent society, the West may not support us wholeheartedly".

Hence lots of unhappy neurotic tweebling at high levels of the FCO and elsewhere as the prospect of the indictment loomed: "now we'll face a cornered animal, even more dangerous and unpredictable... a bad situation could get a lot worse..."

The indictment of course as I expected had several excellent effects:

• Milosevic became a skunk - almost no-one serious would engage with him any more
• therefore all eggs thereafter placed in the opposition basket
• this allowed us quietly to drop hints to key regime supporters that the game was ending - better to jump ship than sink with him. Wedge-driving and all that. Worked a treat.
• and we could turn round his slogan that "in the end the world would come to Serbia via me".
• Instead we could at last say convincingly "Not true! Milosevic is Serbia's obstacle to rejoining the civilised world - throw him out!"

All this worked remarkably well. Out he was thrown.

Does any of this apply to Sudan? Probably some of it. Especially the wedge-driving bits - if the President is indicted we can start picking away much more effectively at those around him.

Not an overnight win, but a big change in the psychological climate, empowering at least a bit more those normal people caught in the Sudanese struggle.

As for Jonathan Steele:

Holding people to account for their actions is a desirable goal, but it has to be weighed against the difficulties it creates if the indictees still hold power. Bashir is not Pinochet, who was long out of office as well as out of favour in Chile when he was indicted (by a foreign judge, not by an international court).

The list of practical problems that would flow from an indictment of Sudan's president is long. It far outweighs the benefits. The ICC's prosecutor should think again.

Does this not miss the most basic point? That if the ICC thinks he ought to face charges for vile atrocities, they indeed must indict him regardless of the political inconvenience and practical problems?

Otherwise it is not an implacable independent Court, but a whim of whatever political fashion happens to be prevalent?

Plus, of course, if they sense ICC weakness local lunatics everywhere only have to threaten to create an even longer list of "practical problems" for the Guardian to bewail the 'likely' impact of any indictment.

Which rather defeats the point of setting the ICC up in the first place?

There are not too many UN Security Council vetoes.

So when one comes along it shows that things at that top table are not in good shape - lack of grown-up consensus and/or serious miscalculation by those who pushed the offending Resolution.

Although of course there may be cases where a Resolution is pushed in expectation of a Veto by one or other Permanent Member in the hope of embarrassing said Permanent Member before world opinion.

Last night the world saw the unedifying spectacle of Russia and China backed by South Africa, Vietnam and Libya blocking a Resolution to impose an arms embargo on Zimbabwe as well as financial measures against key Zimbawe leaders.

The Russians and Chinese hid behind the pious rubbish that Zimbabwe is not a 'threat to international peace and security', the legal 'trigger' needed for action of this sort. Since it is quite easy to imagine Zimbabwe collapsing with dangerous ramifications for its neighbours, that argument is unconvincing if not downright dishonest.

The stance of Mbeki/Mandela South Africa, itself a victim of Zimbabwe's collapse, goes beyond shame.

So there it is.

Three countries with no democracy lining up with Russia which is doing its best to diminish its democracy, aided and abetted by South Africa led by a Soviet-trained narcissist, voting against meaningful pressure on a vile and incompetent regime which counts for nothing.

But why? 

The decision of course has nothing to do with Zimbabwe. The Chinese and Russians want to be obstinate just to show that as their post-Cold War wealth increases apace they can do what they darn well please, regardless of what the 'West' wants. Zimbabwe's luckless population are collateral damage. 

No better time to do flex these muscles than in the dying months of the unhappy Bush Presidency and with Gordon Brown's domestic credibility also low. A strong school of thought has it that when someone is down there is never a better time to kick him.

So, a new phase begins.

Mugabe and his core villains gloat heartily at the success of their daring smash and grab raid on their country's integrity.

Western measures of different sorts intensify.

Zimbabwe's already parlous situation gets worse. The Chinese may step in to buy the place if it gets cheap enough. Ruin. Human desperation and misery on a massive scale.

All as I warned. 

Plus there could be bigger picture effects too. The idea of a League of Democracies separate from the UN may get a boost. But would this move allow a significant League of Authoritarians to set themselves up in business? Is this the best the world can do?

Yet if one looks at these things from a grander perspective, one sees different patterns emerging.

Policies have Consequences, even if those consequences bite you far in the future.

For example, when did the UK wield its first UN Veto acting alone?

Perhaps on 13 September 1963: over ... the situation in Southern Rhodesia. 

Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison to global acclaim on 11 February 1990.

Despite being First Secretary (Political) at our Embassy in Cape Town at the time, I missed it. My friend and colleague John (now Sir John) Sawers was there in the thick of the action, and was probably the first British person to greet Mandela in person after all those long years of imprisonment. Which diplomatic and personal nimbleness he is now deploying to good effect as HM Ambassador at the United Nations.

Anyway, I missed this historic moment because I was in deepest Transkei, Mandela's Xhosa home base, at a rally of the ANC's rival the Pan Africanist Congress.

This was a daunting affair, a heaving African crowd crammed into a sweaty hall chanting 'one settler, one bullet'. Mine was the only pink and conspicuously settlerish face for many miles in any direction.

The ANC (with its steely core of Moscow communist discipline) went on to sweep the board in ensuing elections in South Africa, and the PAC disintegrated in the margins.   

Anyway, a few months later the Embassy had relocated to Pretoria for the non-Parliamentary season. The Ambassador was in the UK. His deputy set up a call on Mandela in Soweto and drove off, delighted with his likely 'scoop'. I was left to run the ship on a sleepy afternoon. 

Zzzzz. 

The telephone rings. The security guard at the gate. "Nelson Mandela is here!"

Panic.

I race downstairs to greet Mandela and escort him to the Ambassador's office. His people mutter something unconvincing (and it turned out untrue) about having called us to say that the meeting with the Deputy Head of Mission was to be here, not in Soweto. Urgent calls go out to try to get my boss back to the Embassy asap for the meeting.

So we sat and waited. I, lowly First Sec Pretoria, a very small ant crawling on the vast dunghill of world history, had the most famous person in the world and a couple of his people, all to myself!

We talked mainly about the ghastly violence in KwaZulu, where ANC/SACP members and Inkatha supporters of Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi were killing each other in large numbers.

At one point Mandela sharply said "Would you people support Buthelezi as President?"

I replied, "If he wins a free and fair election of all South Africans, why not?"

There was a long awkward silence.

Then one of Mandela's people spoke through gritted teeth: "Good answer!"

Eventually Mandela decided not to wait for my boss to return from Soweto and departed, the 'white' South African local staff women in the Embassy jostling to meet him and being charmed to bits.

And to make an exciting day complete, my boss finally arrived. Too late to meet Mandela but complete with speeding ticket. By then I had drafted my telegram to London recording my fascinating encounter. 

Bliss.

This sorry Swedish story attracted fleeting global attention.

A school in Sweden confiscated a boy's party invitations being handed out to his friends as two classmates were not invited:

"Two people in class had not been invited, and that is not allowed. The ones who were not invited felt sad and left out," the school principal, who was not named, told the paper.

Let's assume that the two who were not invited had in some way or the other upset the party-host.

The boy hosting the party decides not to invite them. Cause - meet Effect!

The idea that behaviour has consequences is life's one core rule. Our world depends on it.

Society ideally should be organised so that Good Behaviour has Good Consequences; Bad Behaviour has Bad Consequences.

And if those basic principles are not taught and learned at school, when are they taught and learned?

What if the very distinction between Good and Bad is seen as ... discrimination? 

Thus to the Mandela Birthday Party in London. And the revolting spectacle of Annie Lennox on stage twittering on about HIV/AIDS, when Mandela has done so little about the utterly awful policies of President Mbeki in this area which have led to the deaths of countless South Africans.   

Then on to the African Union gathering, where 'President' Mugabe is welcomed as if nothing untoward had happened in his country's 'election'. Again, Mandela has done nothing to make a difference.

On the day France takes over the EU Presidency let us recall the infamous words of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1961:

The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.

We see now that J-PS was 100% wrong.

Those African Marxist liberators, so generously supported by Sweden, did killing enough. But they remained unfree, locked in a profound Marxist/Swedish moral syndrome of Total Irresponsibility.

Unable to accept criticism, unable to set their standards high, ultimately loyal (like Mandela) not to their people but only to their own political movements.

Nor are we former colonialists free either, since we carry on sending 'assistance' to these villains, patronisingly subsidising and extending their countries' moral and actual impoverishment.

In Africa thanks to generations of the best Euro-Swedish non-judgmental educational thinking and development policies, Bad Behaviour has Quite Good consequences.

Result?

Disaster. Of course.

But it's no-one's fault. Except maybe ours.

Update: I learn that many schools in the UK and not only in Sweden have these 'all or no-one' policies for parties. Including the school where my daughter goes(!). They have a variation - it is OK within one class for girls to invite only girls to a party, and boys only boys. Hmm.

Not clear to me what exactly the 'policy' means. It is not (I think) in any contract one signs with the school. In practice it is little more than an impertinent device to give teachers an easier life, and maybe these days they need one.

Yet it is deeply perverse. Imagine if the teachers at a school were told that if they host a party at home they had to invite all their teacher colleagues. They would say 'Get Lost! It's my house and I'll invite whom I like.'

Parents and children are not extended a similar freedom and the accompanying responsibility?

One of the most piquant features of the British Parliamentary voting system is that it is so well established and so well analysed that pundits can predict with a high degree of accuracy which MPs will lose their seats for any given % swing of opinion against the government at the next election.

Thus the current group of Labour MPs are staring at the opinion polls in horror, as so many of them stand to be Out next time round if things carry on as they are.

Thus the Labour ship heads boldly for the rocks. At what point do the crew rebel and heave the captain overboard?

Robert Mugabe of course sets Gordon Brown a magnificent example in full steam ahead political navigation when rocks are looming.

Robert. Gordon. Names of great richness in Scotland.

Are these two leaders by some chance related?

Daniel Finkelstein in the Times also takes up the charge against John Simpson's wretched analysis of the latest news from Zimbabwe.

And Lord Ashdown argues the case for intervening by force in Zimbabwe to head off a possible genocide.

But, comes the shriek, that would violate Zimbabwe's sovereignty!

Recently I was a Harvard-sponsored seminar at which issues of 'humanitarian intervention' and the Right to Protect were discussed.

I recalled seeing signs as one entered Harvard Square: Cambridge is a Domestic Violence-Free Zone.

I said that if you were walking down the street near Harvard and saw a man beating his wife/child/dog brutally with a stick in his front garden, you were morally and maybe even these days legally obligated to intervene to stop the violence.

Thus we long ago moved on from the idea that the 'sovereignty' of one's home was a shield enabling the uninterrupted commission of seriously illegal acts.

So if it is unacceptable to brutalise one person in one's own garden, why is it acceptable to brutalise millions of people in one's country without fear of being stopped?

Lordy. The West appearing yet again as the self-proclaimed world policeman. How to choose where to intervene? Zimbabwe the thin end of the wedge?

Good points. But to accept them without more merely gives a blank cheque to repressive regimes everywhere. 

So let's agree at least to intervene in the no-brainer immediate brutality cases, where there is no serious cost to intervening and immediate gains to be made in saving large numbers of lives.

Plus 'intervention' need not jump immediately to military force. If key Western governments froze all Zimbabwean official accounts, forced the printing of Mugabe's worthless currency to be stopped and used a bit of electronic sabotage, the regime's power to suppress its own people would be massively reduced.

Or why not quietly offer the key gangsters propping up the regime a bit of money to Go Quietly?

Or lots of other little ruses designed to End the Misery asap?

Maybe some of this is going on. I hope so. But the dose so far is not working.

Finally, South Africa's role (to be precise Mkeki's role) has been outlandishly bad.

Here is a Good Idea from Peter Godwin in the New York Times: lean hard on South Africa by treating Zimbabwe as South Africa's Tibet:

Maybe Zimbabwe should become to the South Africa-hosted World Cup what Tibet has been to the Beijing Olympics — the pungent albatross that spoils every press conference and mars every presentation with its insistent odor.