COMMENTARY

Wither the Commonwealth...

by Anthony Livingston Hall, a Turks & Caicos Islands descendant, Washington lawyer and consultant to the former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, who publishes his own Internet Weblog at http://ipinions.blogspot.com offering a Caribbean perspective on international events

Tuesday,  December 6, 2005

At the closing session of last week’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Malta, delegates spent almost as much time defending their decision to allow Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni to host their next summit as they did spinning the platitudes about trade and good governance contained in their joint Communiqué into something approximating substantive achievement.

This spectacle was entirely fitting, however, because it exposed the fecklessness of the Commonwealth and the inherent contradictions and terminal conflicts that beset the CHOG.

For example, I doubt the CHOG would have expressed any concern about Museveni’s relapse into the Big Dadaism that once characterized the repressive rule of so many African leaders (like the most notorious of Museveni’s predecessors - Idi Amin) if Uganda were not the designated site for their 2007 meeting. It is ironic, therefore, that the 2005 CHOGM shall go down in infamy for the unqualified embrace delegates gave Museveni. 

Because the CHOG were all acutely aware that the recent arrest (on dubious charges of treason and rape) of Dr. Kizza Besigye, the man who posed the strongest challenge to Museveni in elections due early next year, is not the only worrisome development in Museveni’s rule over Uganda. Indeed, others include his censoring the press, using the military as a tool of political intimidation and shepherding a culture of corruption that is untenable even by African standards.

Yet, even though the U.S. Ambassador to Uganda Jimmy Kolker was moved recently to describe these worrisome developments as “red warning lights”, the Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon made it clear that the CHOG suffer no such lack of clarity about Museveni’s government.

After all, in response to press enquiries about whether they are endorsing Museveni’s actions by holding their next meeting in Uganda, McKinnon declared that:

“The leaders have not changed their minds in any way about going to Uganda in two years' time….It was endorsed by leaders that the next CHOGM will be in Uganda.”

Of course, no one familiar with the restive dynamics of the North (white) / South (black) divide within the Commonwealth was surprised by the Secretary General’s declaration of support for Museveni. After all, he and other white CHOG probably feared that any attempt to impose sanctions against Museveni would have incited a mutinous reaction by black (especially African) CHOG. And, their fears were entirely warranted.

Because, at the 2003 summit in Nigeria, the most powerful black leader in the Commonwealth, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, actually conspired to polarize the CHOG along racial lines. Incredulously, he was purportedly driven to racial gerrymandering when white delegates balked at lifting the sanctions (an indefinite suspension) that CHOG imposed against President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe a year earlier for serial human rights abuses. 

But, despite overestimating racial solidarity (if not enlightenment) amongst black delegates at their summit in Nigeria (reportedly CHOG from the Caribbean remained “too loyal HM The Queen”), Mbeki hung a Damoclean sword over the organising principles of the Commonwealth that will inevitably slice the organisation along racial lines - as Mbeki persuades more black CHOG that the dominant role of white CHOG within the Commonwealth offers them little political and virtually no economic benefit. 

Indeed, no one can deny that - but for this Damoclean threat - Museveni would not be hosting the next CHOGM. Unfortunately, Mbeki and the equally defiant President Obasanjo of Nigeria have now established that they are quite prepared to “Africanise” the Commonwealth so that leaders like Zimbabwe’s Mugabe can feel right at home. Never mind that Mugabe has:

• Been condemned by international monitors for routinely rigging national elections (including a censure by the former U.S. President Jimmy Carter whose Carter Centre for Peace Mugabe dismissed as a “terrorist organisation”);
   

• Used his military to arrest and otherwise intimidate leaders of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Party to such extremes that it prompted MDC spokesman, Paul Themba Nyathi, to declare on BBC radio that millions of Zimbabweans were “stunned” by Mbeki’s unqualified support for Mugabe and added, sardonically, that perhaps Mbeki “knows things that those of us who are here on the ground do not know”;
   

• Politically cleansed Zimbabweans he suspected of supporting the MDC – by bulldozing their homes in a national campaign he called “Drive out the rubbish.” In fact, the inhumanity of this ongoing campaign of terror and repression has provoked Zimbabwean Archbishop Pius Ncube to call for a non-violent revolution to overthrow Mugabe’s government; and
   

• Confiscated almost 4,000 white-owned farms and gave them to political cronies who used the land to build private mansions; thereby, turning Zimbabwe in just five years from the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa into a basket case of starving people.

But, notwithstanding this patently dictatorial record, Mbeki and Obasanjo were (and remain) adamant that these are Zimbabwe’s domestic affairs and, therefore, that it behooves the Commonwealth to reconsider its authority to sanction CHOG for such matters.

Of course, it is such rubbish thinking that has to be driven out of Africa. Especially since Mbeki betrayed his preference for political solidarity with Mugabe - at the expense of millions of oppressed (black) Zimbabweans - by declaring that: 

“[White leaders like British PM Tony Blair who seem] inspired by notions of white supremacy are free to depart [the Commonwealth] if they feel that membership of the association reduces them to a repugnant position imposed by inferior blacks."

Despite Mbeki’s pathetic sarcasm, however, it is self-evident that white CHOG (including PM Howard of Australia, PM Martin of Canada and PM Clark of New Zealand) have decided that they would rather accept the repugnant position of associating with despotic black leaders than risk slicing the Commonwealth along racial lines.

Moreover, I suspect that if Mugabe had not withdrawn his country from the Commonwealth in 2003 after the CHOG voted against lifting his suspension, he would have been welcomed back into the fold at last week’s meeting in Malta.

Therefore, after being branded racists and unrepentant colonialists, it’s not at all surprising that white CHOG did not stand on principle at this summit when questions were raised about the propriety of Museveni hosting the next CHOGM.

And, just in case playing the race card did not compel their submission, Museveni guaranteed their surrender (and commanded HM The Queen’s appearance in Uganda) by declaring that he was not about to be lectured on fair elections and democracy by the British. He then reminded fellow CHOG, with indignation, that:

“We had no democracy in Uganda when the British were there. For 70 years there was no parliament and no voting. We had only two elections before in all the time Britain was there.”

Clearly, for the black troika of Mbeki, Obasanjo and Museveni, two wrongs do make a right. And, they apparently feel entitled to abuse their subjects with impunity just as the British did during their colonial rule.

Touché!

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