I blame Mandelson and the EU for propping up Burma’s wicked regime

The EU has not helped Aung San Suu Kyi’s cause

It has been a long-held view of mine that most of the evil in the world today can be traced back, somehow, to Peter Mandelson. People tell me that this is irrational and warped. And yet, as the Burmese soldiers sprayed those protesting monks with tear gas and bunged them in the back of paddy wagons to be taken God knows where and for God knows how long, the EU Trade Commissioner’s spectral form once again swam towards me from inside my television set.

We are all worked up and worried about Burma, quite rightly, because of its appalling record on human rights. It is not simply the continued house arrest of the resilient and personable Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy won a landslide in the 1990 general election — a result which the military junta declined to accept.