Shame on Mugabe’s stooges

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

Johannesburg

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.