The UN’s Tyrant-Friendly Bureaucracy

Over the weekend, the 53 member countries of the UN’s Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) elected their new chair. The head of such commissions is rotated on a regional basis, and it was Africa’s turn. Against objections from the U.S. and Europe, the nations voted 26-21 (with three abstentions) in favor of Zimbabwe.

According to the BBC, “Zimbabwe’s Environment Minister Francis Nheme will now become chairman of the CSD. Mr. Nheme is the subject of European Union travel ban because he is a member of President Robert Mugabe’s government. That means he cannot travel to the EU to meet ministers on commission business.” Nheme also faces a similar ban in the United States, and although UN rules allow him to visit the UN in New York, he can travel no further than 25 miles from UN HQ and will create a diplomatic headache every time he arrives.

The vote showed that Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, remains a hero on the continent.

From an outsider’s perspective it is dismaying that the African bloc voted for Zimbabwe, a country spiraling out of control into disaster, with the world’s highest inflation rate, widespread abuses of human rights, and a leader rightly despised in the West. The only thing sustainable about Zimbabwe’s development is its negative direction.

But the vote showed that Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, remains a hero on the continent. He took control of his country in 1980, following white independent rule, and prior to that British colonial rule. No leaders on that continent have made a strong stand against his actions. Once the African nations agreed to pick Zimbabwe, and the U.S. objected, the UN was forced to chose between endorsing the selection and appearing to respond to Western pressure. Predictably, it endorsed the vote.

Mugabe has destroyed his economy by grabbing land from white farmers, undermining property rights of traders and been responsible for three million people fleeing the country, and countless hundreds of thousands dying mainly from disease. The last time I was there in 2005 I spoke with the only surgeon left in a city the size of Philadelphia. For Zimbabweans it is a tragedy.

Their once beautiful country has collapsed, life expectancy has nearly halved to just about 34 years for women and opposition to the ruling party is ruthlessly suppressed. But my parting observation in 2005 remains true today. “The explorer David Livingstone once said the sight of the mist rising out of Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls gorge was so beautiful it stopped the angels in their flight. Lately, the dark, acrid smoke rising from burning homes will have caused any passing angels to hasten on their way in horror.” The house-clearing, business-destroying, children-killing campaign against Zimbabwe’s opposition party strongholds of 2005 even got the attention of the UN, which at the time sent an envoy to the capital to confirm that Mugabe’s regime was violating human rights. The woeful African Union and weak South African leader Thabo Mbeki largely disagreed, insisting that Zimbabwe’s “process” was an internal matter. Meanwhile babies died of cold from living in the open in winter, or were in a few egregious cases crushed in their bulldozed homes, children starved and at least 3,000 adolescents died from HIV every week.

And that was two years ago. The situation has, almost impossibly, worsened since then. Inflation is about 180% a month, unemployment over 80% (excluding subsistence farmers), and any political opposition routinely beaten. Yet remarkably the UN’s position has weakened. It has done nothing to follow up on the envoy’s report of 2005 that condemned Mugabe’s actions, and today it allows Zimbabwe to take over its CSD. The UN is once again demonstrating its impotence, even tacit support, for tyrants.

With the U.S. and UK unwilling to act militarily—although they might support an extremely unlikely South African initiative—Zimbabweans are left to the odious power of Mugabe. What is happening there is not genocide, and there is no mass ethnically driven rape or murder, so it does not get the coverage of Darfur. But the slow drip of death is equally sure and has been occurring for longer.

Roger Bate is a Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.