EU/ African Union Summit

The AU's presence in Lisbon is summarized to a Mugabe debate. Although worse dictators abound in Africa, i support every action against any dictatorship. One dictator less is always better.

What is the AU's mission in Portugal? Is it a level playing-field summit? Are African Leaders summoned to Lisbon? Is the African Union capable of inviting the EU to Africa. Do you imagine Sarkozy, Merkel, Brown, Prodi etc. converging on Lesotho.?

Over 40 years after most African countries where transformed from colonies to decolonised territories in the guise of political independence, Africa is yet to disengage from the choke-hold of a hitherto colonised elite, who's basic education created the "Colonial Auxiliary".

The EU will be present in Lisbon as political and economic block with a constitution, a continental parliament, a strong currency and supra-national rights and responsibilities. Europeans participate in referandii to decide on Euro-wide legislation.

The African Union on the other hand is a loose syndicate of Heads of state, most of whom prefer to be in power for life. Imagine a cocktail of homicidal theorists like Kabila, Compaore and Obiang Nguema. Sprinkle a handful of political dinosaurs like Mugabe, Moubarak... Stir with colonial auxilliaries like Biya, Bongo, Bouteflika, Ben Ali, Sassou and Museveni(altogether they have been in power for 200 years) The resultant fecal outcome, thanks to Kadaffi's erratic impetus, is a more sorry sight than what a Picasso painting appears to a purist. In this bleakness Mbeki, Sirleaf, Toumani Toure, Kouffor et al. are an endangered minority. Africa is represented at the EU/AU Summit by corrupt despots.

Feed The World

We begin this morning, I’m afraid, with an alarming revelation. Never mind the war, the rugby or gun crime. It has come to my attention that in the whole of the British Isles there isn’t a single eco-nutritionist.

The government’s Food Standards Agency employs about a million and a half working groups who tour the nation in cheap suits making sure that Bernard Matthews is not filling his turkeys with asbestos and that Sainsbury’s isn’t using polonium to make its bananas more bent.

But not one of them is thinking: “Wait a minute. If we build the 3m new houses Gordon Brown has promised by 2020, where will we grow all the stuff needed to feed the people who live in them?”

And worse. Nobody is wondering where we might get the water. Not for our lawns and our lavatories but for the crops, the cows and the piggy-wigs. Like I said, this is an alarming problem.

Already the Atlantic has fewer cod in it than Elton John’s bath, so we are having to import fish fingers from China. And you may think this is fine. Your underpants come from the Far East, and your mobile phone, so why should we not import our watercress and beef from those industrious little yellow fellows on the banks of the Yangtze?

I’ll tell you why. Because China’s population is growing, too, and soon they won’t be able to send us their fish fingers because they will have been scoffed before they get to the docks.

It is a fact that the world can just about feed 6.5 billion people. But it will not be able to feed 7 billion or 8 billion. And certainly not if, as the lunatic Al Gore suggests, Canada stops growing food and turns over its prairies to the production of biodiesel.

Maybe man is causing the world to warm, but we’ll never know because, frankly, we will all have starved to death long before anyone gets the chance to find out.

Obviously, one solution is to burn the entire Amazon rainforest and turn this rich and fertile place into the world’s pantry. But unfortunately this is not possible because Sting will turn up on a chat show with some pygmy who’s sewn a saucer into his bottom lip, arguing that the world’s “indigenous tribes” are suffering because of the West’s greed.

And never mind that the pygmy is wearing a Manchester United football shirt.

Another solution is that we all become, with immediate effect, vegetarians. It takes 1,790 litres of water to grow 1kg of wheat. But 9,680 litres to produce 1kg of cow. Sadly, however, this doesn’t work for people like me who only really enjoy eating something if it once had a face.

I fear, too, that if we all became vegetablists, the world would smell of halitosis and we’d all start to vote Liberal Democrat. Furthermore, all the veg-heads I know are sickly and grey and unable to climb a flight of stairs without fainting.

It all looks bleak. But don’t worry, because I have a suggestion that I worked out this morning.

At the moment, we eat only a very small number of things. Cows. Pigs. Potatoes. Lettuce. And that’s about it. So what I propose is that we spice up our lives with a bit of variety.

David Attenborough is forever finding unusual creatures in the deepest parts of the ocean. He tells us how they can see down there in the murky depths and how they mate. He tells us where they live, how they raise their young and how they use their tentacles to find prey. But he never tells us the most important thing: what they taste like.

It’s the same story with Monty Don. Each week, he crops up on Gardeners’ World and explains how lupins form the perfect backdrop to any rockery. Yes. Fine. But can you put them on toast?

I’m looking at my garden now and wondering. I know I can’t eat the yew hedge because it will bounce off my diaphragm and come right back out again. But what about the lawn? Would that be delicious and nutritious? And, gulp, what about Kristin Scott Donkey, who died recently?

Should I have given her poor body to the hunt, or should I have garnished it with some lupins and a sea horse and had her for supper?

Why not? Over the years, I have eaten dog, snake, crocodile, guillemot, whale, puffin and a scorpion. They all tasted like chicken, so it’s a fair bet donkeys would, too. Or what about camels, which, as we all know, need very little water?

This brings me on to the final solution. There are many people who are greatly concerned for the plight of endangered species such as the tiger, the panda and the blue whale. They work very hard doing charity marathons in zany T-shirts to help keep these poor creatures teetering on the right side of extinction.

So how’s this for a plan? We start eating them. I believe that if enough people demanded blue whale for supper, garnished with the ears of a panda and the left wing of a juicy great bustard, it wouldn’t take very long for big business to move in.

When there’s a quid to be made, pandas will be having babies with the regularity of hens and you won’t be able to go to the shops for all the leopards you’ll meet on the way.

It’s either this or, I’m afraid, we are going to have to start eating each other. If that happens, bagsy I get John Prescott.

Robert Mugabe

Eighty three year strong

Criminal responsibility for political acts is the absent ingredient in African politics. That Robert Mugabe should be held responsible for torture, or accused thereof, may change the way he sees his shortening future. Mugabe is aware of how long he may cling to power. The opposition does not.

At eighty three years and over, it is illogical that Mugabe be held responsible for simultaneous political repression in Harare, Chipinge, Matoto and Binga. Mugabe may be administratively responsible, but 83yrs olds don't wake up at 5am to issue arrest warrants.

Someone is doing Mugabe's job better than he imagined. And that "someone" knows that Mugabe's time is out in every sense. Like elsewhere in Africa, Morgan Tsvangirai is putting up a fight against an individual and forgetting that he should be waging war against a regime. Subverting the nomenklatura is most efficient. Listen to the Chief of Police in Zimbabwe or the Vice-President. They don't fear that Mugabe is in political overtime. As if when Mugabe goes, what they do is forgotten. So far as politics resemble chess, I'll say this to Tsvangirai and other opposition leaders in Africa: "a threat is more effective than its execution". Threaten those who work with Mugabe and the deal is done.

Death Becomes Adam

While being taken to his death, was there a slight hesitation in Saddam’s steps, a small stagger or fear in his eyes? I did not see any. Advancing towards the gallows, he resembled a soldier from a defeated army making inspection.

With an astounding calm, he wanted the black band prepared for closing his eyes to be wrapped around, and with the same calm he allowed the oily rope to be placed around his neck. Saddam’s way of meeting his own death can be seen as heroic to some. As a matter of fact, his family called the toppled leader’s attitude at the moment of execution “brave and heroic.” There are probably those who share this view among his former and new supporters. He did not appear that way to me. The attitude reflected on the screen resembled that of a man who did not believe in death and who was not familiar with what death meant for man. We cannot know; perhaps the psychology of the attitude that appeared to some as heroism and bravery was what is called the numbing of emotions.


Even if it was like that, it would not be incorrect to say that Saddam Hussein’s feelings had become numb long before he was caught, tried and led to his death. For the execution scene we saw was the final curtain of the spiritual state that made Saddam a dictator. We all saw in this last act that this spirit, which did not believe in man, life or even death, had other priorities.


Pride and the desire to dominate in every situation were his priorities. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Saddam Hussein saw himself as a semi-god above everything and that at least he imagined himself to be a Nebuchadnezzar. Signs of man like fear, doubt, regret, and the shadow of pain never crossed Saddam’s face even at the moment of death. Actually, the relation he established with death explains his actions during the period he was in power.


His calm attitude in the face of death

If a Saddam portrait is going to be made, I think that before any thing else it should be made from this lack of emotion in the face of death. Poisoning thousands of people at Halabca without blinking an eye is a result of this same numbness and determination. Not limiting settling accounts with his eternal enemy, the Iranians, to the ethnic cleansing he made against Shiite Arabs in his own country, his beginning a war with his neighbor Iran that would last for years and one of his last statements before his death being “Don’t trust an Iranian coalition” show the limits of his ambition and anger. Saddam probably took as his historical mission an Arab-Iranian or Sunni-Shiite conflict. Just as he saw himself as a Salahaddin fighting against the Crusaders when he opposed the West after his relations with his former supporter America broke down. We know that his notorious oppression and mercilessness shown to the Shiites and Kurds was too rough and devastating to be explained by sectarian fidelity. Saddam was not only extremely merciless to Shiites, but to Sunni Kurds as well. Who knows, perhaps this cruelty was nurtured in his mind by pre-Islamic archaic figures and archaic rage, for he lived in Babel, the heaven of the ancient world. Was it without reason that he called one unit of his army “Nebuchadnezzar” and another “Hammurabi”? Various things have been said about Saddam’s religious beliefs. However, we know by his pronouncing the Islamic testament just before he died that he had faith, but we do not know how religious he was. The half-finished second testament made his death even more tragic.


Of course, while images of the execution scene which caused me to have these thoughts were not yet available, just as everyone else opposed to capital punishment, I thought I would not be able to bear watching the moment of death. The only reason I thought like that was not the moral mistake of ending a life. Even if the one to die is a dictator and oppressor, I still think that no one should have the right to end another’s life, especially with others watching it.


In order not to be unfair to Saddam…

However, I was hopeful on behalf of Iraq that if, on the one hand, the execution should take place, Saddam’s death would have just an opposite effect. In a period when the whole world was full of hatred for things in Iraq, the smallest human reflex Saddam could give at the moment of death might create an effect of mercy and conscience on everyone who liked him and did not like him. And these reactions might make a positive contribution to the determination of the future of Iraq, which is on the border of inexplicable madness. But that did not happen. Just like the execution decision, execution scenes hurriedly appeared on our TV screens. While looking out of the corner of my eye wondering whether or not to turn off the television, I discovered in a strange way that it could be watched. So that it can be understood correctly, I am saying these without ever forgetting that Saddam was a soldier. In which of their faces does death not appear as a shadow that upsets and jolts those who are watching? That human shadow is felt even in photographs documenting the moment of death. Hesitation -- that is the essential hesitation. Forget about politicians and social leaders, a common murderer cannot even bear the moment of death. But there was something different in Saddam’s death. What made Saddam’s death viewable was his disbelief in death.


Maybe he did not have the meaning of death that we have. The secret of the many murders he committed is hidden in the relation he established with death. If he had believed a little in death, perhaps the number of his murders would have been smaller. While the photograph of his greatest massacre at Halabca is still fresh in our minds, the last picture Saddam gave becomes even more meaningful. Strangely enough, there is a similarity between the two photographs. I am talking about the picture of Saddam after he was taken down from the gallows and, with bruised blood spots on his neck and cheek, he was wrapped up in a white cloth and laid face-down. In this last photograph there was a human being, not an emotionally frozen dictator. Maybe it was because the consciousness and pride that had made him an oppressor had dispersed and the innocence of sleep overcame his existence. I do not know, but maybe what made me think of all this is the resemblance between the face-down sleeping state of Saddam wrapped in a white cloth and the state of the dying man trying to protect his baby at Halabca. Unfortunately, Saddam had to die in order to reflect a human appearance. That photograph where he seems to be sleeping, wrapped in a white cloth with a spot of blood on his mouth is going to remain in my mind.