Blogoir

Should we care about the appalling HIV rates in South Africa, if the people of South Africa elect someone who does not care either?

Want a hyper-epidemic? All you need is a tradition of polygamy AND high levels of female autonomy. Big Men have their little network of wives and/or lovers. Women buy in to duty sex for the status and security, but get to run their own little networks on the side, for the fun of it.

That has been the pattern in South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and a number of other countries where more than one adult in seven has HIV.

But woe betide anyone who points this out. At best, you are insensitive to cultural traditions. At worst, you are perpetuating racist myths of the hypersexualised African male, blah, blah, blah.

Shouldn't people get what they deserve?

Update: a reader who knows the subject writes:

Surely the real irresponsibility lies within the card-carrying ANC? It's they who really choose the country's leader.

Well, sure.

But I think the point the writer of the above article was getting at was just that.

We need to have the courage to tell Africans bluntly that certain African cultural norms are dooming them, and not flinch when accusations of RAAACISM come flying back..

And we also need to speak out strongly against the folly of ridiculous leaders who in one way or the other play to dangerous African superstitions and prejudices and make things worse.

When Nelson Mandela dies, how many of the thousands of obituaries round the world will blame him for not roundly denouncing Thabo Mbeki and his crazy AIDS policies, which have led to hundreds of thousands of African deaths? 

Isn't it a perverse form of racism - and in any case a policy hugely damaging to Africa - not to press hard points like this?

One of the most doom-laden assertions from the Climate Change tendency is that said Climate Change causes mass conflict.

See here for a classic noisy example: genocide in Darfur was caused 'at least in part' by Climate Change.

But even the Guardian strikes a note of caution.

As do the ICG:

Yet the relationship between climate change and conflict is complex and not yet sufficiently understood. This is in part because climate projections are somewhat limited in geographic and temporal specificity, and different societies have different capacities to adapt to changes and related effects. But it is also because the processes that produce violent conflict in any particular situation are often complicated.

Although environmental change likely never has been and never will be the sole or proximate cause of deadly conflict, it can contribute to conditions that make it more likely or severe.

And, of course, less likely and less severe (eg if previously dry areas start to get wetter). But that positive aspect does not suit the narrative.

Since no significant conflict round the world in the past 2000 years can sensibly be ascribed to Climate Change (despite large climate changes to and fro throughout that period) it seems best to tip-toe quietly away from this one.

Chris McDowell (formerly FCO, now City University in London) is a serious international expert on the problems of people being displaced en masse because of conflict and huge development projects. He nails it here:

Remember the Sharpeville Six?

They were six South Africans convicted of the murder of a local township leader who 'collaborated' with the apartheid regime. Their case became an international symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle.

What happened? In early September 1984 in Sharpeville (south of Johannesburg) township protesters angered at rent rises converged upon the house of deputy mayor Dlamini. He was dragged from his house, knocked down and set alight. A horrible murder.

The police eventually arrested six people. They were charged under a legal doctrine called 'common purpose', which originates in English law. The general idea is that when a group of people embark upon an unlawful or dangerous acctivity and someone gets hurt, they may be found jointly liable even if it is not clear who precisely caused the harm. See Wikipedia:

... the doctrine derives from R v Swindall and Osborne (1846) 2 Car. & K. 230 where two cart drivers engaged in a race. One of them ran down and killed a pedestrian. It was not known which one had driven the fatal cart, but since both were equally encouraging the other in the race, it was irrelevant which of them had actually struck the man, and they were held jointly liable.

In the Sharpeville case the police claimed to have sufficient evidence to implicate the six in the murder, even though a large crowd had been involved cheering and dancing as Mr Dlamini was burning.

The case became an international sensation when the six were sentenced to death. Controversy centred on both the facts of the case - gruesome but not clear - and the quality of evidence adduced. The 'common purpose ' doctrine too was attacked (absurdly) as a manifestly unjust principle. But the key aim was to show that the apartheid system was incapable of justice. For many activists, journalists and diplomats following the trial, the legal and factual subtleties were irrelevant.

Edwin Cameron then was a fast-rising human rights lawyer who raised cogent professional doubts about the verdicts. Here he is many years and much seniority later talking about the legal issues involved.

Anyway, with huge international pressure mounting the case made its way upwards towards South Africa's Supreme Court in Bloemfontein.

I went along to represent the Embassy to hear the pleadings - one of very few foreign diplomats present.

Representing the Sharpeville Six was Sydney Kentridge QC, who previously had won global acclaim for his work at the inquest of Steve Biko. Here is the CV of one of the most remarkable lawyers of our times.

How, I wondered as a barrister manqué, would Mr Kentridge tackle this one? The eyes of the planet were on him. Every anti-apartheid activist on earth was willing him on to merciless rhetorical demolition of the apartheid regime.

He rose to speak. And in a few dramatic sentences he mastered the courtroom completely.

Not by attacking apartheid. Rather by describing in appalling heart-wrenching detail what had happened to Mr Dlamini as he was beaten and then burned alive by that Sharpeville crowd.

Then, having confronted the evil horror of the crime in itself, like a priest in an Orthodox church swinging the insense jar he began to sprinkle grains of doubt here and there, to and fro, until he made a powerful case that the sentences were unsupportable on the facts and law and, yes, accordingly unjust.

Just terrific technique - it gave the accused their best chance..

But it was not enough. The stony-faced top South African judges under the PW Botha regime decided that the sentences had to stand, and turned down the appeal.

Hours later President Botha granted them a reprieve from their death sentences. In an equal opportunities gesture of defiance he also reprieved four white policemen sentenced to death for murdering blacks.

The point of this now?

Just that having read the opening arguments for Serbia at the ICJ, I feel that they might have done with some of that Kentridge wisdom and acknowledged fully and fairly the miserable oppression of Kosovo under the Tito/Rankovic period and then in the 1980s and on into the Milosevic 1990s.

That would have helped establish that the new leadership in Serbia wanted to occupy its fair share of the moral high ground now, all the better to underpin its formal legal case that Kosovo's UDI was inappropriate and unlawful.

As it was the presentation was strong and effective and principled, but somehow ... depersonalised. It just was not at the level of sheer class that Sydney Kentridge showed all those years ago in dusty Bloemfontein.

It summed up the general approach of Serbia on the Kosovo problem for long decades.

Namely that it is eternally attached to the idea of Kosovo and (maybe) all the territory of Kosovo too - it's almost irrelevant that all those Albanians are there. 

Over at Open Democracy a long and learned piece by Roger Riddell on the impact of Development Aid: a board member of Oxford Policy Management, a Principal of The Policy Practice and a member of DFID’s the Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact (IACDI).

This mighty analysis explores at length whether the question "Is Aid Working?" is really the right question.

It finally comes to what looks to me like a sensible conclusion: that the systemic problems of international aid will not be addressed until ...

... those running aid agencies agree among themselves to devote far less energy and far fewer resources to defending aid by providing evidence of their own agencies’ successes and instead channel far more energy into highlighting aid’s systemic failures and weaknesses and into urging that they be addressed.

If such leaders believe there is a moral reason to provide aid, they should be leading the campaign to address aid’s systemic problems. This, in my view, is where the discourse on aid should be focused.

Well, quite so.

But just a thought.

If the problem is that people are poor and so need inefficient Aid, maybe there should be some hard focus on the tried and proven way to lift people out of poverty?

This article is, according to Word Count 4661 words long.

In it the words/phrases business, freedom, private sector do not appear once.

Why not?

Isn't that the right Aid question?

Few new entries these days as I am back in Brussels trying to earn some money for Christmas presents.

While I am away have a look at the lively writing over at Samizdata at the moment.

Including a link to this energetic piece about Zimbabwe and how the retreat of the Mugabe-style state from the economy has led to a dramatic turnaround  Zimbabwe's fortunes.

It reminds me of the triumphant arrival of Scientific Capitalism in post-communist Russia. In the early days at least.

And for a brutalist analysis of the dangers involved in trying 9/11 'suspects' in US civilian courts, see Pat Buchanan's tirade here - notable if only as an example of the sort of vehement criticism these trials might well attract in the USA as they drag on.

Back to normal on Friday.

A lively piece of work by Craig Murray looking at the prospects for Ghana getting rich and ruined by Oil Money.

Knowing nothing about Ghana or indeed about Oil Money, I leave it to you to work out whether his well-turned analysis makes sense. It is certainly interesting enough. 

But this caught my eye:

At the same time, revenue must urgently be directed to rural infrastructure, to increasing farm prices and developing agro-processing industry, on a scale not previously attempted. Ghana already has a major problem keeping young people in farming. Think how much this will worsen when oil starts to flow.

Why should young people stay on farms now that the country is going to get rich? Ghana as the anti-Nigeria, ie a new hi-tech Singapore-style place rather than a typical agriculture exporting African country?

Is not the point of acquiring such largesse that it gives a country the chance to look at quite different options, not merely ways to impose top-down solutions based on old ideas?

On a previous posting of mine about the BNP, one Chris made this comment:

After the brouhaha of the BNP Question Time this interview http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nh6w4 with Kwame Kwei-Armah went unnoticed on Radio 7 (as most things do) and yet (some 26 minutes in) we hear strikingly similar concerns voiced about multiculturalism and miscegenation.

Kwei-Armah laments the fact that 6 out of 10 Afro-Carribean men are in a mixed relationship, he describes this as "assimilation" not integration, responsible for "the death of my tribe" the "disappearance" of my community.

When Griffin says this he sounds ridiculous and dangerous, and when Kwei-Armah says it he is authentic and intellectual.

I was interested to listen to this (Note: the link has now vanished under BBC iPlayer rules). And yes, there after some 26 minutes this actor and award-winning playwright bemoans the fact that the cultural community from Grenada and other parts of the Caribbean is being 'assimilated' because people from it are having relationships with Others.

This, he says, is bad - something precious is being lost.

Is it?

Check out this interesting article on 'language death' which suggests that the spread of variations of English is bound to continue as (crucially) English is relatively easy to learn. Just as languages fade away, so will many current cultural distinctions (and associated prejudices and discrimination) based on them.

Is not that a huge gain for civilisation?

The strange fact of the matter is that the Afrikaners who set up apartheid were cruel and unfair, but they were intellectually honest. Rigid separation of different cultures is a powerful way to keep minority cultures alive and distinct. 

They realised that if you want to do it properly you have no choice but (i) to set up rigid legal classifications of people in each culture concerned, and (ii) have some concept in law of 'group rights' to allow geographical clusters of one culture to keep others out as far as possible.

And it worked:

A senior anti-apartheid intellectual/activist once told me that one of the best-kept secrets of the anti-apartheid struggle was the fact that apartheid had - through its massive policies of enforced 'separate development' - kept alive lots of African traditions and attitudes which otherwise would have been lost to pell-mell modernity. A precious legacy.

Hence in UK today it is minority community leaders who insist on all the dreary bureaucracy that goes with explicitly apartheid-style 'racial' or 'ethnic' classification when one applies for jobs (and Parliamentary seats...), as a messy way of somehow trying at least to keep tabs on how each supposed 'minority' community is faring. 

But let's face it.

Some cultures are authentic and vibrant and richly deserving of some sort of protection against 'assimiliation', however vilely they treat eg women and gays.

But others (working-class 'white' males, middle-class rural huntsfolk) are deemed in progressive circles to be per se pernicious and backward-looking. 

That's just the way it is.

This Libya business gets worse.

Now the UK government is tangled up in explaining what it did or did not to to help victims of IRA terrorist bombs get compensation from Libya, source of the IRA's Semtex explosives.

Here is a piece about the basic legal claim involved.

To my long-lost legal mind, there is an issue about 'remoteness' here. It is one think Libya (whatever 'Libya' means in this context) supplying explosives to the IRA, another to hold Libya responsible in law for any eventual harm caused by for IRA murdering.

Would victims of IRA shoot-outs be likely to get far suing Russia for making the AK47s used by IRA gangsters? Methinks not.

The fact that Libya has paid compensation to Lockerbie bomb victims' families looks to be not relevant, in that there the direct link between Libya and the bombing/bombers was established.

Be that as it may, the litigation trundles along. So the issue arises: what if anything should HMG do to support it?

If HMG takes the view that this is something on which Libya properly might be pressed officially to respond, what way forward offers the best practical outcome?

Openly siding with the families in the case will please the families, but might make Libya dig in its heels. Quiet, nagging diplomacy and top secret lunches at the Travellers Club may be more likely to get somewhere, but the fact that such diplomacy is quiet may let the Libyans think we don't mean it, and the families may think HMG are not really trying.

Plus any direct involvement by HMG may give the Libyans a plausible excuse to stall any legal proceedings pending official discussions, and the whole thing will drag on inconclusively for years.

A typical Art of Diplomacy conundrum.

So how best to proceed is not obvious.

But it is obvious how not to proceed: by being uncertain/evasive and not looking people in the eye.

Memo to next government: don't be silly and try to get away with all Presentation and no Substance. But do get Presentation right, from Day One. This means being measured, firm but friendly, adult and straightforward. Easy.   

A youthful Crawf asks me what I make of the sending to Libya of the 'Lockerbie bomber'.

Very difficult to say, because it's a fiendishly long and complicated story about which I know next to nothing on the inner detail.

My only professional diplomatic encounter with Libya came on the night in 1986 when US planes bombed Tripoli (in response to clear evidence linking the Libyan leadership to anti-American terrorism) after taking off from airfields in the UK to do so. I was the FCO Resident Clerk fielding a torrent of angry calls from the public. One of my first blog postings described the experience.

Two years later came the destruction of Pan Am 103 which crashed on and around Lockerbie. The finger of suspicion pointed at Libya. Sanctions were imposed.   

Over the following years it all slowly changed.

The Cold War ended. Colonel Gadhafi's eccentric if not narcissistic Arab nationalism started to look a bit limp and self-indulgent compared to Islamist violence. Heavy sanctions on Libya took some sort of toll.

Then 9/11. President Bush gets tough. Very tough. Saddam is toppled then arrested and put on trial.

All this gave Colonel Gadhafi a lot to think about. Gadhafi decided that that the time had come to try something new.

A very private message was conveyed to a senior MI6 officer... Here is a vivid and well-sourced account of the whole story as seen from the US perspective.

The elements of a Big Deal emerged.

If Libya accepted responsibility for the destruction of Pan Am 103 and paid out compensation to the families of the victims, plus stopped playing with weapons of mass destruction, sanctions could be lifted and everything normalised. Why, Colonel Gadhafi could be respectable again. 

And, basically, this is what has happened.

The Libyans wrote a letter to the UN Security Council in 2003 which, while carefully drafted, got as close as such a text is ever going to get to accepting responsibility for the atrocity. Sanctions were lifted, in stages. 

And, in due course, Prime Minister Blair visited Libya. Relations were normalised and smoothed out, even if the colour scheme and rug weren't:

As a significant extra element in this story, two Libyans were surrendered to the British and put on trial for the bombing. One was convicted.

An exhaustive and exhausting expert blog by Professor Robert Black pores over the issues surrounding the less than satisfactory conviction of that man, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi.

My view(s)?

1     The decision made in Edinburgh to send a dying Al-Megrahi back to Libya falls, just about, within the scale of what is reasonable. But I would not have voted to do so, broadly for the reasons given by Liam Murray. Michael Binyon makes some trenchant points too.

2     The idea that London/HMG had nothing to do with the decision (ie that it was Scotland's alone to take) is obviously phoney. Hence the row now developing. No decision such as this would be taken in Scotland without a closely coordinated eye being kept in London on the manifold foreign policy aspects for the UK as a whole. See the Observer yesterday, not least this:

Meanwhile, details emerged of a second letter written by the Foreign Office minister Ivan Lewis to the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, confirming that there were no legal reasons not to let Megrahi go and concluding: "I hope on this basis you will now feel able to consider the Libyan application." 

3     If Al-Megrahi did not do it, there is now simply no chance of identifying, arresting and successfully prosecuting those who did. And in any case the really guilty terrorists were the people up the hierarchy in Libya (and/or elsewhere) who ordered the bombing, or gave a sly wink to those lesser villains who might do it.  

4     Ignominious, embarrassing, perfidious or whatever you want to call it, maybe the whole thing is for the best, all things considered:

• We and the Americans used a powerful and sustained policy of carrot and stick to bring Libya to accept responsibility for this horror, and pay compensation, and also renounce its weapons of mass destruction.
• This is one of the biggest Western foreign policy achievments of our times (compare North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan and so on ), and a huge step forward towards making Northern Africa a partner, not a foe.

Where Diplomacy meets Reality?

Most of the noise generated by Foreign Secretary David Miliband's observations on a BBC Great Lives radio programme has been linked to his words on terrorism:

Asked by presenter Matthew Parris whether there were any circumstances in which terrorism was justified, Mr Miliband said: ‘Yes, there are circumstances in which it is justifiable, and yes, there are circumstances in which it is effective.’

He added: ‘The importance for me is that the South African example proved something remarkable: the apartheid regime looked like a regime that would last forever, and it was blown down.

It is hard to argue that, on its own, a political struggle would have delivered. The striking at the heart of a regime’s claim on a monopoly of power, which the ANC’s armed wing represented, was very significant.’

Eeek.

Where to start?

On the Miliband/terrorism point, the FS was either simply wrong or missed a key point.

It is not whether terrorism is 'morally justifiable'. It is whether those who use terrorist methods to win power are more likely than not to use terror to stay in it.

Insofar as South Africa has emerged from apartheid 'peacefully' and today is in not too bad shape, it is because the ANC/SACP did not use terrorism (other than against fellow Africans which as we know did not count) on any great scale.

On the whole (and wisely, albeit at great cost) the South African masses did not rise up violently against apartheid, but let unrelenting pressures and contradictions of different shapes and sizes erode it.

In fact, if there was an ANC/SACP armed struggle at all it was against other African groupings (PAC/AZAPO/Inkatha). Which is why some 30,000 Africans and almost no 'whites' were massacred in South Africa's legendary Peaceful Transition to Democracy.

Plus the ANC/SACP/UDF in the mid-1980s had a clear policy of unleashing 'the worse, the better' revolutionary terror in the townships, with necklacings and other horrors being perpetrated by groups of demonic school-children. Hence, 20+ years later, South Africa's amazing violent crime rate.

In short, ANC/SACP terrorism did not 'blow down' apartheid. P W Botha's heart attack and the collapse of Communism in Europe did.

The BBC link to the interview coyly describes Joe Slovo as a 'leading member of the ANC and the first Housing Minister in Nelson Mandela's government'. The point, of course, is that Slovo was the leading South African communist and formal head of the 'military wing' of the ANC/SACP alliance. Slovo was at the heart of ANC/SACP policy-making for years, plus a close suck-up of Moscow and  vigorous apologist for Communism anywhere he found it.

So here we have the ghoulish spectacle of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband extolling the merits of this dark character, a great friend of his own Marxist father Ralph Miliband.

Slovo by the usual standards of Communists was something of a moderate and pragmatist. He had to be. Years of exile forced him to grasp that the South African masses were not to be mobilised for a brisk, amazingly violent surge aimed at toppling apartheid. And he seems to have been avuncular in large doses, chatting over Marxist ideology with assorted Milibands. What a great life indeed!

Yet Slovo has to bear a significant responsibility for the carnage inflicted by the SACP/ANC in the townships in its drive for sole power as apartheid ended, and the calamitous crime-rate thereafter. Not an issue I suspect the Miliband family has given much thought to, such is the Labour Party's fevered admiration for the ANC/SACP.

Plus, while Slovo was devoted to the cause of freedom for South Africans, he was openly and shamefully against freedom for those trying to cast off communism.

See how the SACP urged Moscow to suppress the pro-freedom movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Slovo later claimed to have had personal doubts about this, but fealty to Moscow was a prerequisite for leadership in the anti-apartheid struggle. And that was what counted, not some higher principle of real empowerment and freedom for all.

His ideological writings were ghastly beyond description. His famous piece Has Socialism Failed written in 1990 is a cracker of the genre. It agonizes over the ruin which has come to the classic Communist project as the Berlin Wall crashed, and meanders in a jargonised pseudo-logical way towards a purported condemnation of the 'Stalinism' which Slovo had championed for most of his life.

Avuncular Joe scratches for nuggets of Marxist hope in the wreckage:

The transformations which have occurred in Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria are revolutionary in scope. With the exception of Romania, is there another example in human history in which those in power have responded to the inevitable with such a civilised and pacific resignation?

We should remember De Gaulle's military response in 1968 when ten million workers and students filled the streets of Paris. It is not difficult to forecast how Bush or Thatcher would deal with millions in their streets supported by general strikes demanding the overthrow of their system of rule.

Huh?

Of course for Slovo Communism in fact did quite well in lots of respects:

Among other things, statistics recently published in The Economist (UK) show that in the Soviet Union - after only 70 years of socialist endeavour in what was one of the most backward countries in the capitalist world - there are more graduate engineers than in the US, more graduate research scientists than in Japan and more medical doctors per head than in Western Europe. It also produces more steel, fuel and energy than any other country (The World in the 1990s; Economist publication).

How many capitalist countries can match the achievements of most of the socialist world in the provision of social security, child care, the ending of cultural backwardness, and so on? There is certainly no country in the world which can beat Cuba's record in the sphere of health care.

Lies and/or specious drivel.

It was all just a mistake:

We believe, however, that the theory of Marxism, in all its essential respects, remains valid and provides an indispensable theoretical guide to achieve a society free of all forms of exploitation of person by person.

The major weaknesses which have emerged in the practice of socialism are the results of distortions and misapplications. They do not flow naturally from the basic concepts of Marxism whose core is essentially humane and democratic and which project a social order with an economic potential vastly superior to that of capitalism.

My own abiding personal memory of Slovo comes from 1990, a huge rally organised by the ANC/SACP in Jo'burg soon after they were unbanned. Slovo was the final speaker. The crowd had been brought to life by the late Chris Hani leading rounds of cheery Kill the Boer chants and dancing.

Slovo at last rose to speak. Perhaps the proudest moment of his career to date.

And as he started droning on, the Africans started to go home in their droves. Who was this boring old white man anyway?

Slovo on centre-stage could see for himself what was happening. The South African masses were at last voting freely, albeit with their feet. And not for him!

The more impassioned his voice as he glorified the SACP/ANC, the faster people left. It was really remarkable. By the time he finished he was almost shouting, but to desultory applause - the stadium was close to empty.

All the pro-ANC media and its white Leftist elite of course ignored this astonishing spectacle in reporting the event. It was not just appallingly embarrassing for themselves in their self-proclaimed intellectual leadership roles. Worse, far worse, it did not fit the Narrative.

Was Slovo's a 'great life'? In its own tenaciously dogmatic, blinkered, selfish blood-flecked way, perhaps it was.

Does he deserve a fawning BBC piece led by a British Foreign Secretary?

No.

If Mr Miliband is looking for a real Great Life hero, why not go for a poorly educated working man who led a true bloodless democratic revolution in the part of Europe where the Slovo and Miliband families came from?

Such as this one.

Jim Fitzpatrick MP has attended many Muslim weddings. He caused a fuss recently when he and his wife as far as I know politely walked out of one at which men and women were segregated; he then used the media to make some political points about radicalisation among Muslims.

(Update: picking up a helpful comment below, I do not mean to accuse Mr Fitzpatrick of deliberately 'using the media' to get his account of this event publicised. From the reports I have seen it is not clear to me whether he did this, or whether media outlets separately got the story and then he responded to them as he did. Or indeed whether he responded to a press enquiry and then saw an opportunity to crank up more widespread coverage. Many possibilities!)

An interesting issue of politics colliding with etiquette. He has been attacked from all sides.

Such as Archbishop Cranmer:

Where is the courtesy, the grace, the humility, the respect for the fact that this was somebody else’s day? The arrangements were the personal choice of the bride and groom. How they chose to seat people and conduct their wedding was entirely up to them.

But Jim Fitzpatrick has succeeded in turning the biggest and happiest day of their lives into a PR stunt and an anti-Muslim media fest...

The problem, Mr Fitzpatrick, is that your party has mistaken social cohesion for multiculturalism. You have destroyed community cohesion by pandering to the whims of every minority and creating a hierarchy of rights in which each and every disparate group now vies for supremacy. There can be no cohesion where there is no harmony, and no harmony in a climate of perpetual struggle for supreme rights.

But Mr Fitzpatrick declares defiantly: "I’m not pandering to any minority opinion.”

Labour's raison d'être of the past decade has been to pander to every minority opinion - and principally that of Muslims and homosexuals. Jim Fitzpatrick is either a fool or a liar.

And from the activist Left, Random Blowe:

... the way Fitzpatrick has reacted has been particularly boorish and insulting. This was a private function; the bride and groom, Bodrul Islam and Mahbuba Kamali, chose how they wanted their ceremony conducted and as a guest, Fitzpatrick should have either accepted this out of courtesy, even if he didn’t agree with it, or left discreetly and without fuss.

What he most certainly shouldn’t have done is use the ceremony’s rituals to launch into an attack in the East London Advertiser on the Jamaatis that run the LMC and the newly-married couple caught up in this are quite right to feel aggrieved that their wedding day has been “hijacked for political gain”.

As one comment on The Daily (Maybe) said, it would have been different if the event had been a political meeting. The social conservatism that lies behind customs such as gender segregation is undoubtedly shared by a number orthodox religious traditions and this often throws up some important dilemmas for those on the Left who campaign in areas where religious belief is strong.

How far should courtesy extend towards individual religious and cultural practices, or to religious-based organisations for that matter, before this starts to clash with our own values?

Mrs Crawf and I faced something like this at least twice in our diplomatic careers as I recall.

In Sarajevo we were introduced at a reception to Yusuf Islam, viz former singer Cat Stevens. He politely shook my hand but did not shake my wife's, as Muslims of a certain persuasion do not do that sort of thing.

Lofty religious principles? Or rude/obnoxious?

Before that in South Africa we were invited to dinner at the home of a senior lawyer from the Black Lawyers Association. He was a prosperous Zulu living in a smart house in a smart African area.

Imagine our surprise when we sat down for dinner and it turned out that his wife was not permitted to join us - she had to serve the food from the kitchen as per Zulu tradition. I have to say that it did not occur to us to walk out in protest at this (for us) startling sexism in what otherwise looked like a typical African upwardly mobile modern household.

What's odd about this Fitzpatrick episode is the implicit assumption by his critics that he has to 'respect' the cultural traditions of the hosts, but that his own cultural traditions somehow count less.

If he and his wife are uncomfortable at events involving gender segregation, why should they be expected to stay at them? If they think that parts of our society are getting more reactionary in their attitudes to women, should they not say so?

The answer perhaps lies with the sort of argument used by Archbishop Cranmer. NuLabour have created and supported (and paid for via all sorts of taxpayers subsidies) various defaults in favour of certain forms of 'tolerance' but not others.

In particular it has become fair game in progressive tendencies to berate conservative Western religious views eg on homosexuality/women, but champion non-Western proponents of far more extreme and violent positions.

At one point in Warsaw liberal European opinion was muttering about the reactionary social and allegedly antisemitic views of the Polish Families party who were for a while in a coalition government with Law and Justice. I noted that the FCO had been congratulating itself lavishly on an event in Turkey featuring 'dialogue' with various radical Muslims whose reported positions on homosexuality/women/Jews were beyond vile.

So I sent an email to London asking whether we now had a policy of flatly opposing white-skinned European antisemitic homophobes, but extending the hand of dialogue to brown-skinned Asian antisemitic homophobes.

No answer.

My good pal John Sawers is to take over as Head of MI6, the first (mainly) FCO person to do so although he did start off there a while ago before crossing to join the FCO.

He enjoyed a brisk ride to the top with an unusual amount of sharp-end operational content, including pioneering  'township diplomacy' in twilight apartheid South Africa - he was the first Western diplomat to meet Nelson Mandela after Mandela emerged from prison.

Later he also served in Iraq when things were especially difficult. Did I help send him there?

The Times has the best analysis of John and his life and times, albeit curiously omitting any reference to his deft tennis backhand. And here is part of a great speech he gave in Boston.

Mind you, I recall a lively exchange we had back in 1996 when I was HM Ambassador in Sarajevo and he was Political Counsellor in the Embassy in Washington.

John said that US troops would pull out of Sarajevo soon after the Bosnian 1996 elections because that's what President Clinton had promised. I by contrast, closer to the sprawling building works going on as the Americans built bowling alleys and other phenomena on their Bosnian bases, suspected that they would be there for a lot longer than that. 

And they were.

Intelligence work is like any other. Link accuracy, realism and wisdom to hard facts, and you don't go far wrong.

Congratulations.

You come from Africa. Now you are an American.

Are you an African-American?

Yes, but only if your skin is dark enough!

What's worse, if your skin happens to be not-so-dark and you put yourself in the new category of 'white African-American' as nothing else seems to fit, dark-skinned people who are less African than you are but who call themselves African-Americans can claim to be offended.

And get you into big trouble.

Look, this one is easy.

There is a simple test for African-Americanness.

Put a pencil in someone's hair.

If the hair is curly enough to hold it, that person is an African-American.

If not, sue the hell out of someone impertinently and insultingly claiming that noble status.

Hey, that pencil test thing is cool. Where did you get the idea? 

Remember my disagreement about South Africa's Peaceful Transition?

Well, it was so peaceful that they have made a movie about all the violence:

"The period between [Nelson] Mandela's release from prison [February 1990] and the first democratic election [April 1994] was extraordinarily violent. More people died in that four-year period than in 30 years of apartheid," Bang Bang Club director Stephen Silver, says.

"This is one of the stories of South Africa's political freedom that's not been told."

Don't you just love the unconscious institutional racism - the idea that a story involving huge numbers of killings of Africans is 'told' only when prosperous white people get to tell it, and does not exist until they decide to do so?

My case rests.

What exactly was wrong with apartheid?

At root the act of defining people in arbitrary phoney 'racial' categories then allocating them special territories accordingly ('homelands').

Just as happens in some bookshops these days (HT Ed Driscoll):

What a great idea! Putting all the novels about black people in a single section! Why didn’t I think of that? But wait—wait—how many of the characters have to be black before the novel does go into that section? Does just one black character make the whole novel black or is there a special section for mulatto novels with characters of both colors?

And if all the novels about black people are in the black section, does that make the Literature section the white section? Why don’t we call it that then? I’m confused.

And hey, what about The Adventures of Augie March—do I find that in the Jewish section? No, don’t be an idiot. Important novels about Jews trying to find their place in America go in the Literature section, of course. What are you, an anti-semite?

Only important novels about blacks trying to find their place in America go in a special section of their own. Anything else would be hateful. 

Got it now?

This story of the ghastly township violence in South Africa against real or suspected lesbians - 'corrective rape' - has drawn a lot of attention.

The ferocity and brutality of Simelane's murder sent shockwaves through Kwa Thema, where she was much known and loved for bringing sports fame to the sprawling township.

Her mother, Mally Simelane, said she always feared for her daughter's safety but never imagined her life would be taken in such a way.

"I'm scared of these people ... She was a sweet lady, she never fought with anyone, but why would they kill her like this? She was stabbed, 25 holes in her. The whole body, even under the feet."

South Africa has a unique combination of wonderful people and natural assets, and quite amazing violence.

How many people do readers know personally who either have died in car crashes or were murdered?

In my professional and personal life I have known former Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic who was assassinated in 2003. And that's about it.

Apart from when I was in South Africa, where in four years I knew about 14 people killed on the roads or murdered. This is a formidable statistical spike.

The obvious argument is that 'apartheid' is to blame for everything bad which happens in South Africa - its poisonous legacy must last for decades.

Yet there is more to it than that. The way the anti-apartheid struggle evolved in the 1980s away from the tough, radical but thoughtful self-disciplines of the Black Consciousness Movement (Steve Biko et al) into explicit Marxist ANC/SACP-sponsored revolutionary terror aimed primarily at fellow Africans (not 'whites') is in my view a central factor.

Which is why I am delighted that when one types South Africa peaceful transition into Google, this comes up near the top of page one.

South Africa did not have a Peaceful Transition.

It had a Really Violent Transition which still continues, in large part of course because of the callous racist degradation that apartheid imposed on that country's majority for so long.

In part too because of a vile culture of the-means-justify-any-ends necklacing, crucifictions and other nameless horrors which went on in the townships in the 1980s, as the ANC/SACP tried to wipe out opposition by whipping up psychotic violence among children and teenagers. Twenty years on, look what these people are doing now. 

And also, interestingly, because progressive establishments there and more widely have not wanted to accept that South Africa has a powerful traditionalist un-European African tradition with its own norms of exotic violence, which if anything was isolated from modernity by powerful walls apartheid erected.

I recall a top Black Consciousness activist telling me in 1991 that a big post-apartheid philosophical problem would be how to deal with authentic African values in that country (witchcraft etc) which had flourished well away from modernising urban eyes and which were quite incompatible with a 'modern' democratic state.

Such subtleties have not featured much among the multi-racial ANC elite who took over the government and who (albeit uneasily in some cases) indeed pronounced the unique moral rectitude of the full package of modern 'European' urban rainbow liberal values (gay rights etc), with scant regard for more traditional 'African' sensibilities.

Thus these new horrors.

And some bafflement? Is it OK to condemn such behaviour out of hand? Or does that give legitimacy to racist Westernist ideas of cultural supremacy?

We think that what people get up to in bed is their private matter. But what if other societies do not?

Does that make us 'better'? Who are we to be 'judgemental'?

A vile mess.

From top to bottom.

I liked Clare Short when I first met her in Bosnia a couple of years later. Her febrile anti-Americanism aside, she was tough-minded, down-to-earth and perspicacious on Bosnian issues.

Why did someone as smart as Clare Short get that letter to the Zimbabwe government so wrong?

Let's look at the context.

In November 1997 New Labour were settling down after their landslide election win.

The old Overseas Development Administration had been hived off from the FCO to create a new International Development Department (DFID) . It was full of zealous officials thrusting to show how neo-socialist development policies could 'eradicate' world poverty under DFID's brilliant leadership, with a bit of help from Clare and Gordon. And to show how they could brush aside wimpy/fusty FCO advice on how to deal with foreigners.

Clare Short herself was unlikely to be over-impressed by what the Conservatives may or may not have promised Mugabe by way of land reform support.

Plus Mugabe came from the nationalist/socialist/Africanist tendency of African liberation movements, not the Soviet-led communist tendency: he was not "one of us" in Labour Party terms.

On the substance, New Labour at home positioned themselves as "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Why not also be "tough on underdevevelopment in Africa, tough on the causes of underdevelopment in Africa"? This meant having little sympathy for weirdo Mugabe policies likely to make Zimbabwe's position worse, not better.

Thus the scene was set for clever, cocky officials to serve up a draft letter from the Secretary of State to the Mugabe government in Harare which proved just how tough and confident New Labour (and New DFID) would be.

And this is what they did, I suspect loftily not bothering to run it past the fuddy-duddy FCO in London and/or the High Commission in Harare to check tone and wisdom alike.

Thus are far-reaching bureaucratic blunders made.

Did this letter cause the ensuing national economic collapse and the thousands of deaths and injuries which will leave Zimbabwe limping badly for decades to come?

No.

But was it a piece of startling incompetence which made a difficult situation much worse?

Yes.

Clare Short signed this letter but forgot or ignored a Deep Rule of Diplomacy: "it is not what you say - it's what they hear".

Harare heard 'rude and patrionising'. This allowed the most extreme members of the Mugabe elite to portray their stupid greedy policies as a natural pan-African response to British in-bred neo-colonialist racism.

Memo to next British government:

If you win a serious election victory, do not expect foreigners to be as excited about it and your new policies as you are.

Be Bold. But Think.

And on day one put a firm instruction round Whitehall that no (no) policy-significant message from a Minister to another capital gets issued without it first being run past the in-country Embassy or High Commission, to check that your best intentions won't be spoiled by getting the tone all wrong. 

"It's not enough to be right. You also need to be convincing."

In Zimbabwe the Africanist tendency led by Robert Mugabe is making one last heave to destroy 'white farmers'.

The so-called power-sharing deal which is meant to start to pull Zimbabwe out of its crisis leaves the Agriculture Ministry in Mugabe's hands. So, out they go:

At the meeting in Chegutu, Johannes Tomana, the attorney-general who has himself been allocated a seized farm - is reported to have said there had been "unnecessary delays" in farmers' trials as a result of their legal representatives challenging the constitutionality of the process.

Party time!

The greatest book written about Africa from a 'white' perspective is My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan. He describes in gory detail just how far 'whites' have to go to reach true acceptance in Africa.

So far so clear.

But read this fine Standpoint discussion about Western assistance to Africa between Dambisa Moyo, Daniel Johnson and Richard Dowden.

Dambisa has written Dead Aid, a book which describes the way Western development aid to Africa has created chaos. She puts a strong emphasis on self-respect:

So how do you get to the place where Africans can walk into a room and they're equally respected as business partners? They're not going to get to that point if they continue to depend on aid, where you're constantly with a begging bowl.

Places like India and China - they still have an enormous part of their population living in poverty, and yet nobody feels sorry for the Chinese, nobody feels sorry for India. We treat them as equal partners on the global stage. We want to hear what they have to say. That's because they aren't sitting there, waiting for a big cheque to come in from abroad.

I have long suspected that, bizarre as it may seem, Mugabe is operating in some way according to this logic. He wants to force Zimbabwe to rock bottom as one perverse way to end this dependency on 'white'/settler thinking in all its forms. To wipe the Zimbabwe slate clean of European values and residual power, as the basis for restarting the country on exclusively African terms.

Of course whatever purist logic might be attractive in this position is far outweighed by the death and corruption his policies have caused. But I confess some sneaking sympathy with the Africanist ideal, since it is just so awful to see the patronising way the West (and the UK) has dealt with Africa for so long.

Mugabe's own treatment here in London at the hands of New Labour may well have led him to his final ruinous Africanist fundamentalism. The infamous letter sent by Clare Short to the Zimbabwe Land and Agriculture Minister in 1997 is the classic example of what I mean.

How many deaths have resulted from this ponderous, condescending and downright stupid text drafted by priggish DFID apparatchiki who simply failed to understand the psychological issues at stake?

So, as expected, good money drives out bad at last in benighted Zimbabwe. The authorities have started to allow people to trade in real money and not scraps of paper covered in zeroes.

Or, for now, not covered in zeroes.

I had an interesting discussion this afternoon with someone writing a thesis on the Responsibility to Protect:

• That each individual state has the primary responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. And it is also a responsibility for prevention of these crimes.

• That the international community should encourage or assist states to exercise this responsibility.

• The international community has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means to help protect populations threatened by these crimes. When a state “manifestly fails” in its protection responsibilities, and peaceful means are inadequate, the international community must take stronger measures, including collective use of force authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII.

In its strict form as adopted at the 2005 World Summit, this new international principle/norm/standard/requirement lays down that states have to protect their own citizens from certain international crimes. If a state manifestly fails to live up these responsibilities, the international community may intervene including by force if necesary.

It does not say that states have to protect their own citizens from their own rulers' policy incompetence leading to mass deaths or other large-scale disasters. Nor does it say that states have to protect their citizens from the impact of natural disasters.

All of which creates unhappy moral contradictions. It is OK for the international community to jump over the sovereignty fence and stop a Bad Leader killing or expelling his/her own people.

But not OK to jump over to stop a Bad Leader plundering the country, less directly but just as surely leaving millions to starve or die of disease for generations to come.

And not OK to give help to people starving after a natural disaster, when a Bad Leader refuses to let in foreign help.

In each case the Bad Leader's badness and/or malign selfishness causes massive deaths.

Yet in the first case lives may be saved. In the others, hundreds of thousands of people may be left to die as the world glumly leans on the sovereignty fence watching it happen - the victims are collateral damage of that national sovereignty principle.

The main thing, of course, is that African statesmen should noisily insist that the West must not intervene to stop these African 'non-criminal' disasters, but instead must pick up the tab anyway once they are unstoppable:

... former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan led calls for world leaders to help rebuild Zimbabwe's economy.

If there is a moral case for helping Zimbabwe's people out of a horrible hole, is there not an identical moral case for stopping its odious leaders steer the country deeply into it?

Whatever happened to our Moral Foreign Policy?

Or even Enlightened Self-Interest?

Matthew Parris writes eloquently about the role of Christianity in African development:

In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different.

Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

His point is that a traditional passive 'tribal' mind is Africa's main problem:

But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

The answer?

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described.

... Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

But what if in some way the rest of us can not fathom, Africa as a space just does not want to be liberated to walk tall amid global competition, or at least is impervious to any attempt to liberate it?

What if Africa's problem is that we think Africa has a problem?

A senior anti-apartheid intellectual/activist once told me that one of the best-kept secrets of the anti-apartheid struggle was the fact that apartheid had - through its massive policies of enforced 'separate development' - kept alive lots of African traditions and attitudes which otherwise would have been lost to pell-mell modernity. A precious legacy.

Our old friend time-scale again.

Which is more likely?

That in 50,000 years' time New York and Beijing and London will be glorious cities, full of clever and successful human beings?

Or that somewhere in a warm spot a simple man will be sitting under a tree in what a long-lost civilisation called Tanzania, gazing contentedly at Mt Kilimanjaro because it is just there?