Yeah, alright, Robert Mugabe is a Bad Man ™, the kind of authoritarian asshole who doesn’t hesitate to sent the riot police against his ooposition, or rig the elections. He’s also been accused of stealing white people’s land, which is just wrong; doesn’t he know it can only be done the other way around? Cheap sarcasm aside, it’s clear Mugabe is a thug, but he’s hardly unique.
So why is it that during the EU-Africa summit this weekend, all attention was on Mugabe being present and how awful it was that such a tyrant should’ve been invited, when much worse people were present as well? People like Hosni Mubarak? He’s surely as authoritarian as Mugabe, but there has been nothing like the hysteria that surrounded Mugabe’s participation, none of the official denounciations, no carefully staged mediafriendly protests against him. Why is that?
Surely not because Mubarak, unlike Mugabe, is careful to stay on the right side of “the west”, e.g. helping us out by providing handy extralegal torture facilities for those pesky suspects we cannot torture ourselves?