WHY THE UN FAILS TO TACKLE TYRANTS

Do our so-called foreign experts never learn anything, generation by generation?

In the Thirties they failed to comprehend the mentality of Hitler, in the Fifties that of Stalin, in the Seventies they thought Idi Amin was just an amusing clown and now they think the world’s two leading dictatorships are seriously shocked by the idea of persecution.

Every generation, they seem to be utterly ignorant of reality.

The ability of both despotisms to defeat the UN motion to penalise Robert Mugabe for his crimes stems from their veto on the UN Sec­urity Council – which both used.

This Security Council membership stems from the Second World War.

The USSR played a major role in defeating Germany but China did almost nothing to defeat Japan.

The Americans insisted their ally Chiang Kai-Shek, then Chinese leader, be awarded membership of the Council and its power of veto. When Mao’s People’s Republic of China finally became a UN member in 1971, it took the Security Council seat, along with the power of veto. Mistake. Since then both Russia and China have used their power to protect fellow tyrants and still do.

Russia, as we now see, has never really changed. Today it is still a secret police state, the police being the FSB of Putin. This followed the KGB of Khrushchev, which came after the NKVD of Stalin. Before that it was called OGPU, which followed Lenin’s CHEKA.

So the communists invented the Russian secret police? Not a bit of it. The Tsars had the equally brutal OKHRANA. Let’s be frank. In its 1,000 years Russia has never had an hour of true democracy. China is 5,000 years old and exactly the same.

Russia has done unspeakable things in breakaway Chechnya and China ditto in Tibet. Why should they give a flying toss about a bit of brutality in Zimbabwe or Darfur? Ah, you may think, but the Russian people long for freedom.

Forget it. They adore Putin and cheerfully endorse the persecution of anyone opposing the party line.

This is because the fundamental Russian character is as it always was. In short, this is paranoically suspicious of anyone foreign; “patriotic” beyond all the norms and into the realm of aggressive nationalism; eager to bully anyone smaller (as today Georgia, Ukraine, Poland and Czech Republic); but endlessly wailing that they are themselves persecuted by others.

They also have staggering depths of stoicism but for 100 years, apart from 1941-1945, have brought all their miseries on themselves.

As for the UN, it is a busted flush and ripe for reform. The tyrants who dominate it pay nothing; we (the West) who pay its total budget are treated like pariahs.

The EU performs no better. It too is supposed to penalise Mugabe with a ban on travel. Yet when he wants to visit Brussels, Lisbon and Rome (to discuss world famine of all things), his trips go through seamlessly.

So three cheers for Argentinian chief prosecutor of the Inter­national Criminal Court for lambasting another tyrant, the genocidal Omar Bashir of Sudan who masterminded the mass slaughter in Darfur.

Now let’s slap an arrest warrant on Mugabe and confiscate all his cronies’ stashed-away fortunes.