African Union Damaging Interference

As mentioned in the sidebar, we normally don't take sides unless provoked.  Consider me provoked.

I have little time to spare from my day job, but watching al Jazeera here in Kampala, where there is a Qaddafi Mosque and the president has said he would accept him in exile, I can’t help but be appalled, again, by the antics of the vaunted African Union in its attempt to promote negotiations between Qaddafi and the rebel movements.


The delegation led by President Jacob Zuma of South Africa is a joke. They have presented a clearly absurd plan, benefiting only Qaddafi (naturally immediately accepted by him) and are now bouncing along the road to Benghazi with Qadhafi’s approval to tell the rebel leadership that the murderer and dictator should be reasoned with. How convenient. Qaddafi funds about 15% of the AU’s budget and their hands are in his pockets so they don't care that his soldiers are firing deliberately at civilians and into their neighborhood.  They don't care the UN voted to protect rebelious civilians and that neither Russia nor China chose to oppose the resolution.  They know what's best for Africa. How's that working out?

They did nothing when he invaded Chad, brutally occupying the north and initiating the beginning of the Darfur crises back in the late 1980s following up with full support to Khartoum – Muslims against black Christians and animists. They said nothing when he indulged in the vilification of black Africans in Libya, making them targets of his followers. They said nothing as he supported Charles Taylor, among others of similar ilk. Both the South African government and the African Union are, quite simply, a useless bunch of prevaricators intent on preserving the status quo. They have done so with a dictator and murderer in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, simply because prior to his slippage into senility, depravity, racism and lust for power, he was a heroic front liner. They have done damn little in Somalia, nothing in Mozambique and taken little action in the DRC. Now sub-Sahara Africa wants to end a revolution in Muslim, Arab North Africa which could care less about below-the-equator states except as a market. What buffoons.

The rebels in Benghazi should treat Zuma and his camp followers as the ludicrous coterie of paid-for sycophants they are and send them packing. Zuma can deal with the pressing issues of South Africa in Pretoria.