The White UN's Burden

The BBC, along with most of the British media, was abuzz yesterday over Gordon Brown's speech before the Security Council, chastising African nations, particularly South Africa as well as Zimbabwe itself, for failing to intervene in the obviously tainted election process in that country.

Mbeki's speech, on the other hand, was spoken of with disdain - the man didn't even mention Zimbabwe! How absurd! Journalists clucked and pundits wagged their fingers.

Watching the footage of the UNSC meeting, the racial overtones of the entire show were impossible to ignore. Even when Ban Ki-Moon gloriously hopped off the fence (upon which it is his job to sit) and started demanding action from the AU on Zimbabwe, the reporters didn't sound so much like they were saying "Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General" as "Ban Ki-Moon, Not-A-White-Man."

Brown, on the other hand, who has been cast by the pro-war media in Britain as the weak prince who succeeded the noble king, has been benefiting from his show of "decisiveness." After ending Britain's combat role in Iraq, in their eyes he really needed the kind of public approval boost that can only come from pushing around a poor country populated by darkies.

Ok, so it's not all about race. Zimbabwe's economy, if any of the reporting is to be trusted (and much of it is not to be), is next to non-existent, and the damage that has happened over the past 5 years may take much longer than that to reverse. Mugabe doesn't really have an excuse not to publish an election result after 3 weeks, and it seems transparently dishonest to choose this week to charge the opposition leader with treason.

If there is a humanitarian crisis, by all means, let the UN do something about it, but since when is a disputed election the business of the Security Council? More importantly, what exactly does Gordon Brown hope to accomplish by posturing in that chamber? Would Britain be compliant, if African leaders began haranguing them to do something about a disputed election in the United States? Was the Security Council supposed to act on what happened in Florida in 2000?

Last year, when US warplanes and Ethiopian forces were cooperating to install a puppet regime in Somalia, nobody in power in the Western world batted an eye, and the result was the return of chaos and proxy wars to the Horn of Africa. Now Robert Mugabe steals an election, and suddenly the sky is falling.

In abusing the UN to posture, lecturing poorer nations on their own affairs, exaggerating a threat to global stability, and applying double standards in the lofty name of democracy, Brown is showing that perhaps he isn't all that different from Tony Blair after all.