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Human rights double standards exhibited as President Mugabe addresses 65th session of the United Nations General Assembly
Youth Forum
September 28, 2012

President Robert Mugabe addressed the UN General Assembly on Wednesday 26th of September 2012, as part of the opening of the 65th session of the Assembly. Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since independence. He is also a long-standing critic of the West, which was once again made very apparent in this speech. Mugabe delivered a scathing critique of mainly the recent actions taken by the U.S, U.N and NATO, in relation to the Arab Spring. Speaking firmly, the 88-year old president accused the Security Council of ignoring the provisions of the United Nations Charter dealing with the peaceful settlement of disputes, and of instead having an "insatiable appetite for war, embargoes, sanctions and other punitive actions." He thereby set the stage for a very critical and at times deliberately sarcastic speech, aimed at wanting to frame "certain powerful members" of NATO in a negative light, most specifically the Western permanent members such as the U.S, United Kingdom and France.

The President focused a great deal on how the UN Security Council had allowed itself to be "abused" last year by authorizing all necessary measures to protect civilians in Libya in a NATO operation that eventually toppled Gaddadfi's government and led to his death at the hands of Libyan rebels. He urged the UN to, "never allow itself to be abused by any member state or group of States that seeks to achieve parochial partisan goals." Furthermore, he mentioned how there is an increasing trend by NATO states, "inspired by the arrogant belief that they are the most powerful among us", to resort to unilateralism and military hegemony, citing the Iraq war as well as the international intervention in Libya. According to Mugabe, these decisions by some of the UN member states, is the "very antithesis of the basic principles of the UN." Numerous times, he referred to the western NATO states as "the warmongers of our world" and noted how they have done enough harm by imposing themselves and creating chaos in places of peace. Some of the doctrines in the UN Charter were also at fault. According to Mugabe, Libya had been made equally unstable, following NATO's "deceitful intervention under the sham cover of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations and he phoney principle of the responsibility to protect".

Overall, however, the most provocative statement raised in this speech, came when Mugabe brought up the issue that President Barack Obama had focused on in his speech the previous day; the attack on the U.S mission in Benghazi on September 11th 2012, which resulted in the death of the U.S Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens as well as three other Americans. Speaking with deliberate irony, Mugabe praised the "most glowing and most moving" speech by Obama in which he mourned Stevens death, and went on to say that; "As we in spirit join the United States in condemning that death, shall the United States also join us in condemning that barbaric death of the head of state of Libya, Gaddafi? It was a loss, a great loss, to Africa, a tragic loss to Africa." He was thereby officially comparing the death of Gaddafi, long term leader of Libya and responsible for the deaths of thousands during the Libyan revolution in 2011, to Christopher Stevens. Mugabe however, made it clear that the death of Gaddaffi "must be seen in the same tragic manner as the death of Chris Stevens. We condemn both of them".

One reason why Mugabe was a strong ally of Gadaffi could be found in the fact that Mugabe himself, is widely criticized for turning what was once one of Africa's strongest economies into a basket case and has been accused of hanging on to power through vote-rigging. Zimbabwe's human rights record under Mugabe, has not been the most creditable and it is therefore also fairly ironic that he would bring up the accusation that the U.N. Security Council does not live up to its principles of good governance, democracy or justice, due to its lack of having any permanent African representation; when in fact these are the main issues which Zimbabwe are violating. The speech only succeeds in losing more credibility, when Mugabe criticises certain UN conventions and doctrines, which threaten his own dictatorial rule, such as the Responsibility to Protect clause, which is a fairly new international security and human rights norm which justifies the intervention of the international community when acts of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity are being committed, such as in Libya.

Not surprisingly, other leaders which spoke at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, notably Bolivias leftist president, Evo Morales and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also criticized the United States and other Western states for what they see as economic and political bullying.

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