embers have allowed themselves to become little more than a eunuch at a brothel: avid voyeurs but unable to participate.
Said another former fan of the multi-racial organization that boasts a membership of almost 1.8 billion people in 53 countries, 29 of them some of the smallest in the world:
Don McKinnon is starting to look like one of those plastic dogs people hang in the back of cars forever spinning around, smiling, nodding.
A human rights crisis is off the agenda, said Mr Holman who spent much of his youth fighting Ian Smith in Rhodesia. The country (Zimbabwe) has been airbrushed out of Commonwealth history.
Added a senior Commonwealth organizer who asked not to be named:
Don McKinnon has become an embarrassment to the Commonwealth. He tends to take his views from the last powerful person he spoke to and at this point in the Clubs quite long history we desperately need a person with fresh vision and a razor sharp understanding of the problems ordinary members of the Commonwealth face and Im not talking about the heads of state and prime ministers Im talking about the ordinary men, women and children whove never seen a five star hotel in Valetta, yet alone been inside one.
Sadly, at a time when the need for multi-cultural societies to be seen as working to be working has never been stronger, the Commonwealth is in danger of being treated by ordinary people with a large dose of contempt.
Sadly, the old joke that the acronym CHOGM stands for Comrades Holidays on Government Money was revived in Malta last week. The official excuse that the subject of Zimbabwe was hardly raised because well, Zimbabwe is no longer a member of the Club, is she?
Said another leading Club official: It was sick-making. South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1961. Did that stop members denouncing apartheid at every opportunity between them and the end of apartheid in the early 1990s? Of course it didn’t.
And now theres a new bad boy on the block, President Museveni of Uganda. I suppose hell take our minds off Mugabe for a while. Most Commonwealth leaders said that theyd never heard anything about human rights abuses in Uganda and thought it must be a great place because Kampala has already been chosen as the venue for CHOGM 2007.
At 61, President Museveni the man who Tony Blair and Bill Clinton called the new face of Africa has gone from local hero to total zero&overnight.
He has been accused of arranging a show trial of the opposition leader Dr Kizza Besigye, whose wife is Musevenis former girlfriend, of bribing MPs to vote for an extension to his already colossal powers as President and of changing the Constitution so that he can carry on as head of state in a country called the Jewel of Africa by Winston Churchill after elections in March next year.
Already, Museveni has spent a whopping £4.8 millions sprucing up one of his presidential palaces in Entebbe for CHOGM in two years time. Privately, British officials say that CHOGM 2007 will be a public relations disaster.
How on earth can Don McKinnon criticize the man for continuing human rights abuses and for effectively outlawing any kind of opposition when we ve agreed well meet in his country in two years time? It’s simply ridiculous.
Museveni was largely the creature of the former Minister for Overseas Development, Clare Short. He received world acclaim for tackling AIDS and HIV positively but last week in Malta weary of criticism from Tony Blair he lashed out. He said that Britain had never much bothered about democracy when it ran Uganda as a colony for over 70 years.
He sounded just like Mugabe, said an official who attended CHOGM. The real one back home in Harare must be falling around the place laughing his head off that his head is off the Commonwealth block.
Certainly, Mugabes two great buddies in The Club, Tanzanias Ben Mkapa and South Africas Thabo Mbeki never raised as much as a squeak about the abuse of human rights in Zimbabwe.
High-ranking sources told The Zimbabwean: Thabo Mbeki initially said he would not attend CHOGM. Don McKinnon promised him that he wouldnt be put on the spot over human rights in Zimbabwe so thats why Mbeki changed his mind and flew to Malta.
No-one s denying that when it comes to education, the promotion of health and student exchange programmes, the Commonwealth still plays an important role.
But when it comes to handing its members a sharp knife so they can cut men like Robert Mugabe out of the African body politic it has failed utterly.
Victor Hugo told us that theres nothing quite as powerful as an idea whose time had come. But he didnt tell us what to do when the followers of a once great idea turn and run when they see lions in the arena.
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