Today on CentreRight.com we are focusing on just one topic: Zimbabwe.
Every hour different CentreRight contributors will be examining different angles of the reign of terror that now prevails in the run up to next week's election.
At 10am Jim McConalogue will look at the EU's role, at 11am Charlie Elphicke will note the scale of violence, at noon Dan Lewis will call on South Africa to act and at 1pm Robert Halfon will blog about how our tendency to trivialise evil confuses our response to it. Other contributors will be blogging later in the day.
My own opening contribution is a simple one. Our failure to act earlier has made it so much harder to act now. We are no longer dealing with one bad man, Mugabe, and a few henchmen but with an evil system where far too many military men have a stake in the continuation of the status quo. Because we and Zimbabwe's African neighbours turned a blind eye to earlier human rights abuses the regime thought that it could get away with bigger abuses. They saw us do nothing when intimidation of voters was obvious but limited in scale and now the regime murders and brutalises its opponents on a massive scale.
As with nearly every global problem we cannot wait on the UN. The UN Human Rights Council has shown itself to be wholly unfit. It recently elected Jean Ziegler as an expert advisor to its ranks. Among other things Mr Ziegler has said that "[Robert] Mugabe has history and morality with him."
Until the world's democracies operate a policy of zero tolerance of human rights abuses we will see more nations conclude that they can get away with murder. Literally. William Hague has promised to put human rights at the heart of Conservative foreign policy. Part of that commitment should include a system for highlighting nations that are beginning to erode basic standards of civilised behaviour. We need to build a new alliance of democracies who will be willing to act on early signs of abuses. Without a policy of zero tolerance we will only see more Zimbabwes in the years ahead.
