Shirking Our Responsibilities

Saudi Arabia is a nation that still administers public floggings, sometimes consisting of thousands of lashes. This is not the worst of Saudi Arabia’s vicious excesses, and I suspect that it may not even be the most barbaric. Even so, Britain does not seem to care, as has been seen by the welcoming of their King.

When it was Zimbabwe, Gordon Brown was not so willing to shake the blood-soaked hand of a brutal dictator. Indeed, he made it a matter of principle to boycott a conference that he was scheduled to attend, claiming in an article in the Independent that “We will not shirk our responsibilities.”

He cited as the reason for his refusal to meet with Robert Mugabe that “There is no freedom in Zimbabwe; no freedom of association; no freedom of the press.” It’s interesting that, if you replace ‘Zimbabwe’ with ‘Saudi Arabia’, the sentence is no less true. Indeed, the similarities between the two nations are remarkable. Neither is a democracy, neither has any semblance of human rights or common decency and neither has any sense of Justice. In fact, the only difference between the two regimes is that Britain doesn’t need anything from Zimbabwe.

While Zimbabwe gives us nothing except an opportunity to show off just how much we care about human rights throughout the world, Saudi Arabia gives us oil, and it seems we didn’t care so much about global human rights after all.

The truth is Brown’s posturing on Zimbabwe was a front, a pretence in order to fool the British people, and perhaps the rest of the world, that Britain was serious about human rights, that we cared about the plight of people in far off lands, who have been deprived of the rights that they ought to have simply by being human. Apparently, we only care when it’s politically convenient, so much for Brown’s alleged morality.

We should support human rights, everywhere. We should support democracy, everywhere and we should support liberty, everywhere. Even when it may be politically difficult to do so, it is our duty as a free and powerful nation. We must not shirk our responsibility, as Brown has so disgracefully done.