Sustain This

Iain passes on the only-at-the-UN news that Zimbabwe is about to be made the head of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. Happily, this development has aroused some skepticism even among the unfailingly polite apparatchiks in the international diplomatic community:

Erik Solheim, Norway’s international development minister, said some countries still hoped to block the move.

“We do not find Zimbabwe the right country to head the CSD for the next period,” he said.

A US state department spokesman, Tom Casey, has said: “We don’t think that Zimbabwe would be a particularly effective leader of this body.”

He said development there had “been going in only one direction – and it’s backwards”.

They could have also mentioned that Robert Mugabe’s government has one of the worst human rights records in the world, but when has that ever stopped a nation’s representatives from taking an honored place in the UN’s hierarchy?