Increasingly, it seems that there is no middle ground between being a Hitler and being a Democrat. What I mean is that the conventional world views is that the world or rather specific regions of the world are full of bloodthirsty dictators that want to dominate not only their country, but extent their influence. According to this worldview, little Hitlers, Stalins, and Pol Pots are growing everywhere and the international community should not ignore them, but should confront them. A good example of this worrisome trend is the column of Peter Tatchell in the Times of London today in which he presents the world of yet another dangerous dictator, Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda. Sugary excerpt:
Uganda is drifting towards dictatorship, just like Zimbabwe a decade ago. The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, is a new Robert Mugabe in the making, a budding tyrant who is subverting democracy and human rights (according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) through voter intimidation, hounding opposition politicians, detention without trial, torture, extrajudicial killings, media censorship, corruption, suppression of protests, homophobic witch-hunts, and crackdowns on universities and trade unions.
The point isn’t that Tatchell is wrong about Museveni who is indeed a ruthless man. The point is that it is easy to grandstand and to condemn dictators when they come from what are considered unimportant or rather irrelevant countries. After all, what is the difference between Museveni and Putin or rather what is the difference between Museveni and Musharraf? Are African dictators more barbaric than others because there is something in the African air or in the African genes that makes them more bloodthirsty? Either a dictator is a dictator is a dictator or people who love to view the world as black and white need to accept that shades of gray exists. This acceptance of complexity doesn’t mean that the intolerable should become tolerable, but it means also that there are no absolute and that the world is never going to be clean or at least not at once. In other words, Tatchell should learn about Uganda and then write a column about something more important than his outrage. He could explain why Museveni is leading Uganda and has been allowed to “Mugaberize” himself.
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