Better late than never

At first it struck me as pretty pathetic that it took the US and its allies, with all their combined military and economic might and alleged intelligence expertise, 10 years to put an end to Osama bin Laden’s criminal career.

But on second thoughts his come-uppance was quick compared with how long many other major-league malefactors have managed to avoid getting their just desserts.

Some of the worst of the world’s evil-doers, like Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, Mohammed Suharto, Gen Ne Win and Kim Il-sung, to recall just a few examples that come randomly to living memory, have even managed to evade justice by dying of natural causes.

Even the ‘Butcher of the Balkans’, Slobodan Milosevic, managed to slip away by means of a heart attack, leaving Nicolae Ceausescu and Saddam Hussein (right) as the only long-term arch-criminals besides Osama that I recall surviving to pay the ultimate penalty for their perfidy.

Others, like Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Hosni Mubarak - even though the last is currently under arrest - are so old that they are highly unlikely to ever face trial and punishment for crimes they’ve committed against their people.

Then there are those who have been pursuing lives of crime for what seems like a lifetime, and yet for one reason or another appear to be still going strong.

Thanks to his protection by the people-persecuting ‘People’s Democratic’ Republic of China, Kim Jong-il survives what many of us have been hoping is terminal illness to enslave and starve the hapless populace of the ‘People’s Democratic’ Republic of Korea.

And despite belated efforts by Nato to terminate his 40-year criminal career, Muammar Gaddafi (left) clings tenaciously to power in his so-called ‘Socialist People’s’ Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

Just as Ali Abdullah Salleh hangs on like grim death, literally so for countless demonstrators against his rotten 30-year regime, in Yemen.

And Bashar, second generation of the dismal al-Assad dynasty, is unleashing the murderous might of his army on the people of Syria in a desperate attempt to save the family business.

UN charade

Of course the UN makes lots of condemnatory statements against many of the career criminals running countries or heading coteries of killers like al Qaeda and the Taliban. But then crooked countries comprise the majority in the UN, and most of them are pretending to be squeaky-clean for their own public-relations purposes.

Like Malaysia, for instance, whose Umno/BN regime is at pains to pose on the international stage as a model moderate Islamic influence and multiracial democracy, in an attempt to conceal the fact that in practice it’s actually just another racist kleptocracy.

And it continues to get away with this charade, not only because the majority of UN member-nations have similar criminality to hide, but because two of the worst offenders against justice, human rights and civil liberties - China and Russia - have power of veto over the UN’s punitive body, the Security Council.

Even more unfortunate is that the Western democracies in the UN, and especially those with seats in the Security Council, are perennially prepared to betray their principles in their pursuit of power and profit.

A full account of the sordid political and commercial power-plays of ostensibly high-minded European nations is far beyond the scope of this column.

But just by way of example, only a year or so ago the Scottish government forgave Gaddafi and the Libyan agent convicted of bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie back in 1988, presumably in return for UK access to Libyan oil.

And a cartel of European Union countries is currently lobbying the US for its permission to suspend sanctions against arms sales to China, despite the fact that the regime there so obviously uses its armed forces to terrorise its Tibetan and other minorities and suppress its people in general.

Closer to home for Malaysians is the lingering stench surrounding the murder of a young Mongolian national  involved in a clearly corrupt submarine purchase from France, where the case is belatedly if half-heartedly being investigated, and in Malaysia, of course, is officially closed.

US crony-regimes

Meanwhile the US continues to be the most prominent practitioner of hypocritical foreign policy on the planet, frequently with appallingly counter-productive results.

For instance, it somehow contrived to support and sell arms to both sides during most of the 10-year Iran-Iraq war, then soon after invaded Iraq and declared Iran part of the global ‘axis of evil’.

It supported the so-called ‘Mujahadeen’ in their ‘struggle’ against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, and is currently fighting the very same people, now rebranded as ‘Taliban’ and ‘terrorists’, in a ‘new’ Afghanistan run by a hideously corrupt US puppet regime.

And now, surprise, surprise, it has tracked the architect of the atrocious 9/11 assault on New York’s World Trade Centre to an opulent mansion less than a kilometre from the ‘elite’ military academy of one of its principal ‘allies’ and aid recipients, Pakistan.

This should not have come as a surprise to even the most deluded of State Department strategists or self-important Pentagon desk-jockeys.

That the US has been losing friends hand over fist among the common people of the world as a result of its support for repressive regimes for the sake of ‘stability’, oil and influence in spite of all its high-flown rhetoric about freedom and democracy, is hardly any secret.

In fact it was in the face of the realisation that it was dangerously coming to be seen not so much as a benevolent Uncle Sam as a hypocritical Uncle Sham that it resolved back in 2005 to radically clean up its act.    

As some of us clearly recall, Secretary of State at the time, Condoleeza Rice (right), announced a new “ethical” US approach to world affairs, declaring that “there cannot be an absence of moral content in American Foreign policy” and somewhat arrogantly adding that “Europeans giggle at this, but we are not European, we are American, and we have different principles”.

Alas, these principles seem to have disappeared, if America’s selective responses to the people-power uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East are any indication.

Appearing to miss the popular revolt in Tunisia altogether, the US was grudging at best in its support for the people of Egypt lest their atrocious ally Mubarak or their clients in Israel take offence, and even slower and more hesitant in coming to the aid of the Libyan people against long-time American bugbear, Gaddafi.

And they’ve been even tardier and less responsive to calls for freedom, transparency and democracy by subjects of corrupt and repressive US-crony regimes in Yemen, Bahrein and one of the ugliest of them all, Saudi Arabia.

So let’s not get over-excited at the CIA’s long-overdue location and extermination of Osama. And let’s not expect too much US sympathy, let alone assistance, in freeing Malaysia at long, long last from half a century of corruption, repression and robbery by the Umno/BN regime until it’s much too late to matter.

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DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he mentors creative writing groups. Already published in Kuala Lumpur is a third book of his columns for Malaysiakini, following earlier collections ‘Mad about Malaysia’ and ‘Even Madder about Malaysia’.