Africa punts on Mugabe

ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

Anyone looking for African leaders to give Robert Mugabe a dressing-down at the African Union summit today in Egypt is bound to be disappointed. According to the Washington Post, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak didn’t even mention Zimbabwe in his opening remarks, and more attention has so far been paid to an arcane dispute between Djibouti and Eritrea.

The Post‘s Ellen Knickmeyer, I think, gets it right when she attributes the silence to the fact that a lot of the other folks in the room have also stolen power and maintained it by force. I mean, what could they say? Steal the election more artfully? Mugabe pretty much said the same last week at a campaign rally: “I want to see that finger pointed at me and I will check if that finger is clean or dirty.” I wonder, though, if the tone would be different were the summit held in a democratic African country, as opposed to Mubarak’s Egypt. Nobody wants to insult the host.