By: Philip Ochieng
By the “man-bite-dog” criterion of news taught in our schools of journalism, what happened at the African Union summit the other day should have been but a snippet tucked far away in the rear pages of our newspapers. For there was absolutely nothing new in it.

It was nothing but a run-of-the-mill “dog-bite-man” story. It is what African and other Third World leaders routinely do.

They commit tyranny and robbery and murder all the time and then, when accosted either at home or in international councils — try to depict one another as archangels.

If it had been known in advance that the human rights issue would come before Their Excellencies, even a child would have predicted that they would vote to a man ? not to mention the woman from Monrovia — to defend to the hilt the Man-on-Horseback in Khartoum.

No, it was not because they all love the Sudanese strongman.

It was only because none of the other heads of state and government may be innocent of the actions for which Omar al Bashir is wanted by Mr Ocampo in the historic Dutch city of international “justice.”

If Mr Bashir is arrested and taken to The Hague — if the International Criminal Court (ICC) finds him guilty of gross violations of human rights in Darfur — he will have opened a hideous can of worms for all the present and many former African and other Third World rulers.

Indeed, that precedent may prove extremely dangerous even for First World leaders.

The ICC itself has been accused of selective thirst for the blood of former and present tyrants.

It seems to go after Third World despots with much more gusto than it does after developed world leaders.

The Third World’s intelligentsia — including Africa’s — may be waking up slowly.

If Mr Bashir and certain former African leaders are found guilty and punished, the intelligentsia may begin to demand from Mr Ocampo a good explanation why America’s Gang of Five is at large.

Our civil society movements may want to know why George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin and Condoleeza Rice have not yet been mooted even for arrest for having ordered the murder of millions and millions of Iraqi and Afghan children and their parents.

The Spanish Daniel in The Hague may have to explain to humanity why Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw are still gallivanting all over the world as champions of freedom, democracy and human rights when they were central to the holocaust in the Middle East.

London, Washington, Paris, Rome and a city near The Hague may have to answer human rights questions about Latin America, Algeria, Korea, Kenya (during Mau Mau), Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Southern Africa and East Timor and other Portuguese colonies.

And the respondents may include John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Harold Wilson, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Senior, John Major, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi.

Yet, notwithstanding all this, there is just no Ararat from which African heads of state can defend anyone among them.

All of them are guilty of one crime or another — including mal-government, looting, corruption, complete neglect of mass suffering, nepotism and tribalism.

How many have not trampled underfoot all the tenets and institutions of good governance? How many have not rigged elections?

How many have not tried to tamper with the constitution to make themselves presidents-for-life? How many have not colluded to assassinate their rivals?

How many have not tried to impose their sons as heirs? And — most germane to our topic — how many have not organised armed clashes and ethnic cleansing?

Darfur, then, is merely the most spectacular, most tragic, example of this heartless playing around with human life.

Otherwise, which one of Africa’s leaders has the moral or political or juridical authority to declare that Mr Bashir does not deserve to face justice in the Hague? Which? Bongo? Bouteflika? Guebuza? Mubarak? Mugabe? Museveni? Sirleaf-Johnson? Wade? Zenawi?

But, of course, our own sense of justice — the tenet that you are innocent until proved guilty — constrains us to give Mr Bashir the benefit of the doubt. It is within the realm of possibility that the Tartar is not guilty.

But the fact remains that, under his regime, millions of human beings have been slaughtered in Darfur and that the culprit-victim line appears to coincide with the race line. The culprit appears to belong to the same race as those in charge in Khartoum.

That is why it has been claimed — rightly or wrong — that the blood-thirsty Janjaweed militia has vital links with official Khartoum.

It is why the leaders of a country like Kenya, Uganda or Tanzania should have an active subjective interest in that matter — if, for one thing only, because blood is thicker than water.

But, much more important than that, it is imperative for the world to be quite clear in its mind who the culprit is.

Yes, Mr Bashir is innocent till proved guilty. But, because he is among the prime suspects, some internationally sanctioned judicial authority must be the one to give him the certificate of innocence.

That is why it is upon the ICC that it devolves to investigate Mr Bashir.

Nobody has the right or the knowledge to declare him guilty or innocent except an authority like the ICC, after it has gone thorough Mr Bashir’s secret cabinets with a toothcomb.

As for the other African leaders, as nearly as we can see, all of them defend Mr Bashir against Mr Ocampo merely so as to pre-empt the probability of judicial “radioactivity” catching up with them — the usual dog-bite-man story.

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When Senator Barack Obama steps onto the stage on Thursday, next to Berlin’s Victory column, the world will be expecting a momentous speech.

   Great speakers: Enoch Powell, Mikhail Gorbachev, Barack Obama

   Great speakers: John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher

A team of Telegraph writers has compiled what they believe are the most significant addresses of the 20th and 21st centuries. The first tranche, speeches 25-13, can be viewed here. The top 12 are published here.

They limited the list to one speech per historical figure — otherwise, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King would have appeared more than once…….and, I think Obama’s speech on race relations delivered in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, deserves to be in this list.

Notes: Video and Transcript of Senator Barack Obama’s Speech on Race – in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008

Writes Prof: Ali Mazrui

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the two remaining candidates for nomination by the Democratic Party for the US Presidency. Read the full story

Writes: Julia Baird

The Pursuit of Power Isn’t Pretty

Margaret Thatcher was the kind of woman who made men’s toes curl. Her savage intelligence, command of policy and what François Mitterrand called “the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula” both terrified and intrigued them. And she loved it. The woman who was prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990 declared she owed nothing to “women’s lib” and surrounded herself with men–appointing only one woman to her cabinet.

Today she is remembered as a resolute, tough-minded leader who was fond of tanks and relished a fight. Hillary Clinton, commentators cry, asks to be treated more gently because she is a woman. Thatcher didn’t have to.

What we forget is how happily Thatcher exploited stereotypes when it was convenient to do so. When she campaigned for the leadership of her party in 1976, she was so eager to counter her image as an upper-crust Tory in pearls that she portrayed herself as a regular, devoted housewife. She was photographed doing the washing up, tucking her twins into bed, dusting, cooking, peeling potatoes, baking cakes, putting empty milk bottles out on the front step and sweeping the footpath in a lacy cap. “I am a very ordinary person who leads a very ordinary life,” she said.

Just a few months later, the suburban housewife had been dubbed the “Iron Lady.” She proudly, almost coyly, owned the title the Russians had bestowed upon her in a 1976 speech: “Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you tonight in my green chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my hair softly waved â?¦ The iron lady of the Western world? Me?”

The world’s most powerful woman was not averse to highlighting her femininity when it suited her. In this she was not alone–across the globe, women entering positions of political leadership have learned that playing to stereotypes can endear them to voters at critical junctures in campaigns, especially when it is their likability, and not their competency, that is in question.

Yes, like men, women have exploited their gender when it suits them. The pursuit of power is rarely pretty. The first few female leaders were considered so unusual, they were cast as male, or metal. In the 1960s and ’70s, Iron Ladies sprang up around the globe, breathing fire–Indira Gandhi in 1966, Golda Meir in 1969, Thatcher in 1979–women who did not shy from war and quashed any notion that women were the gentler sex. Their success created one of the most repetitive clichés for women in politics–iron maidens, iron butterflies, even steel magnolias–as journalists cooed over the fact that a woman could be (gasp!) decisive and authoritative, a marvelous combination of flesh and steel.

Such labels reflected a longstanding inability to imagine women wielding power–their ambition cast as an ugly trait, their exercise of authority as bizarrely forceful, their tenacity as a sign of psychological concern.

Much has changed in the three decades since Thatcher was first elected. Today, more than 50 women have been elected prime ministers and heads of state, from Chile’s Michelle Bachelet to Germany’s Angela Merkel. We know women can be tough leaders, but from the late 1980s, disillusioned voters began to demand something different–being female was seen as an asset by those who wanted women to prove they could change politics. Ironically, Clinton, as part of the establishment, has been trumped by her younger, fresher opponent on this front–his style is frequently described as feminine.

Clinton has not had to prove that she is made of steel. Her self-styled Boadicea–bespectacled, hovering by the phone at 3 a.m. in her most recent advertisement–is an awkward creation: happy to warmonger like a good Iron Lady but discredited for backing the wrong war. She had to prove, like Thatcher did when she posed in her lacy cap, that she was real so that women could identify with her. Others helped when they argued she was being put down by men. For what unites women most of all is seeing one of their own being belittled.

Claims to female superiority (We are more honest! Kinder! Calmer!) are a little embarrassing and retro in today’s climate.

But if Clinton is to benefit from Tina Fey’s almost Iron Lady claim that “Bitches get stuff done,” perhaps she should also recall the words of Thatcher: “It may be the cock that crows,” she said. “But it’s the hen that lays the eggs.”