Darin’s Blog

Russia and China Veto U.N. Sanctions on Zimbabwe

Western powers mustered nine votes, the minimum needed to gain approval in the 15-nation council. But the resolution pushed by the Bush administration failed because of the action by two of the five veto-wielding permanent members.

The other three states with veto power — the U.S., Britain and France — argued that sanctions were needed to respond to the state-sanctioned violence and intimidation against opponents of President Robert Mugabe before and after Zimbabwe’s recent presidential election.

Sounds like a good cause.

Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said sanctions would have taken the U.N. beyond its mandate in trying to punish political disputes by ”artificially elevating them to the level of a threat” to international peace and security.

Chinese Ambassador Wang Guangya, whose nation is one of Zimbabwe’s major trading partners, also expressed fears of nation-tinkering and said Zimbabwe was should be left to conduct its own talks on how to resolve its political crisis.

”The development of the situation in Zimbabwe until now has not exceeded the context of domestic affairs,” Wang said. ”It will unavoidably interfere with the negotiation process.”

Russia, the former world leader in corruption is trying to re-assert itself on the global corruption stage that is currently dominated by China. We couldn’t be going around meddling with election corruption, that’s their internal business. Because lets be realistic here, there are probably no two nations that need to have their domestic affairs meddled with than Russia and China.

And really, the proposed sanctions were hardly meddling with domestic affairs.

The proposal would have imposed an international travel ban and freeze on personal assets of Mugabe and 13 key officials.

Too bad there are two bad apples in the UN. If it was just one, perhaps everyone could just vote to kick China or Russia out. But since there are two of them, they’ve got each other’s backs, just like the Mafia.