Angola: blood oil and western hypocrisy

Western powers are selective in their censure of African regimes guilty of misrule, while ignoring those countries with oil, or who are allies in the US “war on terror”. For example, Robert Mugabe has been rightly pilloried by the west for running Zimbabwe into the ground. Yet Mugabe’s great ally, Angola’s Eduardo dos Santos, whose ruling MPLA is going into a parliamentary election today, has an equally appalling record of autocratic rule. But Angola’s fabulous oil wealth has silenced western criticisms of the regime’s terrible human rights abuses.

…It is now clear that oil wealth protects African dictators from international pressure to democratise. Western hypocrisy was evident in the fact that early in Zimbabwe’s meltdown, western governments and media criticisms of Mugabe focused mainly on the plight of the large white expatriate community there. Yet, the problem in Zimbabwe has never been solely about blacks attacking whites, but about a despicable regime terrorising its population