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Obscene: Mugabe’s arrival at food summit provokes outrage

He’s turned up again like a bad penny, or a bad smell! Whichever. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is back in Rome, staying in five-star accommodation for the duration of a United Nations food summit while his people starve as a result of his disastrous farm policies.

The unexpected arrival of President Mugabe and his shopacholic wife, Grace, prompted a flood of international protests yesterday after he joined more than 60 world leaders flying in for the three-day conference. Although the Zimbabwean leader and his wife are targeted by an European Union travel ban, the sanctions do not apply to UN meetings conducted on UN premises.

The grotesque irony of the situation was lost on no one. “Robert Mugabe going to Rome for the food summit is like Pol Pot going to a human rights convention,” said Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office minister for Africa, referring to the mastermind of the Cambodian genocide. I couldn’t have worded this better.

The British representative to the meeting, Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary, said Mr Mugabe’s appearance was “obscene”.

Today the Mugabes can get away from all that. They are staying in the reassuringly luxurious surroundings of the Via Veneto, this time at the Ambasciatori Palace Hotel Rome, which describes itself as “deep inside ‘La Dolce Vita’”, and where the room rates range from €210 (£170) to €900 per night. Grace Mugabe will not have to go far to indulge in one of her shopping sprees: the world’s most refined and expensive bags and shoes are all a short trundle from the hotel.

In 2002, he was here with his wife and an entourage of 10, staying at the five-star Hotel Excelsior. In 2005, he flew in for the funeral of Pope John Paul II, and trapped the Prince of Wales into a handshake. Now he is here again, for the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation’s (FAO) summit on world food security, climate change and bioenergy, to the embarrassment of the organizers and many participants, thumbing his nose at the rest of the world less than a month before the 84-year old faces his first ever run-off presidential election.

An FAO spokesman said the UN can exercise no influence over who a given member state chooses to represent it at the meeting, “nor should it”. He said that 185 of the UN’s 191 members will be represented, “and who they choose to represent them is entirely their business”. The Mugabes will not even have to put their hands in their pockets: the UN has set up a trust fund to pay an allowance for the delegations from poorer countries. Meh to Mugabe!