Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, has been in the UK meeting the Queen and causing a stir.

The Daily Mail has whipped itself into a frenzy, calling Zuma a “vile buffoon” and a “sex-obsessed bigot”, as well as repeatedly calling him “Zulu Boy”.

The Telegraph is appalled that he has been invited after  describing the British as “condescending imperialists” and think Her Maj ought to teach him some manners.

The BBC is obsessed with his multiple marriages.

The Guardian’s front page pictured the Queen next to Zuma’s wife Thobeka Stacey Madiba, as if to contrast liberated white womanhood against Mrs Zuma as chattel.

Let’s get some things straight. Jacob Zuma isn’t a very nice man. He’s a corrupt, homophobic, misogynist, rapist.

But most Heads of State and people of power are pretty distasteful, if you look in to it.  The Queen has hosted Mugabe and Ceauşescu, for goodness sake, as well as being big buddies with George W Bush.

So how come the media aren’t reporting on Zuma’s corruption, or his politics, or what he’s done in his role as President? How come they’re not using his actions to talk about issues of rape, women’s rights, gay rights, and equality in South Africa and the rest of the world today?

All we’ve learnt from the media coverage of Zuma’s visit is that we can all point and laugh at the crazy brown man, mock him and his culture and call him ‘Zulu Boy’ and get away with it. It all stinks of racism and white supremacy.

If the British media wants to criticize Zuma, maybe they could have reported on the South African feminists fighting for equality under Zuma’s regime, such as Pumla Gqola, whose wonderful myth-busting article on polygamy cuts right to the chase:

The point of the matter is not whether in a feminist republic we’d force Zuma to choose one wife or banish him… We’d probably banish Zuma for many more reasons, least of which his preference for multiple partners.

How come the white ruling class only give a shit about women’s rights when they’re trying to justify their own racism?

Drone attacks in Pakistan

I found the above map via boingboing. It shows attacks by unmanned robotic drones committed by the US within Pakistan. The analysts who produced it write:

“Our study shows that the 114 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, including 18 in 2010, from 2004 to the present have killed approximately between 834 and 1,216 individuals, of whom around 549 to 849 were described as militants in reliable press accounts, about 2/3 of total on average. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32%.”

Of course, what defines a militant in this kind of situation could be pretty elastic. But what this seems to be showing us is that at least a third of the people we are sending robots to kill are completely innocent Pakistani civilians.

Future face of Kent Police

Earlier this year The Guardian reported how a group of police forces and government agencies are working with BAE systems to adapt military drone robots for use in spying on UK citizens.

The flying robots are currently used in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world to monitor and mount attacks by remote.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 it had no military robots on the ground, and only a few unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air. Today, just in Iraq, the US military is using 7000 drones and around 12, 000 ground robots. Although the US military is driving the development of military robots, the UK and other major arms manufacturing countries aren’t far behind. The Ministry of Defence has hosted robotics competitions to design new surveillance bots, and recently bought 100 Dragon Runner robots. Canada, South Korea, South Africa, Singapore and Israel. China, Russia and India all have military robotics programmes of their own.

Without any real public scrutiny or comment, the way our governments conduct war, and indeed carry out police operations at home, is becoming increasingly robotocised. What’s wrong with this? On the face of it surely less human casualties for our soldiers is a good thing?

In Vietnam 58, 000 US soldiers died, compared to a few thousand in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. A lot of this has to do with advancing technology, better medical techniques etc. However, over the past century civilian casualties in war have rocketed. In World War 1 civilians were only 10% of those that died. Today they make up as much as 90% of war casaulties. For example, it’s been reported that 1 million Pakistanis have fled their homes because of threat of US drone attacks on the border with Afghanistan. The people of the North-West Frontier Province must be wondering where their John Connor is.

Predator drone

Military chiefs have recognised since Vietnam that it’s often difficult to make ordinary people pull the trigger and kill a fellow human being. Even unconsciously, many will aim their guns high rather than shoot someone. It’s one of the reasons that the US moved away from using conscription to recruiting their army. They wanted a professional force of highly motivated trained killers.

Since Vietnam, the US military has becoming increasingly dependent on air power, and satellite monitoring from space. Now the sudden upsurge in the use of robots continues the trend-increasingly US soldiers in other countries are able to kill at a distance, probably with a video screen in between. This makes it much easier to indiscriminately destroy any suspected threats, meaning more civilians get killed in the process. For a generation of military robot operators who have grown up doing similar tasks in computer games again and again, it’s easy to see how they get desensitised to the misery they’re causing from afar.

Anti-war campaigners are currently able to get a lot of support because many people in Britain and the US are angry about the numbers of our troops dying in imperial wars. One of the main drives behind developing new robots is a hope by the government that this means they can reduce the numbers dying significantly. While nobody wants to see working class kids sent to die, we also don’t want to see the government feeling free to intervene anywhere it feels like it using robot troops.

The boom in military robots is also making a lot of money for arms manufacturers, like the privatised UK government agency turned international evil megacorp QinetiQ.

And now, with the news that the police in the UK are going to have access to surveillance drones, we’re about to see a dramatic increase in the ability of the state to spy on us wherever we go. The people of the UK already have more CCTV watching them than anywhere else on Earth. There’s about 1 CCTV camera for every 14 people in Britain.

But with the use of drones the police will be able to cheaply monitor anywhere they want from above, which obviously has implications for political activists that get up to things the government don’t like.

The good news is that anti-war activists are starting to wake up to the threat posed by military robots and take action, especially in the US. In January there was a protest outside the CIA headquarters against the use of drones. Members of the Pittsburgh Organising Group blockaded the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the largest academic military contractors in the country. Fourteen activists were arrested in the action, which successfully shut down the robotics lab for the day.

Some companies, like iRobot, make both civilian and military robots. iRobot manufactures both the PackBot and the Roomba home cleaning bot. Such companies are potentially worried about public pressure, and should be targeted.

An interesting possible future development would be that the enemies of the US and its allies could get in on the military robot revolution. There’ve been reports that Hizbollah have used drones against Israel. There’s also been the news that Iraqi insurgents have been able to hack into the live feed from US predator drones.

Just in case you think I’m making this up, or exaggerating the threat, here’s a look at some of the latest developments in robotics.

This is the SWORDS robot, that is armed and able to kill:

Here’s some footage of the truly terrifying (but still cool to look at, I know) BigDog robot, designed with funding from the military to be an artificial pack mule carrying gear over difficult terrain:

BigDog has got a little friend, the LittleDog.

This is a group of swimming robots based on a fish, with obvious potential naval applications.

Something that is especially creepy is the potential now to remotely control insects and intercept what they see for the use of surveillance. Check out this cyborg moth:

Perhaps the most crazy idea of all though is the EATR. This stands for Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot. The basic idea is that it would be able to operate alone out in the field for a long period without going back to base to refuel. Hence EATR-it can take organic matter from the environment and turn it into fuel. This has, unsurprisingly, got a lot of people worried. The idea of a potentially flesh eating killer robot on the loose is something that does not appeal to anyone who is even half way sane.

Artists' impression of the future EATR robot

The manufacturers and government agencies working on this technology have strictly denied that the EATR would ever start using the “organic matter” contained in the corpses of those it kills as fuel. They claim it is strictly vegetarian. Yet their own documents talk about chicken fat as a potential fuel, so the possibility that it could use fuel derived from animals, including humans, is clearly there.

Although many of these robots are developing the capacity for autonomous action, that is to take decisions on their own without the need for a human operator, we’re still quite a few years away from something with the intelligence of a Terminator or a Cylon.

And we shouldn’t be against the advances in robotics technology going on per se. It’s just that no technology is neutral-people design things with a goal in mind. And in our society one of the main goals is to make sure that the world’s most powerful countries are able to dominate the planet and exploit its peoples at the minimum cost to themselves.

But even with the prospect of robots becoming self-aware and nuking humanity isn’t quite on the horizon yet, some experts are already calling for serious thinking about military robots. Many have demanded that governments start thinking now about the implications of taking the decision of whether or not to kill someone out of human hands and putting it on an autonomous robot.

But SSY has a slightly more radical idea: how about we just don’t build KillBots. Doesn’t sound so crazy really, does it? Here’s a couple of documentaries that might win you round if you don’t agree:

XKCD: More Accurate:

When people were protesting against the war in Iraq, “No war for oil!” was one of the main slogans around the world. Of course it’s easy to see that at a simple level the reason why Britain and America invaded Iraq was to do with oil.

But things are rarely simple and straight forward when it comes to the operation of big, nuclear armed empires trying to control the world. For example, as much as the war in Iraq was about American control and access to Iraq’s oil fields, it was also about making sure that when that oil was bought and sold on the world market it was done in dollars, not euros.

The same is true of the long, and escalating, war in Afghanistan. On one level the reason British and American soldiers are killing and dying there is clearly to do with oil pipelines, and keeping strategic control over Asia in a battle for world domination. These big reasons why the war grinds on are about to be explained in an upcoming SSY pamphlet looking a bit deeper into why we should campaign for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

But in any big war operation like this, there are secondary reasons why the governments of NATO are willing to commit lives and huge amounts of money. Something that’s been overlooked as a reason motivating the war in Afghanistan is the global importance of the heroin economy.

Estimates put the value of the global heroin trade at more than $64.82 billion per year. Today, over 90% of that product originates in Afghanistan. Only a small proportion of these massive profits can be held in cash or recycled through unofficial banks. The vast majority has to be laundered through the global financial system. In other words, the drug trade contributes billions of dollars a year to the revenues of major global banks.

Poppies being grown for heroin production in Afghanistan

Just because something is illegal doesn’t mean that when it’s traded for huge profits it isn’t a vital part of the world economy. The story of the growth of the heroin trade since the 60’s is one that’s inextricably linked with the history of US imperialism and its wars around the world. There’s a long and well documented history of the involvement of US government agencies like the CIA in the drug trade. During the US wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, American support was given to anti-communist rebels that used heroin production to fund their operations with the support and approval of the CIA. The areas where the drugs were produced were known as ‘The Golden Triangle.’

Later persistent allegations surfaced that in the 1980s the CIA collaborated in assisting the Contra rebels (who were waging war against the left wing government in Nicaragua) in selling crack cocaine into the US. This was uncovered by investigative journalist Gary Webb. The point of the operation was to generate a stream of profits through the drug trade that provided the money to sustain the Contras’ war. If the CIA has asked the US Congress for this funding they would have had to justify its use, but crack money provided funds whose use they weren’t answerable for.

With black communities across the US flooded with crack cocaine, many affected by the resulting wave of social disruption blamed the CIA and US foreign policy. By 1996 CIA Director John Deutch was forced to appear at a public meeting in Watts, Los Angeles to answer to the allegations. Despite his denials of CIA involvement in the drug trade, he was confronted by a former LAPD Narcotics Officer turned independent investigator, Mike Ruppert, who told the meeting he had direct evidence of CIA involvement in trafficking crack.

The point of all this background history is to show that the CIA and other US government and military agencies have long had involvement in the highly profitable global drug trade. The profits from this trade have helped to provide funding for secret military operations not subject to any kind of democratic scrutiny.

Beginning in 1978 the CIA embarked on its biggest operation ever, which was to fund and arm warlords and Islamic fundamentalists to make war against the Soviet-backed left wing government of Afghanistan. They worked hand-in-glove with the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency This war dragged on throughout the 80s, draining lives and resources from the USSR, and contributing greatly to its final collapse. The mujahideen rebels, equipped by American arms and money, were eventually able to drive the Soviet armies out, and then depose the government.

In the chaos of the war and its aftermath Afghanistan became the world’s leading supplier of heroin. As you might expect, very little of the profits are made by the actual farmers. The money is made by government officials, police, warlords and power brokers. Indeed, the western-backed President Hamid Karzai’s own family have been implicated in the drug trade.

Of course, when the mainstream media reports on the Afghan heroin trade, they usually do so to imply that it provides funding to the Taliban and al Qaeda. However, the truth is that the vast majority of the profit goes to NATO allies, people who our forces maintain in power. Many of these same forces work with figures in the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment, providing a major source of income to Pakistani state (another US ally.)

In fact, in 2000, before the American invasion and while they were still in power, the Taliban actually banned the growing of poppies needed to produce heroin. The Afghan heroin trade temporarily collapsed in value, cutting off a massive source of revenue for the Pakistani state. And ultimately, the impact was felt on the profits of western banks through which the money would have been laundered.

When the US and its allies invaded in 2001, revival of the heroin trade proved to be one of the main ways to finance the operations of the Northern Alliance, the western backed gang of brutal warlords now in power in many parts of Afghanistan. Some of the warlords have become millionaires as a result.

In addition, there is a significant profit being made by someone in the marketing of the chemical precursors needed to manufacture heroin in Afghanistan. Acetic anhydride, a chemical needed as part of the process, is regularly intercepted being smuggled into Afghanistan. The trade in this chemical is thought to be worth $45 million. A portion of that money makes its way back to western chemical corporations as profits.

There are an estimated 16 million opiate users worldwide, and the main market is in Europe, where the annual profits are estimated to be around $20 billion. One of the main ways that peace could perhaps be achieved in Afghanistan would be to do something to curb the demand for illegally produced heroin in Europe.

In Scotland, the SSP and SSY has campaigned for years in favour of a system of clean, pharmaceutical heroin being prescribed to addicts via the NHS. We’ve been villified, even effectively being called drug dealers by the Daily Record. But the fact remains that heroin on prescription is a safer way to help people with an addiction than the current system of blanket prescribing methadone. In a pilot scheme in the English town of Widnes where this was tried the effect was a drop to virtually zero levels of acquisitive crime by drug users, as well as new infection rates for HIV.

Pharmaceutical heroin

The urgency of removing the need for Scotland’s 50,000+ heroin users to buy from the illegal market was illustrated graphically last year. At least 9 people were killed after using heroin that was contaminated with anthrax.

But at least part of the reason that the pilot scheme in Widnes was shut down was that it threatened the profits of pharmaceutical companies manufacturing methadone. And at least part of the reason that NATO forces remain entangled in the Afghan war is that our allies rely on the heroin trade, which in turn produces a tidy profit for western banks. In the wake of the economic collapse of 2008, banks are now less keen than ever to ask too many questions about where their money is coming from. As UN drug official Antonio Mario Costa puts it:

“Interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities, and there were signs that some banks were rescued in that way. . .At a time of major bank failures, money doesn’t smell, bankers seem to believe.”

What all this shows is that the fight against the war in Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the fight to change society here. Their problems are largely a result of our governments’ policies. A socialist drug policy in Scotland would go a long way to ending the misery caused by illegal heroin in Scottish communities. But it would also go a long way to pulling the fuel from the fire of the war in Afghanistan, giving the Afghan people a chance at last to have peace and determine their own future.

Hard on the heels of a previous post poking fun at the idiocies of the organised, evangelical Christian Far Right in Ireland, Leftfield brings you news of another bout of idiocy from a fundamentalist nutjob.

Calling out the offensive madness of Pat Robertson is a bit like shooting fish in a giant barrel with a satellite laser guided super gun, i.e. it’s not very hard. Researching this article I came across the wikipedia page ‘Pat Robertson controversies,’ which has 20 separate entries, such as ‘Chinese abortions,’ ‘Remarks against Muslims and Hindus,’ ‘Remarks against Asians,’ and ‘Financial Ties to Charles Taylor and Mobutu Sese Seko.’* He also famously called Scotland “a dark land overrun with homosexuals,” and advocated the assassination of Hugo Chavez on live TV.

If you don’t know of this guy count yourself very, very lucky you live in a country where such people don’t have national political influence. People in the US are much less fortunate. Robertson is a famous televangelist, known for spouting his virulent right wing views on his own TV station, the Christian Broadcasting Network. In 1988 he campaigned to become the Republican nominee for US President, and retains a huge following and influence on the US right. He’s really a poster boy for the extreme right evangelical political movement that is basically responsible for two terms of George W. Bush.

But what has he done lately to earn the prestigious inclusion in Leftfield’s roster of knobheads? Well, he excelled himself with this latest outburst, in reference to the Richter 7.0 earthquake in Haiti which has killed around 200, 000 people:

Pat Robertson on Haitian quake

… something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it, they were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon the third and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil, they said, we will serve you, if you get us free from the French, true story. And so the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free, and ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. . . That island of Hispaniola is one island. It is cut down the middle; on the one side is Haiti on the other is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etc. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God and out of this tragedy I’m optimistic something good may come. But right now we are helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.

Most people who can be bothered to try and work out what is going on in his fevered mind interpret his comments as relating to the role of Dutty Boukman, a slave in colonial Haiti when the country was still controlled by the French. As a priest of the voudun religion, followed by slaves and derived from their traditional beliefs before they were abducted from Africa, he conducted a ceremony in 1791 that helped spark the Haitian revolution.

The movement he helped start is one of the forgotten moments in the long struggle of humans everywhere to free themselves from exploitation, not as well known as the French or Russian revolutions. It was the first successful slave revolt in the history of the Atlantic slave trade, and it allowed Haitians to found the first state not controlled by a white elite in the whole western hemisphere, and the first post-colonial Black-led state in the world. The revolutionaries, in an unabated streak of ass-kicking, not only beat the French, but then went on to drive out the Spanish and British invaders who saw their chance to grab another colony. Then, with racism clearly clouding his ability to recognise hardcore fighters when he saw them, Napoleon Bonaparte sent MORE French troops in an attempt to reconquer the island. I bet you can guess what happened to them.

The existence of Haiti as a revolutionary base later became a key aid to the struggle of Simon Bolivar to end Spanish colonial domination of Latin America, when Haitians provided the rebels with shelter and aid.

The history of the revolution is famously documented in the classic book ‘The Black Jacobins,’ by Caribbean Marxist C. L. R. James. It’s a great read and is one every socialist should try and make the time for at some point.

On one level, you can almost (almost) understand how poor old mad, ignorant Robertson ended up with such wacky views, given the total lack of context that’s been displayed in most coverage of the devastating quake. Most accounts have told us how the infrastructure and government were woefully inadequate, and how unprepared they were for a disaster of this kind. But that’s the end of the story, nobody seems to be interested in how this situation arose.

The fact of the matter is that there is almost never a completely natural disaster, especially in countries like Haiti, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. Since the revolution Haiti has been under virtually constant assault from imperialism. In 1825 France sent another invasion force, and forced the former slaves to pay reparations for the cost of their freedom, a crippling debt for Haitians. This was the beginning of an almost permanent period of political uncertainty, in a country that has had 32 coups in its 200 year history, virtually all of them backed by foreign imperial powers.

This process came to a head in 1914 when British, German and American troops entered the island to prevent rebellion. The US then went on to occupy the island until 1934, completely re-writing the constitution and imposing a financial system that left Haiti in even more debt, and siphoned off the country’s wealth to US banks.

Another little mentioned event is how the US helped establish a firm boundary between Haiti and the neighbouring Dominican Republic. Following this, in 1937, the US trained and supported Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo massacred around 30, 000 Haitians in five days on his side of the border.

Following the US occupation the US supported with significant aid the dictatorship of the batshit-insane ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier as a bulwark against a spread of the Cuban revolution. Duvalier was notable for a reign of terror against anyone he didn’t like, including socialists and communists, carried out by his private army, the Tonton Macoutes. Haiti became his private kingdom, and he continued loot the country’s wealth, as well as getting Haiti into massive debt. Haiti today is still paying off debts amassed by Duvalier, which no one had any say on apart from ‘Papa.’ He created a huge personality cult around himself, and claimed that President Kennedy had been assassinated because he had cursed him. He also liked to compare himself to Christ. In other words, he had about as much of a grip on reality as Pat Robertson. When he died in 1971 he was succeeded by his son, known, imaginatively enough, as ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier.

In 1986 Haitians finally managed to get the Duvalier family kicked out and exiled to France. Following this Haiti held its first democratic elections in a long long time, and elected former priest Jean Bertrand Aristide to the Presidency. As a priest he had advocated liberation theology, and as leader of the party Lavalas (which means ‘the flood’ in Haitian creole) he argued for redistribution of wealth and the duty of the state to try and alleviate the massive poverty affecting Haitians. In 1994 he also suffered a coup against his Presidency, but it was defeated and he returned.

Re-elected in 2000, Aristide was finally deposed in a US backed coup, the frontline troops of which were drug-smuggling mercenaries. US troops then kidnapped Aristide and dumped him in the Central African Republic. Since then Haiti has hosted a UN “peacekeeping” force, whose troops have been predictably enough been accused of numerous killings and abuses of the Haitian people. One of the most notable crimes to have occurred during the UN occupation has been the kidnapping of Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine. Lovinsky was a member of Lavalas, and a noted human rights activist who fought for the poorest, particularly single mothers and homeless children. He went missing after a meeting with UN forces in 2007. An international solidarity campaign has fought for his return.

In the first elections since the coup, Haitians overwhelmingly elected Rene Preval, a close ally of Aristide. Despite government committed to (as Aristide put it) “moving from absolute misery to dignified poverty,” Haiti has been the victim of decades of neo-liberal capitalist policies. International institutions like the IMF and World Bank forced the government to relinquish its powers to help their own people from the 70s onwards, and harsh trade agreements made sure the prospect of Haiti developing its economy and resources for its own people was just not happening.

Perhaps most importantly, these policies deliberately forced tens of thousands of poor small farmers off their land and into swelling slums in cities like the capital Port Au Prince. This city has grown immensely, and the vast majority live in poorly built makeshift homes that are in no way equipped to cope with disaster conditions, with no electricity, running water or infrastructure of any kind. Around 75% of the population lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% — four and a half million people — live on less than $1 per day. These are the people who have died in the thousands, as much victims of poverty imposed by imperialism as the earthquake.

As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, puts it: “Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses.”

The UN occupation is fantastically expensive, and yet its mission is defined as solely military, in other words keeping the rebellious Haitians in line. The powers that take part, chief among them the US, have consistently voted against any of this money being diverted to help ordinary Haitians.

An important comparison to make if you want to understand what’s happened to Haiti is with neighbouring Cuba, fortunate to have had a socialist revolution in 1959 and so not controlled by the US and its allies. In 2008 storms killed thousands in Haiti, whereas in Cuba they killed only four. A socialist government that is truly in control of the country and its resources is able to take practical steps to protect ordinary people from natural disasters. Meanwhile, refugees leaving Cuba are welcomed with open arms in the US as evidence of how awful socialism is, whilst Haitians fleeing poverty are treated as vermin, kept in detention camps and deported wholesale back to Haiti.

Many places and organisations are raising money for disaster relief in Haiti, and this is of course vitally needed. But socialists reading this could perhaps reflect on how we could best help the Haitians in the long term. What Haiti really needs is imperialism to get off their back so that they can have the kind of pro-poor government that they have consistently voted for. One of the main ways this could happen is if the US and international bodies would forgive some of the huge debt burden, much of which was amassed by a government no Haitian ever voted for. But in fact, quite the opposite is happening right now, as the IMF is actually ADDING to Haiti’s external debt by offering loans for disaster relief!

Perhaps some of this (plus a basic education about geology, and the devil’s non-role in it) could help enlighten Pat Robertson. But then again, it’s unlikely, as he is clearly a knobhead. Inside that knobhead is a brain composed of nothing but 100% pure, weapons grade mentalism.

Bonus: Pat Robertson gets caught saying a caller to the Larry King show is a “homo” when he thinks he’s off air:

Pat Robertson calls viewer a \”homo\”

*Charles Taylor is the former President of Liberia, currently on trial for war crimes in The Hague, who presided over a reign of terror in his country featuring all kinds of horrors inflicted by conscripted child soldiers. Mobutu Sese Seko was the brutal dictator of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which he renamed Zaire cos he felt like it. When he was kicked out the aftermath caused a war which has killed more people than World War 1. Pat Robertson was in business with them both because he owns diamond mines that use virtual slave labour. What a prick.