Nobel laureate and Northern Ireland politician David Trimble drew parallels on Thursday between the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and Zimbabwe under President Robert Mugabe.
Addressing the Cape Town press club, Trimble said that what was really needed to ensure sustainable development in the developing world, was stable, responsible, government.
”There is only so much that can be done in terms of aid, at the end of the day it really has to be peoples themselves that address their own particular circumstances and problems.
”There is a crying need in some areas for stable, responsible, government. It is not a coincidence, that those areas most affected by poverty and famine are also areas in the world where there is war, conflict and dictatorial governments.”
Just as democracies did not fight each other, democratic leaders did not impoverish their own people, Trimble said.
Referring to Zimbabwe, he said: ”We are seeing not to far from here a famine developing which is not natural, but is largely man-made.
”It seems to borrow not a little from the tactics of Stalin in the Ukraine in the 1930s. It’s getting as bad as that.”
Early in Stalin’s reign the Soviet leader imposed a system of ”collectivisation” whereby all privately-held land in Ukraine was
nationalised.
The system was ultimately blamed for the deaths of millions of Ukrainians during the winter of the 1932-33. It is widely believed that Stalin perpetrated the famine to stamp out any aspirations of Ukrainian independence.
On the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which resulted in a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, Trimble said: ”We are in the middle of a transition which is not complete.
”There had been a lot of progress, but we haven’t actually completed it. I don’t think we are going to go seriously into reverse, but we could get stuck.”
If this happened things could get messy, ”but I don’t think the whole thing will collapse”, he said.
Trimble, who as the Ulster Unionist Party leader, has to contend with an anti-agreement lobby in his own party, said he did not believe these members were as much ”anti-agreement, as anti-Trimble”. – Sapa