DINNER PARTY INTEL...
The topics you have to be able to discuss this week
1. Light on the UN
The curtains in a famous UN Security Council chamber have been opened for the first time since a bazooka attack on Che Guevara more than 50 years ago. The German UN mission celebrated its month-long presidency by calling for the heavy drapes covering the two-storey windows to be pulled aside to let the sunshine into the council chamber. The curtains were closed after a bazooka was fired in 1964 across New York’s East river, aimed at the UN building, where Guevara was speaking. The shell exploded in the river and rattled the windows. Guevara, then Cuba’s industry minister, did not pause in his delivery of an anti-american tirade.
“Unfortunately the conditions the European council decided on in its last meeting have not been met [by the UK]. This means time will run out on April 12. Of course the EU [is] willing to talk [but] so far absolutely nothing has changed” Germany’s EU affairs minister Michael Roth, quoted on April 9
2. Amritsar remembered
As the UN warned of war crimes against civilians by rebel forces marching on the Libyan capital Tripoli, and Rwanda began a 100-day commemoration of the 1994 genocide that left 800,000 people slaughtered, India prepared to mark the 100th anniversary of the Amritsar Massacre on April 13. At least 379 people were shot dead and 1,000 were injured when, without a word of warning the colonial general Rex Dyer cold-bloodedly ordered his 50 men to open fire on the unarmed and peaceable crowd of 15,000 gathered in the walled former garden of Jallianwala Bagh. Dyer said he “could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back again and laughed”. Amritsar turned loyal subjects of Britain, notably Gandhi and Nehru, into implacable nationalists.
3. Wigs before bread
Zimbabwe’s founding president, Robert Mugabe, regularly excoriated British colonialism but held on to a quaint English tradition: judges’ wigs. Lawyers in Zimbabwe this week slammed the government’s £118,000 (R2.2m) purchase of 64 horsehair wigs from a London outfitter. They said the tradition evokes a colonial past, adding that the country’s economy is crumbling and 63% of the population live below the poverty line.