If you want to make a big noise and rattle a bigger cup at the latest climate fest, it pays to be a dictator with a history of bloodshed, oppression, graft and ballot-rigging. Just ask Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or the Maldives’ Abdulla Yameen Gayoom
Two important blocs posturing at the Paris climate talks are the Alliance of Small Island States bloc ( AOSIS, 44 countries) and the African bloc (54 countries). The island-states’ representative since January is the strongman president of the Maldives, Abdulla Yameen Gayoom, whose democracy-friendly predecessor, Mahomed Nasheed, is now doing a 13-year term in an insanitary Maldives prison. The African bloc’s spokesman is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who needs no introduction.
It’s hard to plumb the depths of the hypocrisy involved, especially about the proposed $US100 billion annual green handouts to Third World despots and kleptocrats. But I’ll give it a try.
Maldives President Yameen has sent a message to Paris describing AOSIS as the “moral voice” of the UN Paris talks, and he has called for the $US100 billion per annum to be “scaled up in the years to come”. And that not all that he and his AOSIS team want. In 2013, the Warsaw climate conference waffled about an extra fund for the likes of Maldives, called “an international mechanism on Loss & Damage”. This will require further ratification in 2016 and Yameen is very keen on it.