Archbishop Desmond Tutu the 'moral compass'

Nelson Mandela once called Archbishop Desmond Tutu 'South Africa's moral compass' and he is. The other day he refused to share platform with Tony Blair, Labour Party's longest-serving prime minister - if that is a credit anymore - accusing him of prompting illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blair's support for the US-led invasion was basic on doctored information, therefore "it would be inappropriate and untenable for the Archbishop to share a platform with Blair, according to Nobel Prize-winning priest". Ironically, however, the one-day conference was on 'leadership which could not be separated from morality'. Indeed, Blair's participation as speaker was a joke with history, for he was the principal inciter of the campaign to dislodge Saddam Hussain accusing the Iraqi leader of possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). That was never the case as after destruction in a surprise attack by Israeli airforce Iraq had permanently jettisoned its nuclear ambitions. But the oil-thirsty and pro-Israel governments in the West were out to capture Iraqi oil by hook or by crook. Having failed to convince international opinion that a minor explosion near Baghdad was 'incident in one of the Iraqi nuclear facilities' they led Saddam Hussain on to invade neighbouring Kuwait and then punished him for the adventure. But a clear victory over Saddam was required, hence the Blair's conspiratorial role and his fabricated information over Iraqi WMD stockpiles - so eagerly lapped up by the then US military chief General Colin Powell. And for the hypercritical gloss over invasion touted as a move to bring democracy to the people of Iraq, how much of it is on the ground at the cost of a quarter of a million lives and lingering instability and insecurity. One would have expected Blair was not invited to the moot given its high-sounding rubric of moralising the world leaderships. No other country in modern history has suffered at the hands of colonial oppression as of Archbishop Tutu's South Africa. And the natives' struggle against the notorious 'apartheid' policy of the colonial masters was perhaps the longest. But it was also a saga of human endurance and tolerance; it produced men like Mandela and Tutu who decided to overlook the gloomy past for a better future both for the South Africa's European and non-European segments of population. But for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created by Bishop Tutu and others on both sides of the racial divide the 'apartheid' would have been still there taking its bloody toll. So sincere the effort on his part was that the sinners walked in without shame and embarrassment to confess their crimes and helped obtain a people at peace with their conscience. That moral compass of South Africa is the need of the hour in many parts of the world where ethnic, racial and sectarian conflicts are now raging in full fury causing immense human pain and misery. Instead of coming to the leadership conference Blair should have come to Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and confessed his crime of consigning millions of innocent Iraqis to unending war - that may have lost its military dimension but not of the Blair mischief that tends to foment insecurity and violence. Iraq today has a semblance of democracy, but it's definitely more volatile and unsafe than under the undemocratic rule of Saddam Hussain. And what kind of that war was that in the end removed from the scene one of the United States' strongest allies against its regional nemesis, Iran. Archbishop Tutu has indeed deserved world's praise for his frank 'no' to what was once known as 'Bush's poodle'.