I hear that Wikileaks is to include 89 cables about Swaziland sent out by the American Embassy in Mbabane.
When you consider that’s 89 out of a total 251,287 diplomatic and not-so-diplomatic messages sent by US embassies across the world to the State Department in Washington it certainly puts Swaziland in its place.
As you know by now, Wikileaks has received confidential and secret communications from US embassies across the world and many of them reveal for the first time publicly what the Americans really think about their friends and foes alike in the international community.
I don’t suppose the cables will reveal much we don’t already know about what the US thinks about Swaziland: you could sum it up as ‘not that bothered, the kingdom just isn’t important to us’.
If the contents of some of the cables about other nations is anything to go by we might see some indiscreet remarks about ‘leaders’ in Swaziland.
What do the Americans really think about Lutfo Dlamini, Swaziland Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, and the man he sees as chosen by God, King Mswati III?
We should find out eventually. Wikileaks is publishing its stash of cables gradually on the Internet and if ‘newsworthiness’ is a criterion for how quickly a cable goes up on the web, we can expect to wait a very long time for the first one from Mbabane.
No comments:
Post a Comment