WASHINGTON, D.C. – It has been said of the Commonwealth, formerly the British Commonwealth, that it is as soft as gossamer, but held together by ties as strong as piano wire. With Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe quitting, the 53-nation organization is being tested as never before.

The Commonwealth, which was cobbled together by Britain as its empire shrank, is made up almost exclusively of former British possessions and bound together as much by sentiment as by reality. It is all of these things: a mini United Nations; a pint-sized Davos World Economic Forum; a sports promoter via the Commonwealth Games; and an operator of various modest welfare programs, including its own Peace Corps.

In its latest and most contentious meeting last week in Abuja, Nigeria, presided over by Queen Elizabeth II and attended by Prime Minister Tony Blair, the organization ran into the limits of its comity. It divided along racial lines in an ugly exhibition that the interests and values of the Westernized members, including some in Asia, were not those of Southern Africa.

North and South were, as so often, continents apart. Even the Commonwealth’s most cherished institution, the Commonwealth Retreat, during which heads of states spend days causally conferring with each other, failed to produce healing. If anything, it emphasized the differences.

The proximate cause of the Commonwealth schism was a reluctantly adopted move to continue the suspension of Zimbabwe for vote-rigging and other unconstitutional practices. But for years, except by force of will and forced camaraderie, the Commonwealth has been on the verge of disintegration, as the founding standards of Britain have been mocked by members.

In 1991, ironically in Harare, Zimbabwe, the Commonwealth decided it had to get serious about constitutional government and the rule of law. It had taken no serious disciplinary action since the eviction of South Africa over apartheid. But, as the recent meeting in Abuja showed, one country’s sinner is another country’s saint.

In Southern Africa, Mugabe is not a man who has brought the country to failure but one who has wrested it from its white settlers. To his neighbors in Botswana, Malawi, South Africa and Zambia, Mugabe is an inconvenience, an embarrassment, but above all else, he is still a freedom-fighter and a hero of the anti-colonial struggle. Also, his anti-white racism plays well in the region.

Years ago, I asked then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher whether the Commonwealth could survive. She retorted that it was strong, prospering and a force for good. As he struggled to find consensus in Abuja, Blair might have wondered whether that is still so, and whether a club that was founded in the twilight of colonialism can survive when anti-colonialism, and by extension anti-white racism, is a virulent creed.

In Zimbabwe, animals and people are dying by the tens of thousands from starvation and disease. But the Commonwealth members that surround the tortured country prefer to see Mugabe as a freedom-fighter and a revolutionary hero rather than an incompetent, corrupt mass-murderer. Now he has quit the Commonwealth, accusing it of racism and bias, while his country continues to implode.

In the Southern African tragedy and the discomfort of the Commonwealth is a bitter lesson for those who believe that the great liberal principles of democracy and the rule of law will triumph over hate and a state-sponsored interpretation of history.

Successful members of the Commonwealth, say, Sri Lanka and Singapore, are not consumed with pathological hatred of members like Australia, Canada and New Zealand. But even the northern and eastern African countries barely saw eye to eye with the non-African Commonwealth on Zimbabwe.

The Commonwealth will probably limp along as a communications tool between heads of state, but it will not fulfill its idealistic promise. It is a house divided by race.

Llewellyn King is chairman and CEO of the King Publishing Co. (www.kingpublishing.com), publishers of White House Weekly and Energy Daily.

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