Europe's ex-colonial powers are ill-placed to lecture China about its behaviour in Africa, they say.
These were men and women who had never governed, who were colonial subjects while the colonial powers led everything.
Other colonial powers vied for control of the increasingly-prosperous sugar-producing island, and it came under brief periods of English rule in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Yet, try as he may, Mr Mugabe cannot dismiss the new pressure on him merely as the vengeful work of former colonial powers or the machinations of western capitalists.
The European Union, with Italy and Britain, as former colonial powers, to the fore, will probably try to shore up the transitional government in Baidoa while coming to terms with the Islamists in Mogadishu.
And the American settler uprising that began in 1775 was essentially a reflection of the tensions between this private-enterprise notion of empire and the growing financial burden of securing it both from rival European colonial powers and from displaced indigenous peoples.
Back in 1938 the Brotherhood's founder Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher with a knack for organisation, took the podium at an Islamic gathering in Cairo and proposed stitching together the nascent states that Europe's colonial powers had carved out of the Ottoman empire.
In a sense, France and the United Kingdom are replaying their 19th century roles of colonial European powers looking to project power and protect interests outside the European continent, while Berlin remains landlocked behind the Skagerrak and concentrates on building a Mitteleuropa.
What Syria and Congo and, for that matter, Iraq and Jordan and Rwanda and Burundi and Uganda have in common is these are old colonial boundaries that were drawn by European powers way back when.
NPR: U.S. Non-Intervention In Syria Could Mirror Outcome In Congo
U. President Jacques Chirac of France, Cambodia's onetime colonial ruler, supports a tribunal, as do the other European powers, though all are aware of the practical problems involved.
Far from limiting its war effort to fending off the encircling allied powers of Russia, France and Britain, German diplomats and soldiers tried to foment popular anti-colonial revolution in India and Egypt, to create a widespread Islamic jihad against the colonial rulers, to disrupt the allies' global communications.
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