On the 28th anniversary of Robert Mugabe's rise to power in Zimbabwe April 19, Robert Rotberg, president of the World Peace Foundation, conceded that he once was enamored with the Zimbabwean despot.

Rotberg, keynote speaker for the Cornell symposium "Failed and Failing States in Africa: Lessons From Darfur and Beyond," said it wasn't until 1989-90 that he began to "seeing the light" about Mugabe, under whose leadership Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, initially prospered then nosedived.

Such an admission might get lesser figures heckled off the podium given Zimbabwe's current state. But Rotberg also happens to be director of Harvard University's Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention and Conflict Resolution, an expert on failed states and repressive regimes and a prolific author and editor on the subject.

He appeared to have the respect of the numerous economists, sociologists, political scientists, historians members of the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch who attended his talk.

Even so, it's a risk for an expert to acknowledge gross errors of judgment.

Mugabe seems determined to steal the recent presidential election from opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who was winning the March 29 runoff when the election commission was ordered not to announce the results. The results still have not been released, and human rights groups report violent suppression of opposition supporters and predict that Mugabe will steal the elections.

But Rotberg led off his talk by focusing on Burma (now called Myanmar but Rotberg used "Burma"), a failed state in all respects but one: It is stable by virtue of being militarily secure, he said. Rotberg called it a "weak state with a hollow center," comparing it to North Korea and Turkmenistan.

Burma shares much in common with failed and newly failing states, he said, in that it was "brought to the precipice of failure by human agency."

Burma was a democracy from the time of its independence from Britain in 1948 until the government was toppled by military coup in 1962.

"No structural deficit or institutional deficiencies, no natural disasters or geographical constraint contributed to Burma's descent," Rotberg said. Burma's autocratic leaders "ran the country into the ground."

Rotberg classifies nations by stability: strong, weak, failing, failed or collapsed. He is principal author of the Index of African Governance, a diagnostic tool that ranks the quality of governance in sub-Sahara African countries on the factors of security, the rule of law, human rights, economic opportunity and human development.

It is a useful tool to determine when the international community should intervene on a struggling state's behalf, Rotberg said. But Rotberg said the world's leading industrialized nations suffer from a collective "lack of political will" in dealing with the issue of failed and failing states.

The upshot is that more than 70 years after the Holocaust and the creation of the United Nations, after the horrors in Uganda, Rwanda, the Sudan and elsewhere, the leaders of world order are still "unable to do more than wring their hands after the fact."

He added: "We must have preventive diplomacy, smart sanctions and limited forms of intervention," as well as world leadership that is not timid in challenging oppressive dictators.

For those keeping watch on the spread of state failures, Rotberg said to keep an eye on Bolivia, Kurghistan, Guinea-Africa and Papua, New Guinea, all of which are teetering.

The two-day symposium was part of Cornell's ongoing Africa Initiative with a focus on Darfur. It was sponsored by the Institute for African Development and co-sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Office of the Vice Provost for International Relations, Cornell and Houghton College.