Don't listen to Western critics, Mugabe tells UN chief
HARARE (AFP) — President Robert Mugabe used a meeting with UN chief Ban Ki-moon to deny Zimbabwe was facing a humanitarian crisis and accuse his Western critics of trying to stir up trouble, state media said Thursday.
"The president told the secretary-general that the situation in Zimbabwe was not as dire as portrayed by the British and the Americans who have always had a fight with Zimbabwe," Mugabe's spokesman George Charamba told the Herald newspaper from the ongoing UN General Assembly in New York.
Mugabe told Ban that Zimbabwe, currently facing widespread food shortages and mass unemployment, would have informed the United Nations if the situation was "dire", and his government was currently able to cope.
"The president also told the secretary-general not to let his office be abused by the British and Americans who have a history of trying to drag Zimbabwe to the United Nations Security Council," Charamba said.
The meeting came ahead of Mugabe's speech at the general assembly Wednesday when he upped his war of words with George W. Bush, accusing the US president of "rank hypocrisy" for describing the regime in Harare as tyrannical.
Mugabe, in power of the former British colony since independence in 1980, said Bush's hands were dripping in blood as a result of US military misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"He has much to atone for and very little to lecture us on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," said Mugabe.
"He kills in Iraq. He kills in Afghanistan. And this is supposed to be our master on human rights?"
Mugabe said Bush's regime had ignored international law with its treatment of prisoners at the US detention camp in Guantanomo Bay, Cuba, and was "taking out his anger for failing to find the culprits of 9/11 on other countries".
In his own address to the assembly on Tuesday, Bush had accused Mugabe of heading a "tyrannical regime" which had "cracked down on peaceful calls for reform (and) forced millions to flee their homeland."
Mugabe and his inner circle have been subject to targeted sanctions by the United States and European Union since he was alleged to have rigged his re-election in 2002.
