'Don't listen to Western critics'
27/09/2007 13:26  - (SA)  

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Harare - President Robert Mugabe used a meeting with United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon to deny Zimbabwe was facing a humanitarian crisis and accused his Western critics of trying to stir up trouble, state media said on Thursday.

Mugabe's spokesperson George Charamba said: "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 told Ban that Zimbabwe, currently facing widespread food shortages and mass unemployment, would have informed the UN if the situation was "dire", and his government was currently able to cope.

Charamba said: "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 UN Security Council."

Bush's hands 'dripping in blood'

The meeting came ahead of Mugabe's speech at the general assembly on Wednesday after 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 said: "He has much to atone for and very little to lecture us on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 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 had been subject to targeted sanctions by the US and European Union since he was alleged to have rigged his re-election in 2002.

- AFP

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