Strange how the increasingly demented Mugabe, in true Animal Farm style, gets to sound more and more like the old-style British colonialists he so despises:
Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, yesterday called top UN humanitarian envoy Jan Egeland a "damn hypocrite and a liar" after he criticised the country's brutal slum demolitions.Speaking to thousands of ruling ZANU-PF party delegates gathered for an annual conference near Esigodini in southern Zimbabwe, Mr Mugabe said the envoy had told "lies, utter lies".
Mr Egeland, the UN's emergency relief co-ordinator, left Harare on Wednesday after a three-day visit he said had shown him that Zimbabwe was facing a "very serious" humanitarian crisis. The envoy toured makeshift shelters in Harare and Bulawayo's poorest townships and spoke to some of the 700,000 victims of Operation Drive Out Trash, a devastating blitz on shacks and flea markets launched in May.Mr Egeland said the operation was the "worst possible thing" to happen to Zimbabwe. But Mr Mugabe told cheering delegates that people were suffering "much more" in other parts of Africa and accused the UN envoy of being a British agent. "I'm going to tell the secretary-general [Kofi Annan] not to send us men or women who are not his own but the agents of the British," he said in a speech broadcast live on state radio.
The 81-year-old president was in fighting mood, apparently emboldened by his party's victory in last month's senate elections when it won all but seven of the 66 seats. The 3,000 delegates attending the ZANU-PF conference are being wined and dined in style in Esigodini, an impoverished corner of Zimbabwe.
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