Anti-American outburst

last updated 8 January 2015

Rome

The leader of Zimbabwe used the unlikely setting of the U.N.’s food agency meeting this week to rail against the United States. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe called President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair “the two unholy men of our millennium, who in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini formed an unholy alliance to attack an innocent country.” Tony Hall, U.S. envoy to the Food and Agriculture Organization, said he found it strange that Mugabe had even been invited to the summit, since it is Mugabe’s land-seizure policies that plunged Zimbabwe into famine. Mugabe has defended the seizures of white-owned farms as a way to redress the injustices of colonialism. Since the seizures began five years ago, agricultural production has virtually stopped.