Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Sunday launched a virulent attack on Britain and the United States at the UN General Assembly, accusing them of "state terrorism" over the Iraq war.
Mugabe, whose relations with Britain - Zimbabwe's former colonial ruler - have been frosty for years, also accused London of "abusing its privilege and acting dishonestly" for raising his government's slum demolition campaign in the UN Security Council.
"Is it not obvious that Britain, under the regime of Tony Blair, has ceased to respect the charter of the United Nations?" Mugabe asked.
"Witness its being a principal member of the anti-Iraq illegal coalition that went on a devastating campaign of the country in complete defiance of the United Nations Charter.
"Any state or group of states that commits such an act of aggression on another, justifying it on blatant falsehoods, surely becomes guilty of state terrorism," he said.
In a dig at the United States, Mugabe said "imperialist countries... have remained silent about the shocking circumstances of obvious state neglect surrounding the tragic Gulf (of Mexico) coast disaster."
"(...) A whole community of mainly non-whites was deliberately abandoned to the ravages of Hurrican Katrina as sacrificial lambs," he said.
As Mugabe spoke, only junior diplomats occupied the British and US assembly seats.
The veteran African leader accused "Britain and its Anglo-Saxon allies" of embarking on a "vicious campaign of first peddling blatant lies intended to tarnish it (Zimbabwe) and secondly appealing to Europe and America for sanctions against it."
He said that Britain's push last July for a Security Council debate on a damning UN report on Harare's slum demolition blitz was aimed at scoring "cheap political points in its bilateral dispute with us."
"We were dragged on to the Council's agenda over an issue that has no relevance to the maintenance of international peace and security," Mugabe noted.
Last July, after a two-week fact-finding visit by UN special envoy Anna Tibaijuka, the UN released a scathing report charging that Harare's shantytown demolition drive had left 700,000 Zimbabweans homeless and destitute and affected a further 2.4 million.
Zimbabwe has defended the demolitions as a campaign to rid cities of squalor and crime and has since launched a reconstruction program to house those displaced.
"We have rejected the scandalous demands, as expressed in Tibaijuka's report, that we lower our urban housing standards to allow for mud huts, bush latrines and pit toilets as suitable for the urban people of Zimbabwe and for Africans in general," he said.
He also rejected as "unfounded alarms" reports of a "humanitarian crisis" in Zimbabwe.
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