Mugabe: 'Dell must go to Hell'

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By Staff Reporter

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe told the U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe to "go to hell" on Tuesday after the envoy blamed the country's economic and political crisis on mismanagement and corrupt rule.

State media said the ambassador, Christopher Dell, risked expulsion from the southern African country for his "undiplomatic" criticism of the government in a public lecture.

The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corp. said it had asked Mugabe for his reaction to the comments.

"The president said the ambassador must go to hell. The president said: 'I cannot even spell the word Dell with a "D" but an "H" and that is where Dell should go'," a ZBC correspondent said during a news bulletin.

Dell said last week that Mugabe's government was responsible for plunging Zimbabwe into a crisis which had left it with soaring poverty and chronic food shortages.

Mugabe, 81 and in power for 25 years, embarked on a controversial drive of seizing and redistributing white-owned farms to landless blacks in 2000, and earlier this year tens of thousands of people were made homeless after the government ordered the demolition of shacks and "illegal houses."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli backed the ambassador's comments and said the Zimbabwean government had not lodged a complaint.

Zimbabwean state media said the Foreign Ministry was dealing with the matter.

"I think our ambassador and his comments very fairly and accurately reflect the policy of the United States," Ereli said.

Mugabe's relations with many Western powers, including the United States and the European Union, have soured in the last few years over charges of human rights abuses and vote-rigging.

But Mugabe said he has been targeted by foreign opponents led by Zimbabwe's former colonial ruler Britain for his nationalistic policies and said most of Africa is on his side, which he describes as a struggle against imperialism - Reuters
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