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 Corporation (ZBC) 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.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli backed Dell's comments and said the envoy had been called to a meeting at the Zimbabwean Foreign Ministry on Wednesday. He did not know why the meeting had been called. "This is not about a speech by our ambassador, it's about failed economic policies of the government of Zimbabwe and President Mugabe," said Ereli when asked about the confrontation between the ambassador and Mugabe. "They have gone after him (the ambassador) personally, which is wrong and should be condemned instead of examining what the true problem is," he 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 says he has been targeted by foreign opponents led by Zimbabwe's former colonial ruler Britain for his nationalistic policies and says most of Africa is on his side in which he describes as a struggle against imperialism.