ROME — On World Food Day last month, I found myself distracted by a diplomatic circus, rather than celebrating the great work that is being done feeding the world's poor.
I was forced to defend both the poor and the people of the United States. During the celebrations, Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, came to Rome to speak to the United Nations' delegates to the Food and Agriculture Organization on world hunger. This was both an irony and a tragedy. Mugabe is the last person who should be given a platform to lecture the United Nations on the importance of fighting hunger.
You see, this is a man who has wrecked the agricultural system of a country that used to be known as the "bread basket" of southern Africa. Further, on the very day that he was given the honor of speaking to us in Rome, a judge in his own country ruled that the president and his party had used food aid to compel rural areas to vote for the ruling ZANU-PF party — and threatened to starve them if they opposed the party in their recent election.
Mugabe is a tyrant bent on retaining his iron grip on power no matter what — even if it means devastating the lives of his own people. He has not only decimated the agricultural sector's capacity to feed the country through his gross mishandling of land-redistribution reform, but this summer he bulldozed impoverished neighborhoods. That act made 700,000 of the country's poorest people homeless in a program called "Drive Out the Trash."
What kind of government officially declares its poorest and most vulnerable citizens "trash"?
It was for these reasons that I told a reporter that I was disheartened that Mugabe was coming to speak on World Food Day. Because of his mockery of the poor and abuse of the hungry, I said he should not have been invited and that he should not have come.
Mugabe used his speech before the United Nations in Rome to equate President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair with Hitler and Mussolini and then to vilify our nation's agenda as one of world domination.
He pointed at me from his lectern and said that "Tony Hall is an agent of imperialism, and I thank you for defying him and the enemies of Zimbabwe."
Neither I, nor the United States, is an enemy of Zimbabwe. Since 2002, the United States has been the most generous donor to food-relief programs in Zimbabwe. Our country has poured more than $300 million worth of food aid to feed more than 5 million Zimbabweans.
While Mugabe has been ruining his country, the United States has been there to keep his citizens from starving.
I have visited Zimbabwe three times, most recently this summer when I met people whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed by this brutal dictator. When I went to a feeding camp where U.S. food aid was being distributed, U.N. colleagues and I were denied access to witness the distribution.
One fearful official whispered that I was not being allowed to enter because people were dying inside.
Mugabe was angry that I told a reporter that he should not have come. Well, I'm incensed that he starves his people, bulldozes their homes, uses food as a political weapon, then uses the anti-hunger platform of the United Nations to denounce the same government that is keeping his people alive.
If we don't help the people of Zimbabwe, they will not live to see the day when Mugabe's corrupt rule will be over, when they will have a government that rules in their interest rather than the interest of a corrupt elite, that will educate their children, help them start businesses and create economic conditions so they can earn enough to feed and provide for their families.
If we don't help these people now, then Mugabe will win this battle over the poor and the poor will lose.
The United States has work to do that is too important to get distracted by this man. Our food aid is keeping alive millions of innocent and vulnerable people in some of the world's worst-run countries.
I can accept being publicly and wrongly accused by Robert Mugabe because I know we're on the right side — the side of the poor.
Tony P. Hall, who represented the Dayton, Ohio, area in the U.S. House of Representatives for 24 years, is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations' food and agriculture organizations.