An Emissary to Tyranny
HARARE, ZIMBABWE— When the U.S. Embassy here put out a statement in February denouncing the “continuing deterioration of the human rights situation in Zimbabwe,” then-President Robert Mugabe’s spokesman responded by suggesting that American critics of the Zimbabwean government, including U.S. Ambassador Harry K. Thomas Jr., should “go and hang on a banana tree.”
It was a mild rebuke by the standards of Mugabe’s government, which treated American diplomats with a level of contempt more befitting U.S. exchanges with Iran or North Korea than of a nation that maintained full diplomatic relations with the called him an “Uncle Tom” and a “house nigger dressed in a fine suit”—and that was just in his first week on the job.
