Canada pulls out of World Tourism Organisation over Robert Mugabe role The move prompted outrage from politicians and human rights activists who claimed that the UN had effectively endorsed someone who authorised mass murder and brought his country to the point of economic ruin as a "tourism ambassador." The UN insists that it conferred no official status on Mr Mugabe and that many other heads of state had received the open letter. But Zimbabwe's state media lost little time in adding "special tourism ambassador" to President Mugabe's list of honorifics, while Canada said the UN's sentiment was clear. "They were legitimising him by enlisting Mugabe to promote tourism," Mr Baird's spokesman Joseph Lavoie said. In our view that makes him a small 'a' ambassador. In the United States, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the House Foreign Affairs chairman, accused the UN of "propping up dictators." "The UN has hit a new low with naming Mugabe as a UN tourism envoy as if North Korea chairing the Conference of Disarmament and Cuba serving as vice-president of the Human Rights Council had not been enough," she said in a statement. The continued rewards the UN bestows upon the world's dictators has reached the point of absurdity. An organisation devoted to world peace and stability is propping up and aiding the very regimes that oppose such ideals. In Europe, Scottish National Party MEP Alyn Smith wrote to Baroness Ashton to ask her to protest the UN action. "It also makes absolutely no sense," he wrote. As one of the world's most barbarous dictators, Mugabe has wrecked his own tourist industry and brought Zimbabwe to the edge of economic ruin. He consistently betrays human rights, has defied democracy and uses violence to hang on to power. Mugabe is not a global tourist leader. Indeed, as an international pariah, he is exactly the opposite. Walter Mzembi, Zimbabwe's Tourism Minister, described Canada's behaviour as "childish."