Zimbabwe?s President Robert Mugabe has rejected a United Nations offer of temporary shelter for victims of a government slum clearance programme but has accepted an offer of food aid, the world body said on Tuesday. The UN says Zimbabwe needs emergency aid including tents to accommodate hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by evictions earlier this year but the government says it only needs help to provide permanent homes.

?There are issues we disagree on frankly, but we also agree on the importance of the international community to raise its profile in pursuing humanitarian principles,? said Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator. ?There is agreement to work, to redouble our efforts to be much more effective to meet all the challenges of millions of people infected with HIV ... (and) several million people being food insecure,? he said after talks with Mugabe.

Mugabe?s spokesman George Charamba confirmed the president and Egeland disagreed on the question of housing. ?For us it is not to do with the UN capacity, it has to do with attitude towards the Zimbabwe government,? Charamba said, noting the UN was building permanent homes in Zambia and the troubled Sudan region of Darfur.

A UN report criticised Harare and said the demolitions were carried out ?with indifference to human suffering?. The evictions, which Mugabe argues were meant to root out illegal trade in scant basic commodities, left 700,000 people homeless or without a livelihood and affected 2.4 million others, UN estimates show. ?The humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe is very serious. The need for international aid is big and growing,? said Egeland, who on Monday toured some settlements where families have lived in makeshift plastic tents since their houses were destroyed.

Mugabe denies responsibility for the crisis and says domestic and international opponents have sabotaged the economy in retaliation for his programme of seizing white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to blacks. Egeland told a news conference on Tuesday the world body could be doing more under a ?a better working environment in several sectors?. Talks with Mugabe and government officials could see progress in solving the housing problem, he added. The demolitions added to the woes of many Zimbabweans facing shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency, high unemployment and one of the highest rates of inflation in the world.

Egeland said the UN would be feeding in excess of three million people by next February in Zimbabwe, where the country?s agriculture output has fallen by over half in the last 5 years. ?We are ... eager to help Zimbabwe regain food security and I hope we can have some kind of task force that can focus immediately on that,? he said.

Mugabe also raised his concern that the United States and Zimbabwe?s former colonial power Britain were trying to use the United Nations to settle political disputes, said Charamba. ?This kind of picture does not help the case of the UN in its humanitarian work,? Charamba said, adding that Egeland had also asked Mugabe to make it easier for non-governmental organisations to register and operate.

?We have our own reservations on that. The president said some of the NGOs are politicising food aid and the whole housing programme,? he added. In November, Harare accepted a UN offer to help the homeless after rejecting it on the grounds that the demolitions did not constitute a humanitarian crisis. About 2,500 houses are expected to be constructed under the programme.