Zimbabwe won approval on Friday to head a key U.N. body charged with promoting economic progress and environmental protection

President Robert Mugabe, an 83-year-old who has ruled Zimbabwe since it gained independence from Britain in 1980, has been criticized by the West and domestic opponents for repression, corruption, acute food shortages and gross economic mismanagement that has driven inflation above 2,000 percent -- the highest in the world. Mugabe has acknowledged that police used violent methods against opposition supporters. (Italics added.)

protests from the U.S., European nations and human rights organizations. 

"We're very disappointed in the election of Zimbabwe as chair," said the U.S. representative to the commission Dan Reifsnyder, deputy assistant secretary for environment and science at the State Department.

"We really think it calls into question the credibility of this organization to have a representative from a country that has decimated its agriculture, that used to be the breadbasket of Africa and can't now feed itself," said Reifsnyder.

Several European nations have also called Zimbabwe's candidacy inappropriate.

On Friday, the Pan African Parliament, a body of the African Union, voted to send a mission to Zimbabwe to investigate alleged human rights abuses "relating to the arrests and detention, assault and murder of political activists and members of the media."

"Zimbabwe is hardly a model of good governance or sustainable development or even responsible leadership," Benjamin Chang, deputy spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, said before the vote. "Our concern is that it's potential chairmanship would undermine the commission's credibility."