WASHINGTON, Oct 10: US Secretary of State Colin Powell laughed off a stinging attack against him this week from singer-activist Harry Belafonte who branded him a sellout to his race (blacks) for joining President George W. Bush’s administration, the State Department said on Wednesday.

Belafonte, who like Powell is of Jamaican descent, offered up the criticism of Powell during a radio interview in San Diego, California in which he ripped into the secretary for belonging to the conservative Bush administration.

“There’s an old saying,” said Belafonte. “In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and were those slaves that lived in the house.

“You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master... exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him,” he said, according to a transcript on radio station KFMB’s website.

“Colin Powell’s committed to come into the house of the master,” Belafonte said. “When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.”

Belafonte also targeted other members of the Bush administration, comparing the tactics of his justice department to those used during the McCarthy communist “witch-hunt” era of the 1950s.

“Families were destroyed, neighbors spied on neighbors,” he said. “Now we find (Attorney General John) Ashcroft cutting in under the guise of catching terrorists, suspending liberties and rights.

“To deny those rights, to any citizen, to any people, is to cast a great shame on us and lead us back to another dark period,” he said amid allegations that US civil liberties are being eroded by the government’s war on terror.

Belafonte was a huge singing star of the 1950s and 1960s, best known for his song “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” which popularised calypso music. He now serves as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“He smiled when I told him,” spokesman Richard Boucher said of Belafonte’s comparison of Powell to a “house slave” on a cotton plantation who had become beholden to his “master” and risked being sent out to the field for back-breaking work should he not toe the administration line.

“He smiled, but he also said that both the IRS and his accountants thought he was better off as a field hand,” Boucher said, referring to the Internal Revenue Service, which collects income taxes in the United States.—AFP