White people are to blame because Africans who invade Europe in rickety overcrowded boats across the Mediterranean Sea are dying when their boats sink, the president of the African nation of Gambia has announced.

The outburst by President Yahya Jammeh came during his recent grandstanding appearance at the United Nations in New York.

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly, President Jammeh—dressed in a white sack and matching hat—said that the U.N. must investigate the “manmade sinking, capsizing” of boats carrying Africans to Europe, saying 500 citizens of his African country had died in such incidents in the past five years.

Jammeh blamed the sinking of these boats on white people, a common belief among blacks everywhere who always blame Europeans for anything that goes wrong.

The Gambian president, who seized power in a 1994 coup and has held on to his office through two blatantly fraudulent elections since then, told the U.N. that the boat sinkings—which are in fact caused by overcrowding and the poor condition of the vessels themselves—were “very dangerous” and the result of European “racist and inhuman behavior of deliberately causing boats carrying black Africans to sink.”

“The U.N. must conduct a full and impartial investigation into this manmade sinking, capsizing of these boats carrying young Africans to Europe,” Jammeh said.

“If these boats are able to cross the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea only to sink on European coasts, we must find out what deadly mysterious force exists on the European Mediterranean coasts that causes boats carrying young Africans to disintegrate and sink upon arrival,” he said.

Over 130,000 Africans have invaded Europe via boat this year, as compared to around 60,000 last year, according to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR.

Italy has received more than 118,000, most of them rescued at sea under its naval operation Mare Nostrum. Half of these invaders are from Syria and Eritrea, according to the agency.

More than 2,500 of these invaders have drowned or “gone missing” trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe this year, compared with 700 people in 2013, the UNCHR said, although they did not say how they had collated those exact numbers.