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Priests told: don't aid 'filth'
Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times (UK)
June 19, 2005

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1660059,00.html

Every morning Father Michael looks out of the window of his Harare parish house and sees an ever larger crowd of homeless families outside. "I feel helpless," said the Jesuit priest, who was too terrified to give his real name. "I keep telling them my little homilies, that the violent will not win, they will have to answer for what they have done, but I see a city ringed by fire. People who worked to look after their families - carpenters, metalworkers, street vendors and caterers - have been turned into beggars by their own government. This is a crime against humanity and all we can do is give them black plastic sheeting." As Operation Murambatsvina or "drive out filth", moves into its second month, as many as a 1m city-dwellers have been made homeless by government bulldozers and axe-wielding police. Churches have become the only refuge for people who have lost everything. But priests have now been warned not to help by the government of President Robert Mugabe. Harare has been turned into a refugee city with marauding bands of families pursued through the smoking rubble by police who move on anyone they find sleeping outside or still retaining a few possessions.

Some have been taken to camps outside the city such as Caledonia Farm, where there is only one lavatory for several thousand people. Those with money have left for villages but many have no family to go to and the country’s fuel shortage means buses are few and far between. Others have returned to Harare, claiming village chiefs are refusing to accept them because there is not enough food. Zimbabwe is facing its lowest harvest since independence. The United Nations estimates that 6m Zimbabweans are in urgent need of food aid. With international aid agencies prevented from helping, those who can have sought shelter from the freezing winter nights in church yards and halls. But confidential minutes of a meeting last Wednesday between community representatives and government officials headed by Ignatius Chombo, the minister of public works, confirm that church leaders have been refused permission to help the homeless. The Catholic church has called for prayers all over the country today. Bishops will condemn "the injustice done to the poor" in the bravest move yet to stand up to Mugabe. "It’s social engineering with sledgehammers," said Oskar Wermter, a Jesuit priest in Harare. "I do not know anyone poorer than a widow with her orphaned grandchildren - remember, there is Aids all around - surrounded by the rubble of her destroyed home." Yet far from halting the brutal campaign, which has seen people forced to destroy their homes at gunpoint, government officials said yesterday they were extending it to rural areas. "We must clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy," declared Augustine Chihuri, police commissioner. The announcement came as a list compiled by directors of education in Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces showed that more than 300,000 children have dropped out of school since their homes were destroyed.

According to Catholic priests, many of those seeking refuge have appeared in the past couple of days waving pieces of paper forced on them by police. These are bills for water, sewerage and electricity on their destroyed homes and businesses, complete with enormous penalty charges. "A stream of people come to the parish, waving those ominous letters, asking for loans to pay them," e-mailed one priest yesterday. "It’s just becoming madder," said a Zimbabwean reporter. "All this puts a question on Mugabe’s patriotism. It seems as if he hates his own people." Steve Kibble, of the Catholic Institute for International Relations, put it more starkly. "This is a genocide policy," he said. "It’s a strategy of letting the urban population die by leaving them to starve in the bush rather than facing the bullets of Mugabe’s goons. It doesn’t cost them a cent."

One of those to receive a bill for electricity supplied to her destroyed home and business was Glory Mawimbi. Everyone knew Glory’s Hair Palace on the corner of Madzima Road in Mbare. The pink-painted building was her pride and joy. Inside, a radio blared township jazz and the walls were covered with pictures of celebrities and the latest hairstyles torn from South African magazines. Mawimbi had worked hard to create the business after her husband left her with three children. Over the years, her fame had spread and Glory’s had become the place to go, particularly on a Friday evening when people had just been paid and were planning a night out. She employed three other women and paid for her children to go to school. Then two weeks ago the bulldozers came, flattening most of Mbare. Mawimbi’s home was destroyed in the early morning and she ran to the salon to find it gone. The destruction means she and her employees now have no income; none of them can send their children to school. Yesterday Mawimbi sat in the rubble, staring blankly. When a priest asked how she would survive, she replied: "We will do, I suppose. I made a decent life for my family out of nothing and now it’s all gone."

Zimbabwe has become a land with hundreds of thousands of such stories. Many of the people the government is referring to as tsvina (filth) are mothers and employers like Mawimbi. Mugabe’s former information minister, Jonathan Moyo, said the blitz was linked to a power struggle within the ruling party over who would succeed the ailing 81-year-old president. "It seems to be a directionless activity of some mischievous group which imagines it can profit by this in some mysterious way and position itself ahead of the pack in the succession game," he said. Another former close associate of Mugabe, now in exile in Britain, said: "It’s an exercise of power. He’s doing it because he can." Whatever the reasoning, nobody is spared. Among the properties to have been wiped out are many built by war veterans, the men who were Mugabe’s staunch supporters and were used to carry out the violent invasions of white-owned farms. One of those to have the roof fall in on him last week was a leading war vet called Dickson Chingaira, better known as Comrade Chinx. During the land seizures, he composed and sang a song called Hondo Yeminda which refers to whites as "devils" and was frequently played on state radio.

Police demolition squads descended on a mansion he had built near Ngungunyana Housing Co-operative in Harare, an area mainly occupied by war veterans. Witnesses told SW Radio Africa that Chinx pulled a gun and fired shots in the air as the police arrived at his house. When that did not deter them, he climbed on the roof and demanded to talk to Mugabe. Eventually the police persuaded him down, only to give him a thorough beating, leaving him badly bruised with a suspected broken leg. Another group to find themselves unexpectedly disadvantaged by Mugabe was the Zimbabwe national football team. The Warriors, as they are known, had chartered one of Air Zimbabwe’s three remaining functioning aircraft to fly them to Algeria for a World Cup qualifier. When they arrived at the airport they were informed that the president had taken the plane to fly to Qatar for a meeting of G-77 nations. Yesterday in the face of all this, even the state-owned Herald newspaper was finding it difficult to maintain its usual slavish support for government policies. An article on the havoc caused by Operation Murambatsvina ended by saying: "While there is consensus that people had illegally built housing structures, there are widespread views that the exercise has contributed to massive homelessness." Reuben Marumahoko, the deputy minister for home affairs, told the civic leaders last Wednesday that the operation has been a success. "Streetism has been wiped out," he said. "Robberies have fallen down drastically and ladies can walk in the city freely."

*Some names have been changed to protect identities

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