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Discarding the Filth: operation murambatsvina
Interim report on the Zimbabwean government's "urban cleansing" and forced eviction campaign
Solidarity Peace Trust
June 27, 2005

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Operation Murambatsvina: A brief overview
The Government, under the auspices of the Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises Development, began OM by arresting 20,000 vendors countrywide in one week, beginning 25 May, destroying their vending sites, and confiscating their wares. Thousands more escaped arrest, but have lost their livelihoods. The "clean-up" campaign has continued with the police destroying all vendors’ markets nationwide, and almost simultaneously, entire suburbs in towns across Zimbabwe were demolished.

Throughout the month of June, OM has affected virtually every town and rural business centre in the country. From Mount Darwin in the north, to Beitbridge in the south, Mutare in the east and Bulawayo in the west, no part of the nation has been spared the impact of what could be termed a slow-moving earthquake; every day the nation awakes to find more buildings have fallen around them, more families have been displaced and left poverty stricken.

Literally thousands of dwellings have been bulldozed during the last four weeks, displacing people on a massive scale. The scale of the displacements has been unprecedented in Zimbabwe’s history: at the height of the translocation of civilians by Rhodesians into "protected villages" or "keeps" during the 1970s war of independence, human rights agencies reported with outrage that 43,000 people were forcibly removed in one month.¹ This number pales into insignificance when compared to the numbers that have been left homeless since May. Not even in apartheid South Africa were several hundred thousand people ever forcibly relocated in the space of a few weeks. There is no precedent in southern African for such a movement of people in a nation supposedly not at war with itself.

As houses and dwellings continue to fall at this time, numbers of people affected are growing daily. It is difficult to estimate how many houses have been knocked down, but in Harare, entire suburbs and housing settlements have disappeared, including Hatcliff Extension, Mbare, Joshua Nkomo, and White Cliff Farm. In Bulawayo, settlers at Killarney and Ngozi Mine have been entirely razed, and in Victoria Falls, entire settlements have vanished. In towns across Zimbabwe, whole suburbs are gone. In addition, in every street of every suburb, cottages and structures in back yards have been taken down, leaving lodgers without accommodation.

Along the width and breadth of Zimbabwe, by the middle of a wintry June, families were to be seen sleeping under trees or on pavements, trying to protect small children, the elderly and the ill from winter weather and thieves, with no access to ablutions, and nowhere to cook or store food properly. Tiny babies, days old, and people on their deathbeds alike continue to sleep at the mercy of the elements. Bus stations remain filled to overflowing with families sitting hopelessly next to furniture and building materials salvaged from the onslaught, waiting in vain for buses prepared to carry the loads to rural areas.

Those with trucks struggle to access scarce diesel, which now costs up to Z$50,000 per litre, when the official price is Z$4,000 per litre; those with fuel are charging extortionist rates to move desperate families short distances. It costs Z$200,000 to move a wardrobe by bus – desperate families without this money are selling their assets off at a tenth of the transport cost in order to raise fares for their wives and children to get home. They will arrive in some remote, starving rural area without a job, without food, without furniture, without a house – and be at the mercy of a ZANU PF dominant rural leadership to whom they will have to appeal for a space to live.

Harare has been among the worst affected cities in terms of destruction of vendors’ sites and wares: the Government press itself acknowledges the existence of 75,000 vendors of different types in the city – all of whom have been prevented from operating since late May.² Police action was brutal and unannounced. Sculpture parks along the main roads, which have been there for decades and feature as a tourist attraction in guide books, were smashed. Beautiful works of art on roadside display, created out of stone, wood and metal, some standing up to two meters high, were smashed. Vendors, who have been operating in the same places without complaint or interference for their entire working lives, were confronted with riot squads without any warning, were rounded up, arrested, and watched helplessly while their source of livelihood was destroyed. Within days, bulldozers have moved in to take away remains of these works of art. Vendors markets throughout the city and its outskirts were entirely annihilated, with no regard for those that were legal and those that were not.

Other wares were taken by the police, and are being sold off through "auctions" in which the police buy goods worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few dollars. These auctions are not open to the general public, and there is no process of highest bidder, but any minor offer is accepted. No records or receipts are being kept during this process. Police have also been reported selling goods seized by them from vendors, directly to the public.³

1. CCJP, The Man in the Middle and Caught in the crossfire, republished 1999.
2. The Herald, 2 June 2005; "State to relocate informal traders".
3. In Bulawayo, for instance, there were daily "auctions" of seized fresh produce during the week in which vending markets were destroyed. Produce was witnessed by the authors being sold for a fraction of its market value from one policeman to another, and the money, unreceipted, was being put into brown paper bags.

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