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UN envoy criticises plans to force people to rural areas
Zim-Online
July 07, 2005

http://www.zimonline.co.za/headdetail.asp?ID=10101

BULAWAYO – United Nations special envoy Anna Tibaijuka yesterday told government officials that demolishing slums to force people to rural areas is not a solution to the country's housing problems.

Tibaijuka was speaking after touring demolished shacks in Zimbabwe's second biggest city of Bulawayo.

Human rights groups have accused the government of trying to depopulate urban areas in an urban renewal programme that has been heavily criticised by the United States, Amnesty International and church groups as inhumane.

THE government says it will not evict people on the farms who settled there illegally. At least a million people have been rendered homeless after their houses were demolished in the last six weeks.

Zimbabwe's deputy housing minister Morris Sakabuya earlier this week told a housing seminar in Cape Town, South Africa that slum dwellers should move to the rural areas and till the land in a bid "to decongest urban areas." But yesterday, the UN envoy who is probing the mass evictions in Zimbabwe told Home Affairs Minister Kembo Mohadi that the slum dwellers were forced into the cities by circumstances beyond their control in a bid to eke a living.

At least a million people have been rendered homeless after their houses were destroyed in a campaign the government says is necessary to restore the beauty of cities and towns. The government says the crackdown is also meant to smash the illegal foreign currency parallel market blamed for Zimbabwe's economic ills. But the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change party accuses the government of executing the exercise in a bid to punish its supporters who are mostly in urban areas for rejecting Mugabe's ruling ZANU PF party in last March's election. - ZimOnline

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