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Zimbabwe: Punishing the poor - an eyewitness account
Rod McLeod, CIIR/ICD International
August 03, 2005

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CIIR/ICD international programmes director, Rod McLeod, has just returned from a trip to Zimbabwe, where he witnessed the devastating effect of President Robert Mugabe's Operation Murambatsvina (clear out the rubbish) campaign. Here, Rod writes about his experiences:

Sometimes it is hard to see how the odds in life can be stacked more heavily against someone. A woman in Bulawayo in the east of Zimbabwe told me about how her husband had died of AIDS. She is also HIV positive and is struggling to earn a basic living to look after her children, one of whom is disabled and confined to a wheelchair. Then the government ordered her to knock her own house down within 24 hours. She and her family are now living and sleeping on the veranda of their former home in the middle of the Zimbabwean winter with nowhere else to go.

This is just one human story behind the staggering figures surrounding Operation Murambatsvina initiated by the Zimbabwe government with the aim of improving service delivery and enforcing by-laws to stop all forms of illegal activities.

On 25 May, Operation Murambatsvina (translated literally as 'Restore Order' by the government but 'Clear Out the Rubbish' by others) started in Harare, Bulawayo and other cities, with 'illegal' housing structures, vendors and local markets targeted, numerous structures destroyed and many people arrested.

According to the United Nations report just released, it is estimated that 700,000 people in cities across the country have either lost their homes, their livelihoods or both. Indirectly, a further 2.4 million people have been affected in varying degrees, estimates show. With a population of 12.8 million, this constitutes a quarter of the entire population. Many would claim that the actual numbers are even higher.

This has had a catastrophic impact on people who were already living at the margins. I visited Caledonia Transit Camp outside Harare where more than 4,000 people were staying prior to being relocated. Living in conditions that fall well short of the internationally accepted Sphere standards for settlements in emergency situations, people told of how they had lost property, possessions, access to education, health services as well as the means to provide for their families. The mood was one of despondency and fear for the future.

When confronted by the reality of how this operation has affected ordinary people, it is hard to understand government claims that this operation is a 'noble idea' to clean up urban centres and provide decent houses and businesses to those affected. If that was the case, why not build new houses for the affected people before destroying the old ones with no warning and no planning in the depths of winter? And why allow those settlements to develop over many years in the first place? Astonishingly, some displaced people told how they had been settled in some of the areas now deemed 'illegal' by the government itself and had even been paying rent to the municipalities.

Given the Zimbabwe government's near bankrupt circumstances, it will need substantial international resources if it is to address the needs beyond the relatively small scale construction projects that are now being heavily publicised in the official media. However, such funds are not likely to be forthcoming until the international community is convinced that the clearances have stopped and that the government is seriously committed to assisting its urban poor on the basis of clear, well-planned and transparent policies. Sadly, for the many I met now living in crowded and inadequate conditions, it seems they may have to wait a while longer before this point is reached.

The United Nations has just released a report on the situation in Zimbabwe, in which UN Special Envoy Anna Tibaijuka says Operation Murambatsvina was carried out with 'indifference to human suffering.'

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