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Lawyers appeal to AU over mass evictions
Rangarirai Mberi, The Financial Gazette
June 16, 2005

http://www.fingaz.co.zw/fingaz/2005/June/June16/8720.shtml

THE Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) has written to the African Union’s Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights over state-led mass evictions that rights and opposition groups say have left up to a million people destitute.

The rights lawyers’ move came as Australia announced it was tightening travel sanctions against Zimbabwean government officials in response to the evictions, while the United Nations special envoy for housing, Miloon Kothari, said UN secretary-general Koffi Annan might make a statement soon on the evictions.

ZLHR projects lawyer Harangu Nyamurindira confirmed to The Financial Gazette yesterday that the lawyers had written to the African Union’s Commission on Human and People’s Rights, the first stage towards lodging an official appeal to the AU to intervene to end the dismantling of informal buildings and home industries.

"We have written a letter to the commission in which we are seeking recommendations from the commission on this matter. This is a preliminary stage," Nyamurindira said.

The Commission was set up in 1987 to monitor human rights on the continent.

A statement from Canberra on Tuesday said Australia would now demand visas from diplomats travelling to Australia as a way to censure the Zimbabwean government for what it described as a retributive drive against people the ruling ZANU PF party "considered opposed to it".

In Geneva, Kothari, who has angered the government by describing the mass evictions as "a new form of apartheid", told the press that Annan had expressed concern over the operation. Aid agencies were also being barred from reaching affected families, Kothari said.

A joint blitz by police and local government authorities has destroyed illegal homes and informal market stalls in an operation government says is designed to restore Zimbabwe’s decaying cities and weed out criminal elements said by police to have been sheltering in illegal settlements. Thousands of families have been sleeping in the open after police destroyed their homes.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which draws much of its support from urban areas, has claimed that up to one million people have been directly affected by the operation.

Information and Publicity Minister Tichaona Jokonya, while conceding that many had been left homeless by the operation, this week however disputed the opposition’s figures, saying those affected were much less than 20 000.

Jokonya said the affected people were being moved to Caledonia farm, a transit camp outside Harare.

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