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Evicted Zimbabweans sleep in the open in Jo'burg
ZimOnline
December 15, 2005

http://www.zimonline.co.za/headdetail.asp?ID=11291

JOHANNESBURG -- About 200 foreigners, the majority of them Zimbabweans, are sleeping in the open at Park Station in Johannesburg after they were forcibly evicted from their run-down apartments in the poor suburb of Hillbrow on Sunday.

The latest evictions come barely a month after South Africa’s municipal police carried out similar evictions of people who had taken over some run-down buildings in a bid to revamp the city.

South African police media officer Kariban Naidoo confirmed the three-day evictions which ended on Sunday but denied the police were targeting Zimbabweans.

Naidoo said: "I can confirm that many families have been evacuated from dilapidated buildings around Johannesburg . . . we are not targeting Zimbabweans or foreigners. This is a joint operation comprising the police and the city council.

"What we want is for the residents to abide by the city’s by-laws and they should expect more of this as this is an on-going process to clear up the city."

But one of the Zimbabweans who was evicted from Hillbrow, Ntombizidwa Siziba, 38, accused the police of targeting flats accommodating foreigners.

"This move is only meant to harass foreigners and is highly xenophobic. Now we are displaced and we have nowhere to go. We were paying R500 and we can’t afford to move to leafy areas of the city where they charge about R1 500 per room," she said.

There are at least three million Zimbabweans, a quarter of the country's 12 million people, who are living outside the country the majority of them in South Africa after fleeing political persecution and hunger in Zimbabwe.

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