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Lutheran leader appeals to Zimbabwean president to fight against poverty, but not the poor
Spero News
June 13, 2005

http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idCategory=33&idsub=121&id=1521

The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) General Secretary, Rev. Dr Ishmael Noko, has urged Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to exercise his authority to restrain police and security forces from carrying out harsh evictions in Harare and other cities in a government operation called Operation Murambatsvina.

In a letter to Mugabe, the LWF General Secretary affirms his support for calls by other Zimbabwean church leaders asking the president to engage in a war against poverty but not against the poor.

Since 18 May 2005, thousands of people have been forcibly removed by police from informal market areas in Harare, apparently with the aim to restore order, clean up urban centers and tackle illegal trade in foreign exchange. Similar actions have taken place in other cities across the country. Although the government claims the traders are unlicenced, human rights lawyers say many of those arrested have licenses.

Noko notes that while the government has a "right and duty to maintain law and order and to promote improved sanitary and environmental conditions," other ways of achieving these goals could have been considered to avoid "putting such a large number of people who are already poor into an even worse situation."

He criticizes the name of the operation, "Murambatsvina," which means "remove rubbish," saying the people expelled from their homes and businesses "are not 'rubbish' [but] human beings." As a representative of an organization that has long sought to support efforts for human development and poverty alleviation in Zimbabwe as in many other parts of the world, "I cannot believe that any government genuinely committed to helping the poor and dispossessed could engage in such actions," Noko writes.

He observes that the government bore a significant degree of responsibility for the economic difficulties that had led so many Zimbabweans to resort to whatever available means to support their families.

The actions being taken against these people would deepen rather than alleviate poverty in the country. This would also worsen the conditions that had driven desperate people to illegal activity and to seek refuge in neighboring countries, giving the country an increasingly negative image in its own region, Noko adds.

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