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Mugabe's human rubbish dump
The Times (UK)
June 06, 2005

By Xan Rice

On the President's orders, 200,000 people have been forced out of illegal townships

When President Mugabe's Government announced plans to "clean up" the country's cities more than two weeks ago, many Zimbabweans wondered what the innocent-sounding phrase really meant. Now they know. Thousands of street stalls demolished. More than 23,000 informal workers arrested. Entire neighbourhoods burnt to the ground or razed by bulldozers. Hundreds of thousands of poor people left homeless in the middle of winter. The authoritarian regime has called the continuing campaign to curb illegal trading and housing Operation Murambatsvina, or "Drive Out Rubbish". Human rights organisations call it something different. It is a "blatant violation of civil, political, economic and social rights", Amnesty International said. The normally cautious United Nations said last week that the eviction of 200,000 people was creating a new kind of apartheid, where the cities were only for the rich. Miloon Kothari, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, told reporters: "We have a very grave crisis on our hands."

Zimbabwe's state-run media has quoted government officials as saying that the operations were vital to reduce crime and stop cities turning into shantytowns. Police started out by rounding up informal traders, from carpenters to cigarette sellers and gold-panners. Attention then turned to areas housing the cities' poor. In squatter villages such as Hatcliffe Extension, where people were settled in the early 1990s during a clean-up before a visit by the Queen, residents were forced to tear down their tiny wooden shacks. In recent days police moved into areas such as Joshua Nkomo Heights, where people had - illegally, the Government said - built large sub- urban-style brick houses. Television pictures showed bulldozers knocking down homes as tearful residents watched helplessly. Mr Kothari said that he feared that between two and three million people - a quarter of Zimbabwe's estimated twelve million population - could be targeted in the operation, which has been declared legal by the courts. Most of the newly homeless are living on the streets. A local journalist interviewed by telephone yesterday said that rents in some areas of Harare had doubled as the evicted residents desperately sought new accommodation. He said that some of the people had been taken to a government- run farm, while others had fled from the city to seek shelter in the countryside, where they were encountering more problems. "They are being chased away by the locals who accuse them of being MDC [opposition] supporters," said the journalist, who asked not to be named for fear of state reprisals.

So far there has been no large-scale resistance to the police action. The authorities have said that they are on "full patrol" to quash any protests. The privately owned Sunday Standard newspaper reported that a coalition of civil groups, which has named itself the Broad Alliance, had called for a nationwide strike on Thursday and Friday. Political analysts are struggling to understand Mr Mugabe's campaign. The MDC says that it is designed to punish urban voters for failing to support the 81-year-old leader in March's parliamentary elections, which the ruling Zanu PF party won amid claims of vote-rigging. Yet even war veterans - staunch Zanu PF supporters who led the invasion of white-owned farms in 2000 - have been evicted from their homes. Alternatively, the campaign may be designed to quash potential dissent as the economic collapse grows more acute. Power cuts and fuel shortages are crippling the cities, and witnesses in Harare say that workers are queueing until midnight for buses to take them home. Mr Mugabe, who said during the election that Zimbabwe had plenty of food, met James Morris, the head of the UN's World Food Programme, last week and agreed to allow the distribution of humanitarian aid. Mr Morris said that a third of the country's population need food aid to survive the next year.

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