Homeless and Hopeless

Bulldozers Carve Out a Bleak New Reality for Poor Zimbabweans 

DUNCAN CAMPBELL / The Guardian (UK) 5jul2005

In a special report from Harare, Duncan Campbell witnesses
Mugabe's drive to clear the makeshift homes of hundreds of thousands of people

[More below]

The giant prehistoric Balancing Rocks that stand 10 miles from the centre of Harare are one of the great symbols of Zimbabwe, etched on to banknotes and pictured in every tourist guide. Immediately across the road from the rocks is a new symbol of the nation, one that is unlikely to feature in any guidebook or on the notes of the collapsing Zimbabwean dollar.

It consists of piles of rubble, corrugated iron and random belongings — a basin, a single shoe, a coat hanger — like the detritus left in the wake of an earthquake or a storm. This was home to hundreds of people in the suburb of Epworth until President Robert Mugabe announced last month that Operation Murambatsvina (Clear Out the Trash) was under way. He authorised the destruction of the homes of hundreds of thousands of people across the country as a way of removing what the police commissioner, Augustine Chihuri, described as "this crawling mass of maggots" who had settled into makeshift townships on the fringes of cities. So far at least seven people have died in the clear-out, there have been six suicides reported and 22,000 people have been arrested or had their property confiscated.

"They stood there with their AKs [Kalashnikov rifles] and told us we must knock our own homes down," said George, a bearded, middle-aged man who told his story as though recounting something utterly unfathomable. "Last night, we all slept on the ground under a blanket with plastic bags over us. This is what the government is doing to its people." The drive back into town has a surreal quality to it. On one side of the road, a group of Apostolic worshippers dressed in immaculate white are conducting an open-air service as tsiri-tsiri birds hop beside them in the fields. On the other side, hundreds of people desperate to get into Harare to work or buy food try to flag down overloaded cars and lorries.

"We have to start walking at four in the morning now to get to work," said Joyce, a young woman from Hatfield, another affected area. Most will end up walking the 10 miles as petrol has almost run out, and drivers queue for up to seven days, sleeping in their cars as they wait for the pumps to open. "Some of the petrol stations, they ask to see your Zanu-PF [Mr Mugabe's ruling party] card before they serve you," George said. In the centre of the highway, armed police man roadblocks, waving down and searching cars.

"This country is upside down now," said one young man. "Once we had beef and tobacco and maize and now — look — we have to stand in line for petrol, for money, for mealie meal, for sugar. Soon there will be no country left at all."

A retired carpenter in his 80s said he had never seen Zimbabwe in such a state. "You have to be careful what you say in public," he said. "You don't know who is listening and what may happen to you but even under the whites there was always work if you wanted it."

State of emergency

Operation Murambatsvina was launched in the wake of Mr Mugabe's fiercely contested election victory earlier this year, which established him in power, with 108 of the 150 parliamentary seats, until 2008, at which stage he has indicated he will step down after 25 years as president. It also comes as he has increased from two years to 20 the penalty for "publishing and communicating false statements prejudicial to the state". But the law has not curbed his critics.

"Once he was our darling," said Marcus, a young businessman in Harare. "I remember when we were at school, we would all clap when we saw him on television and he did great things with education, with healthcare. But now the old man is ruining the country. He says that he will go in 2008, but even if he does, that will be too late. He needs to go tomorrow. He cannot go on treating people like this.

"He is not Pol Pot and he is not Hitler, like some of his enemies say, but he has been behaving brutally. It has never been this bad before. What you have here is a de facto state of emergency."

Not only Harare has been affected. From the Victoria Falls to Bulawayo to Beitbridge, the bulldozers have gone in. Over the past week a transit camp has been opened at Caledonia Farm near the capital to house some of the homeless in single-sex units, but many now sleep in the open or erect shelters secretly at night and pull them down before dawn. No one knows exactly how many have lost their homes. The government figure is 120,000 while opposition groups have claimed as many as a million. Aid agencies suggest the total is around 300,000.

The government remains bullish. Didymus Mutasa, minister for state security and head of the Central Intelligence Organisation, said on Zimbabwe state radio: "Everyone in Zimbabwe is very happy about this clean-up. People are walking around Harare saying 'we never knew we had such a beautiful city'."

Yesterday, the UN special envoy, Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, continued an inspection that started last week at the behest of the secretary general, Kofi Annan. According to the government newspaper the Herald, she applauded Mr Mugabe's "vision", but the report was immediately dismissed by a UN spokesman as inaccurate.

Why has Mr Mugabe launched such an operation which has brought him the attention of the UN and condemnation around the world at a time when he is already beleaguered? The government's justification is threefold: that the settlements consist of illegal structures which create a health hazard and damage Harare's fragile infrastructure; that they breed crime; and that the "parallel market" of unauthorised businesses dealing in currency, goods and fuel constitute a serious threat to the country's economy.

Inflation is at 144% and unemployment is nearing 80%. While the official exchange rate is around ZW$9,000 to the US dollar, the black market rate on the street corner in Harare outside Meikles Hotel is ZW$25,000. Lack of foreign currency after the collapse of the tourist industry has caused the latest fuel shortage. The other shortages Mr Mugabe blames on droughts and what he portrays as a racist campaign waged against him by Tony Blair and George Bush.

Mr Mugabe's opponents see his motives very differently: to punish those from the settlements who voted so heavily against him and for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the elections, and to disperse people who might foment an uprising in an increasingly hostile political environment.

"Another reason he is doing this is because farming has collapsed since he took the farms away from the white farmers and gave them to the war veterans [who fought the white regime] — although many people think he just gave them to his supporters," said a young technician in Harare. "The people who had worked on the farms came to the cities because there was no work for them in the country. Now Mugabe wants to drive them back because the farms are producing nothing."

On the streets of Harare, people ask how much a flight to London costs, what an average wage is there, what work is available. An estimated 3 million Zimbabweans now live abroad, mainly in South Africa but also in Britain — as evidenced by the current hunger strike by asylum seekers — and the money they send back keeps the economy afloat.

Politically, the clean-up has already prompted fissures within the ruling party. Two days ago a Zanu-PF central committee member, Pearson Mbalekwa, resigned, declaring himself "perturbed and disturbed" by what he saw. He is seen as testing the water for others to follow and there is talk of a "third force", a grouping of disillusioned Zanu-PF members and some MDC politicians.

The MDC's shadow justice minister, David Coltart, said yesterday that he thought that unlikely. "I think it's a distinct possibility that Zanu will fragment," he told the Guardian. "I think an uprising is unlikely and the country will just literally grind to a halt. Sadly, when you go to some other African states, you will see that Zimbabwe has quite a way to go."

Mr Mugabe remains unbowed. In an interview with the magazine New African he denounced Tony Blair, saying he "wants to continue to maintain this headmaster type of attitude — you must submit, after all you are a black nigger".

The new minister for information, Tichaona Jokonya, defended the laws governing the media and the prohibitions on foreign media operating in the country. He said the BBC, which is banned in Zimbabwe, had wanted 36 people accredited for the elections. "Obviously, we knew what they were up to," he told New African. "They wanted journalists to come here with a pack of intelligence guys."

The Guardian's former Zimbabwe correspondent, Andrew Meldrum, was deported two years ago, and in May two Sunday Telegraph journalists were jailed for two weeks after being detained for reporting without permission. This report was compiled on the same basis and names of members of the public interviewed have been duly changed.

Mandela invited

The one country in the region with the power to influence events is South Africa, but its president, Thabo Mbeki, has reiterated the position of the African Union: Zimbabwe is a sovereign country and what it does within its borders is its own affair. Mr Mbeki has also echoed Mr Mugabe's view that the west is only concerned about Zimbabwe because of its old colonial interests. This week, however, Mr Mbeki has held talks for the first time with the MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who yesterday called on G8 leaders to intervene in Zimbabwe.

The only other South African with the personal and moral power to intervene is Nelson Mandela, and pressure is already being put on him by Zimbabweans to act. Mr Mandela has been invited as guest of honour at a party to celebrate the Mugabes' 10th wedding anniversary. In an open letter from "concerned Zimbabweans" in the opposition newspaper the Zimbabwean, an appeal has been made to Mr Mandela to stay away. "We, your admirers, are concerned that your attendance at this event will be construed as a blessing of the things that are occurring in Zimbabwe," urges the anonymous letter writer. "I do not think that you are able to eat and drink and make merry while Africans are being oppressed."

Mr Coltart, the shadow justice minister, believes South Africa now has to engage in meaningful efforts to broker a way out of the crisis. "When Zanu realises that they have to jettison Mugabe, then maybe something will happen, but the outlook is pretty gloomy."

The International Crisis Group, the Brussels-based body chaired by Lord Patten, said in its report on the elections last month that "economic meltdown, food insecurity, political repression and tensions over land and ethnicity are all ongoing facts of life that the election has not changed for the better in any way". It concluded: "Robert Mugabe has been the father of Zimbabwe in many respects but he is now the single greatest impediment to pulling the country out of its precipitous social, economic and political decline."

Out in Epworth, there is a plume of smoke from burning tyres. The Balancing Rocks of Chipenga may have survived for thousands of years, but modern Zimbabwe's balancing act seems more precarious by the day.

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/zimbabwe/article/0,2763,1521337,00.html 12jul2005

Zimbabwe Police Continue Urban Blitz in Northern Harare

Deutsche Presse-Agentur 5jul2005

Harare — Seven weeks into a controversial clean-up campaign, police in Zimbabwe have ordered people in a low-income Harare suburb to demolish illegal buildings, a resident said Tuesday.

The man, from Hatcliffe in the north of the capital, said police on Monday ordered people in the suburb to dismantle informal businesses like hair salons and small grinding mills.

They were also ordered to knock down backyard cottages as they had been built without official permission.

"They (police) have been ordering people to destroy what hasn't been approved," the resident, who asked not to be named, said in a telephone interview.

"They're going to bring in a bulldozer today (Tuesday)," he added.

Since May 19, police, backed by bulldozer teams, have been demolishing backyard shacks and cottages, flea markets and squatter camps in a "clean-up" programme dubbed Operation Restore Order.

Human rights groups say the campaign has made at least 300,000 people homeless and put 750,000 informal traders out of work.

A special U.N. envoy on housing is currently in the country to investigate the humanitarian effects of the campaign.

Some people who had cottages demolished in Hatcliffe Monday spent the night out in the open with their furniture, and homeless families could be seen milling about Tuesday morning, said the resident.

"We thought this thing (Operation Restore Order) had stopped, but they're carrying on," he said.

Trudy Stevenson, the opposition lawmaker for the constituency, confirmed the demolitions.

The government had announced an end to the operation, and the launch of a reconstruction programme aimed at providing two million new houses over the next five years.

U.N. Special Envoy Anna Tibaijuka, who has been in Zimbabwe for more than a week, was meanwhile set to visit the country's second city of Bulawayo Tuesday as part of an extended investigation into the impact of the clean-up.

President Robert Mugabe's government says the operation is necessary to relieve pressure on overburdened municipalities.

But the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) claims it is a purge of its supporters in towns and cities.

UN Envoy Fails to Halt Bulldozer Assault on Zimbabwe's Poorest

JAN RAATH / The Times (UK) 28jun2005

Harare — THE arrival in Zimbabwe of a United Nations special envoy to investigate the State’s demolition of the “illegal” homes of up to a million people did little to interrupt President Mugabe’s bulldozers. Around the time that Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, the executive director of Habitat, the UN’s agency for shelter, landed in Harare on Sunday, government machines were wrecking the home of Goodrich Chimbaira, the MP of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, in a large township constituency just south of the capital.

Charity officials reported that riot police, crews of demolition workers and bulldozers were active in other parts of Harare, as the operation entered its sixth week.

Mrs Tibaijuka said that the UN wanted to “see the impact of the operation called Murambatsvina [clear out the rubbish] and how we can assist the affected”.

Mr Mugabe, more in the habit of telling international figures to “go to hell”, welcomed Mrs Tibaijuka, asserting that he wanted the UN “to understand and appreciate what we are trying to do for our people, who deserve much better than the shacks that are now being romanticised as fitting habitats for them”.

He says that the campaign is to clear slums that have become havens for criminals. Witnesses say that the operation was launched with almost no warning and no provision of shelter or sustenance, and has forced tens of thousands to sleep out in the open in midwinter.

Mrs Tibaijuka’s visit has assumed critical international importance. Tony Blair said yesterday that he hoped her report on the crisis in Zimbabwe would be strong enough to bring the issue to the UN Security Council to censure Mr Mugabe formally. Such a move would lay the 81-year-old leader and his regime open to more substantive international action.

Mr Mugabe is working hard to create a favourable impression. In the past few days an announcement was made of a “national housing scheme” in which an unbudgeted three trillion Zimbabwean dollars (£170 million) would be allocated to build two million houses in the next five years.

source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1671977,00.html 12jul2005

Ministers Back Mugabe in Clean-up Campaign

LINDA ENSOR / Business Day (S Africa) 5jul2005

CAPE TOWN — While some developed countries and the United Nations (UN) have either condemned or expressed concern about Zimbabwe’s controversial slum-clearance programme, a number of African housing ministers yesterday sympathised with President Robert Mugabe’s government action.

The ministers, attending an international housing seminar in Cape Town, said it was necessary to reverse the tide of urban migration, which had created sprawling, unsustainable slums around major cities in Africa.

It is estimated that there are about 1-billion slum dwellers in the world. Reducing this number is one of the aims of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

About 43% of the urban populations of developing countries live in slums.

About 300000 people are believed to have been displaced as a result of the Zimbabwean government’s action.

Kenyan Housing Minister Amos Kimunya said he sympathised with the actions of the Zimbabwean government in demolishing shacks and removing illegal slum dwellers in its Operation Restore Order.

“However painful, evictions are necessary,” Kimunya said.

In Kenya’s experience, slum dwellers would move only when they saw a government bulldozer, the minister said.

Kimunya said Kenya had adopted a different approach in trying to reverse the urbanisation trend, and was investing in his country’s rural areas.

Kimunya’s “bulldozer” comment drew an angry response from the audience at the seminar, which was organised by the housing department for developing countries in Africa to share their experiences and housing policies with their counterparts in Brazil and India.

Bulldozers, one speaker said, brought back images of SA’s apartheid removals.

UN Habitat’s Eduardo Moreno also objected strongly, and said communities should be consulted and should agree on housing programmes.

There should also be forward-looking action plans to deal with urbanisation in a just way.

Zambian Housing and Public Works Minister Sylvia Masebo also highlighted the problems caused by migration from the rural areas to cities that did not have adequate housing and infrastructure to sustain them.

Zambia had a backlog of 1,2-million houses. The rights of slum dwellers had to be balanced with those settled in decent homes who were faced with declining property values, she said.

Zimbabwean Local Government, Public Works and Urban Development Deputy Minister Morris Sakabuya emphasised that rural to urban migration had reached “alarming” levels in Zimbabwe. The government aimed to provide 250000 housing units a year and to clear the urban housing backlog by 2008.

The programme aimed to decongest urban areas, ridding them of illegal activities and “all sorts of social decadence” and to resuscitate rural areas, he said.

Where there were no jobs in urban areas people should return to work the land, Sakabuya said.

Kimunya said it was impossible to leave people in appalling slum conditions. “I think we owe it to our people to give them better conditions in life, to give them better housing and to remove them to rural areas.”

People were moving into cities under the illusion of finding a job and better life and were taking all the available space, he said.

source: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A64332 12jul2005

Monster of the Moment:

Zimbabwe is Being Hypocritically Vilified by the West
for Forced Slum Clearances That are Routine
Throughout the Developing World

JOHN VIDAL / The Guardian (UK) 1jul2005

For a month now, the BBC, CNN, ITV and others have been reporting what has been portrayed as one of the greatest humanitarian and human rights disasters in years. At least 200,000 people - sometimes this figure grows to 250,000 or even 300,000 - are said to have been forcibly evicted from slum areas of Harare in Zimbabwe. The figure peaked last week at 1.5 million, but yesterday the BBC reckoned that bulldozers were now "crashing through the homes of 500,000 people".

In fact, only about 1.2 million people live in Harare and no one is suggesting that half the population has fled in terror or that most of the city has been wrecked. So where are all these allegedly terrorised people? A few thousand have been filmed in makeshift camps but not many more. Who is trying to count the numbers? They are almost always attributed to an unnamed person in an unnamed UN agency. But read the only UN statement on the evictions and it says nothing of 200,000 people. The evictions - which are clearly happening on a wide scale - have been seized on by the west, and the former colonial power Britain in particular, as another reason to demonise President Mugabe and further humiliate long-suffering Zimbabwe. It's open season on the Harare regime and it appears that anyone can say anything they like without recourse to accuracy or reality. Whipped into a frenzy of hypocritical outrage, the EU, Britain and the US, as well as the World Bank - all of which have been responsible for millions of evictions in Africa and elsewhere as conditions of infrastructure projects - have rushed to condemn the "atrocities".

The vilification of Mugabe is now out of control. The UN security council and the G8 have been asked to debate the evictions, and Mugabe is being compared to Pol Pot in Cambodia. Meanwhile, the evictions are mentioned in the same breath as the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans - although perhaps only three people have so far accidentally died. Only at the very end of some reports is it said that the Harare city authority's stated reason for the evictions is to build better, legal houses for 150,000 people.

Perspective is needed. The summary removal of people at gunpoint from their homes is indefensible, almost certainly unnecessary, and probably economically counter-productive, but it is not unusual in the developing world. Every year millions of poor people are evicted to make way for tourism, dams, roads and airports, for events like the Olympics, and for the gentrification and beautification of cities, national parks and urban redevelopments.

Nor is it new. Forced evictions, brutal land grabs and slum clearances were all used by Britain's own rulers in the past to enlarge their estates, build bigger, more modern cities, construct reservoirs, make way for railways and lay out fine parks and fashionable areas for the newly rich to live. Rapidly developing countries are now doing the same as the rich world did during its own industrial and urban development.

The difference is mostly in numbers. According to UN-Habitat, the Nairobi-based agency that concerns itself with the urban environment, hundreds of millions of the world's poor are technically illegal squatters living in slum communities like those in Harare, liable to be moved on by private landowners or by governments. In the past five years, slum clearance programmes have forced more than 150,000 people out of their homes in Delhi; 300,000 people were evicted to make way for Olympic sites in Beijing; 100,000 were moved on in Jakarta; 250,000 were forced out of dam sites in India; and as many as a million in Lagos and Port Harcourt in Nigeria. There are many more.

Yet those who like to call themselves "the international community" say nothing about these mass evictions and the world's press has been mostly silent. For the World Bank to condemn the Zimbabwean evictions was particularly rich. According to its own calculations, the bank has funded projects that have required the eviction of at least 10 million people.

So why are the Harare slum clearances so different? As international monster of the moment, Mugabe is unacceptable to Britain and the west mainly because he has chosen to evict whites and redistribute land grabbed in colonial times. The fact that the African Union and other African leaders are not prepared to condemn him for the Harare evictions reflects the fact that they, too, recognise the injustice of the colonial land ownership inheritance and do not want to see Africa bullied again by the west.

But there may be another reason why African leaders have not condemned the evictions. Urbanisation is overwhelming most African cities, which have been flooded by impoverished people forced off the land. According to the UN's 2003 study of urbanisation and slums, the driving force behind the slums of Africa and Asia is not bad governance or tyrants, but laissez-faire globalisation, the tearing down of trade barriers, the privatisation of national economies, structural adjustment programmes imposed on indebted countries by the IMF, and the lowering of tariffs promoted by the World Trade Organisation.

Like every city in the world that has tried to clear its slums, Harare will find that history repeats itself. This year, Zimbabwe faces massive food shortages that will force more of the urban poor into destitution and drive yet more people off the land into the cities to look for work. The poor, punished for their poverty rather than for voting one way or another, will become poorer and the shacks and shelters so brutally pulled down in the past month will just go up somewhere else.

However, an alternative to forced evictions is emerging right under Mugabe's nose. Last year, 250 homeless Zimbabweans, members of the Federation of Slum and Shackdwellers, negotiated the provision of land from the city authority. They have now planned the layout of their community, worked out the costs of the homes and are ready to build. Where are they? Harare.

John Vidal is the Guardian's environment editor

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1518747,00.html 12jul2005