- New makeshift refugee camps were springing up around
Zimbabwe's capital yesterday as President Robert Mugabe's bulldozers reduced
more township homes to rubble.
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- Tens of thousands of people are now sleeping in the open,
huddled under blankets or plastic sheets, as the campaign against "illegal
buildings" continues.
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- Trudy Stevenson, the opposition MP for Harare North,
said areas of her constituency resembled "refugee camps". Part
of it, the township of Hatcliffe Extension, bore the brunt of last week's
offensive.
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- "It looks like the place has been bombed and the
people are sitting there dazed," said Mrs Stevenson. "At night,
there are little fires as people do their cooking. There's a kind of unearthly
feel about it. People are huddled up together under plastic and bits of
wood."
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- Police destroyed 3,300 homes in Hatcliffe Extension alone,
forcing about 20,000 people to sleep in the open. They also closed the
local primary school and ordered its 1,100 pupils to attend classes elsewhere.
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- Mrs Stevenson has distributed 500 blankets to the refugees.
But across Harare, fugitives from the bulldozers and their work are sleeping
on pavements or patches of waste ground.
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- "The whole city is full of people trudging along
with their belongings on little carts," said Mrs Stevenson. "Some
have colonised bus shelters, others are outside supermarkets. They're all
over the place."
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- Mr Mugabe's bulldozers have already raided about 15 townships
around Harare. Yesterday, they reached Highfield and Kambuzuma, demolishing
what police call "illegal" homes and, in particular, a housing
scheme named after the late nationalist leader Joshua Nkomo.
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- The urban clearances are comparable to the demolition
of "illegal" townships carried out by South Africa during the
apartheid era.
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- But those evictions were fiercely resisted. In Zimbabwe,
by contrast, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change has not organised
a single demonstration or protest at the crackdown.
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- Welshman Ncube, the MDC's secretary-general, said this
was not the party's responsibility.
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- "I cannot understand why it must be our responsibility
to deal with the situation," he said. "People should stop thinking
of the MDC as the primary venue for national action. If people are watching
their homes being bulldozed, why must they ask the MDC what to do?"
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- Mr Ncube, the MP for Bulawayo East, did not visit his
constituency when the bulldozers wrecked its townships for two days last
week because he was 280 miles away in the capital, Harare.
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- The MDC's failure to stand up to Mr Mugabe's assault
on the urban poor has dismayed many Zimbabweans.
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- "Mugabe has managed to expose the leadership deficiencies
within the opposition," said Vincent Kahiya, editor of the Zimbabwe
Independent.
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- "If something on this scale is happening under their
noses and there is no response, then there is a problem."
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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