- In raids reminiscent of Kristallnacht in Germany and
of Pol Pot's Return to Year Zero in Cambodia in the late 1970s, Robert
Mugabe's police and soldiers have in the past three weeks torched, bulldozed
and sledgehammered the homes of two million of Zimbabwe's poorest of the
poor.
-
- Officially heralded as a clean-up of Zimbabwe's teeming
urban slums, ordinary black Zimbabweans have been turned into roofless
internal refugees in the middle of southern Africa's short winter when
night temperatures dip below zero.
-
- Amid the smoke from smouldering homes, the poor are dying
from exposure and starvation and there are reports of suicides among broken
people driven beyond despair. Moving thousands from the cities to the countryside
means only more poverty, hunger and unemployment.
-
- President Mugabe says the blitz on the very people he
says he fought to liberate is necessary "to restore sanity" to
the cities, although many people are questioning the 81-year-old leader's
own mental health. Out of the earshot of agents of the much-feared Central
Intelligence Organisation the name "Mad Bob" has been whispered.
They say this is Mugabe's revenge on urban dwellers for voting for the
opposition Movement for Democratic Change in parliamentary elections last
March.
-
- As well as the mass destruction of housing and the small
roadside businesses of the poor, more than 30,000 have been arrested in
Mugabe's continuing Operation Murambatsvina, which translates as "operation
drive out the rubbish". Entire families are sleeping in the open.
Others are battling to find scarce transport to take them to relatives'
rural homes. Many are burning furniture and their few surviving possessions
before they depart.
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- "I believe only the survivors of South Africa's
apartheid-engineered forced Bantu removals would be able to appreciate
the scale and ferocity of this operation," said Vincent Kahiya, editor
of the weekly Independent newspaper. "The police are going about the
rapine with gusto, destroying everything deemed illegal, never mind that
the officers carry no papers from any recognised court of law. There can
be no worse lawlessness than this callous operation."
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- Tendai, aged 10, and his four-year-old brother Chipo
may be among the dead in Mugabe's onslaught. They were among many Aids
orphans being looked after by Zimbabwean and Irish Dominican nuns in the
Harare suburb of Hatcliffe. For the past decade, the Catholic sisters had
distributed anti-retroviral drugs there to HIV-positive women while running
a crèche for 180 orphans in an entirely legal brick building.
-
- Sister Patricia Walsh, one of the senior nuns, got word
that police bulldozers had moved into the township and that police were
destroying the homes of the poor, pouring petrol on the debris and setting
it ablaze. She dashed to Hatcliffe and was initially lost for words when
she saw that bulldozers had demolished the Dominican clinic.
-
- Surveying the wrecked building, Walsh said: "I wept.
Sister Carina was with me. She wept. The people tried to console us. They
were all outside in the midst of their broken houses, furniture and goods
all over the place, children screaming, sick people in agony.
-
- "How does the government say that Tendai and Chipo
are illegal? We provided them with a wooden hut when their mother was dying
of Aids. She has since died and these two little people had their little
home destroyed in the middle of the night. When we got there, they were
sitting crying in the rubbish that was their home. What do we do with them?"
-
- "How can the little ones of the world be brutalised
in this way? Their only crime is that they are poor, they are helpless
and they happen to live in the wrong part of town and in a country that
does not have oil and is not very important to the West. We stand in shock
and cry with the people, but we also have to try to keep them alive. When
will sanity prevail? Where is the outside world?"
-
- Yesterday, unconfirmed reports suggested that Tendai
and Chipo had died in the assaults by Mugabe's stormtroopers.
-
- With Zimbabwe's new Chinese warplanes and Alouette helicopters,
newly provided with spares by South Africa, sweeping overhead, police demolition
squads turned Mbare into a battleground, completely demolishing houses
and shelters in street after street. Families with remaining possessions
on their heads, wooden planks, tin sheets, pots wrapped in blankets and
plastic or in makeshift carts are on the march, like refugees in some terrible
war, after the mass demolition of their homes.
-
- It is a scene of desolation and despair, being repeated
right across the country in the attempt to drive hundreds of thousands
of people back to the rural areas. Miloon Kothari, the United Nations special
representative on housing for the poor, told reporters in Geneva he feared
Mugabe planned to drive between two and three million Zimbabweans in a
population of 11.5m into the countryside in Operation Murambatsvina.
-
- "We have a very grave crisis on our hands,"
said Kothari. "This is a gross violation of human rights. People are
desperate. They have nowhere to go."
-
- But Zimbabwe's local government minister, Ignatius Chombo,
said: "This is the dawn of a new era. To set up something nice you
first have to remove the litter, and that is why the police are acting
in this way."
-
- The weekly Standard newspaper responded editorially:
"Chombo's explanation is nonsensical and an insult to the intelligence
of the people of this country. The government should not delight in the
suffering of people when it does not have a ready-made alternative for
them."
-
- Brian Raftopoulos, Professor of Development Studies at
the University of Zimbabwe told the Sunday Herald: "It may well be
that Mugabe is looking to remove surplus' elements of the urban population
ahead of the next presidential election by drawing them into more controllable
rural political relations.
-
- "The long-term implications of this process do not
bode well for democratic politics."
-
- Simon Phiri and his wife Tsitsi are victims in the chaos
as well. They rescued the essentials from their Mbare township shack before
a state bulldozer razed it. Simon, 39, and Tsitsi, 32, who have four children,
saw their home of 12 years crushed to pieces. Close to tears, Simon, who
until early this month sold second-hand clothes at Mbare's colourful but
now burnt out Mupedzanhamo market, looked at the wrecked remains of his
shack and said: "This is the only home I know but government and the
city council have just destroyed it."
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- ©2005 newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights
reserved
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- http://www.sundayherald.com/50282
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