[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Zimbabwe: Housing Tsunami Continues

[Alfred Kagan]

FYI

Begin forwarded message:

> From: africafocus at igc.org
> Date: July 28, 2005 9:58:03 AM CDT
> To: akagan at uiuc.edu
> Subject: Zimbabwe: Housing Tsunami Continues
>
>
> Zimbabwe: Housing Tsunami Continues
>
> AfricaFocus Bulletin
> Jul 28, 2005 (050728)
> (Reposted from sources cited below)
>
> Editor's Note
>
> Despite a devastatingly critical report by UN-HABITAT Director Anna
> Tibaijuka, the government of Zimbabwe is continuing its drive to
> destroy "illegal" housing and shops that is estimated to have made
> at least 700,000 people homeless in the last two months. Zimbabweans,
>  rejecting the government's term Operation Murambatsvina
> ("Clean Out Garbage") compare the assault on the country's poor
> to a "tsunami."
>
> The UN report was careful not to implicate President Robert Mugabe
> directly in responsibility for the destruction, but said those
> responsible should be held accountable. Also last week, renowned
> Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, speaking in South Africa, called for
> African leaders to end their reluctance to criticize "rogues and
> monsters" such as President Mugabe. "Bulldozers have been turned
> into an instrument of governance and it is the ordinary people who
> are suffering," he said, "it is a disgrace on the continent."
>
> This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains a short update from the UN's
> Integrated Regional Information Networks, and a background analysis
> and critique by Zimbabwean human rights activist Mary Ndlovu, that
> appeared in Pambazuka News earlier this month. The web version of
> this bulletin, at http://www.africafocus.org/docs05/zim0507.php)
> also contains the text of the executive summary from Ms. Tibaijuka's
> report. The full report is available at:
>  http://www.un-habitat.org/documents/ZimbabweReport.pdf
>
> For previous issues of AfricaFocus Bulletin on Zimbabwe, see
> http://www.africafocus.org/country/zimbabwe.php
>
> For a wide range of reports from Zimbabwe civil society, see
> http://www.kubatana.net
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++++++++
>
> Zimbabwe: Evictions Continue Despite International Condemnation
>
> UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
> http://www.irinnews.org
>
> July 25, 2005
>
> Harare
>
> [This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United
> Nations.]
>
> Ignoring a call by the United Nations to halt evictions of people
> living in unauthorised housing, Zimbabwean police on Friday ordered
> residents out of Porta Farm, one of Harare's oldest informal
> settlements, about 35 km west of the capital.
>
> Since the launch of Operation Murambatsvina ('Clean Out Garbage')
> in mid-May, the UN estimates that 700,000 people have been made
> homeless or lost livelihoods as a result of the blitz on the
> informal homes and unlicensed vending of the largely urban poor.
>
> A report by UN-HABITAT Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka after a
> two-week fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe recommended that the
> evictions, "carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified
> manner, with indifference to human suffering", be stopped.
>
> "The government of Zimbabwe should immediately halt any further
> demolitions of homes and informal businesses and create conditions
> for sustainable relief and reconstruction for those affected," read
> the report, presented last week to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
>
> The latest police operation at Porta Farm was the second time in a
> month they had tried to clear the 7,500 settlers from the area. At
> the first attempt in June, homes and markets were demolished to
> force people to return to their rural areas, or to a holding camp
> at Caledonia Farm, 15 km north of Harare, but many of the residents
> refused to move.
>
> Aid workers said on Monday that the police were determined to clear
> the remaining people. Residents were being grouped according to
> place of origin in preparation for their transport out.
>
> The evictions, part of a drive to "clean up" the cities, have been
> carried out despite the Porta Farm community having won a high
> court order last year allowing them to stay.
>
> When IRIN visited the settlement on Sunday, around 70 policemen
> were monitoring the removal of the residents, who are among the
> poorest and most disadvantaged in Harare.
>
> "We have been camping here since Friday, and we will only go when
> all the people have been removed. This time our bosses have
> instructed us not to use force on the settlers," said a police
> officer - a reference to the death of 11 people when police used
> teargas in a bid to evict residents in September last year.
>
> In one corner of the camp, reduced to rubble and heaps of household
> goods, five young men defiantly beat a drum and danced to an
> improvised song vowing not to move. Elsewhere, people were packing
> their belongings into trucks provided by the army and Harare
> municipality.
>
> "I returned from Caledonia Farm two weeks ago because that place
> was like a prison for me and my three children," said Tabita
> Mugomba, a 38-year-old widow.
>
> When the home she had lived in for 10 years was demolished in June,
> she went to Caledonia but left most of her belongings at Porta.
>
> "Besides, I had to fend for my children, who have since stopped
> going to school. Here at Porta Farm I had been surviving by selling
> fish to motorists," said Mugomba, holding the hand of her thin
> seven-year-old boy.
>
> Mugomba said she would try and move in with her brother and his
> family in Harare's working-class suburb of Mbare but was unsure
> about how well she would be received, as she had been out of touch
> with him for some time.
>
> Porta Farm dates back to 1991, when the government moved thousands
> of people from unauthorised settlements in Harare; because it was
> supposed to be temporary, basic amenities like water, schools and
> health services were never provided.
>
> Tibaijuka's report said Operation Murambatsvina has indirectly
> affected 2.4 million people, and the humanitarian consequences "are
> enormous".
>
> "It will take several years before the people and society as a
> whole can recover. There is an immediate need for the government of
> Zimbabwe to recognise the virtual state of emergency that has
> resulted, and to allow unhindered access by the international and
> humanitarian community to assist those that have been affected,"
> the report noted.
>
> The government has dismissed the UN's findings as biased. Local
> Government Minister Ignatius Chombo told IRIN that the people had
> been evicted from illegal settlements, "and I don't think the UN
> can sanction illegality".
>
> He stressed that the government's new corrective programme,
> Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle ('Stay well'), would develop
> housing at an estimated cost of US $300 million. "Our people are
> much happier because the government is giving them land, they are
> getting stands, and are getting government assistance," Chombo
> insisted.
>
> On Monday only five families out of the original 4,500 people
> remained in Caledonia Farm after the authorities moved to close the
> transit camp at the end of last week. The government said that
> those without accommodation in urban areas and who were unemployed
> would be relocated to their rural homes where chiefs were asked to
> give them land and farming inputs.
>
> Critics have questioned the ability of the cash-strapped government
> to afford the housing programme's price tag, and pointed to the
> immediate needs of the people - especially the young, sick and
> elderly - displaced by Operation Murambatsvina.
>
> "The government is acting irrationally and hypocritically, because
> it is causing further suffering to the very people it says it is
> providing accommodation to," said Welshman Ncube, secretary-general
> of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
>
> **************************************************************
>
> Zimbabwe's Tsunami
>
> Mary Ndlovu
>
> Pambazuka News 214
>
> July 06, 2005
>
> http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?issue=214
>
> Mary Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean human rights activist
>
> Operation Murambatsvina - sweep out the trash - has torn through
> Zimbabwe like a Tsunami, describes Mary Ndlovu. Hundreds of
> thousands of people have been internally displaced, but the true
> cost of the government operation on the livelihoods of people is
> almost impossible to predict. As the G8 meets in Scotland and
> African leaders conclude an African Union Summit in Libya,
> Zimbabweans feel that the rest of Africa has turned its back on
> them.
>
> Towards the end of May a tsunami struck Harare, flattening
> everything in its path - informal businesses, solidly built homes,
> shacks, orphanages, churches, even a mosque; it took with it
> people's lives, livelihoods, family life, their spirit to survive.
> Like the Asian tsunami in December, the number of its victims and
> the total cost of the destruction are hard to quantify; unlike the
> Asian tsunami, it is man-made and continues in wave after wave of
> senseless brutality, reaching every corner of this increasingly
> miserable country.
>
> The government calls it Murambatsvina - sweep out the trash - or
> Operation Restore Order. But Zimbabweans have rejected the
> government's term, for they are not trash, and order has not been
> restored. Only the term "tsunami" adequately portrays the
> suddenness, the scale and the nature of the catastrophic
> destruction which has been visited on us - not by erratic nature,
> but by our own government.
>
> Suddenly, with virtually no warning, police in central Harare
> descended on informal traders, breaking and burning their stalls,
> confiscating or destroying their wares, and arresting thousands. By
> the following week, the attacks had spread throughout Harare and to
> other urban centres in the country, and the assault on informal
> housing had begun. Six weeks later, the operation continues. Police
> of various descriptions move from township to township, ordering
> residents to destroy their illegal dwellings or have them smashed.
> Sometimes sufficient warning has been given for people to remove
> their furniture and salvage some of their building materials, other
> times the bulldozers are hot on the heels of the police, disrupting
> funerals, chasing people from their cooking and their bathing. At
> least six people have been killed directly by the police actions.
> Many others, especially babies, the aged and those suffering from
> AIDS have succumbed to exposure, shock and hunger as they huddle
> through the cold nights in the rubble of their homes.
>
> Now, in the depth of the winter season, tens of thousands remain
> camped in the open, dazed and unbelieving. Others, perhaps hundreds
> of thousands, have moved into the houses of friends or neighbours
> or relatives, who were already overcrowded, or sleep on verandahs.
> Thousands are crammed into churches where they have been offered
> shelter and are being fed; some have managed to sell their
> furniture to raise the bus fare to go to their rural homes, where
> they face an uncertain future with no food or housing.
>
> How do we expect them to react when our President tells UN experts
> that the action is for the good of the people, and they appreciate
> what has been done for them? Can it ever be for someone's good to
> destroy their home when you have nothing to replace it with? When
> you tell them they are rubbish, maggots, who are not wanted? When
> you cause them the utmost trauma of preventing them from feeding
> their families? When you destroy the huts of orphans and smash the
> centres that were caring for them; when you bulldoze a clinic that
> was providing anti-retrovirals to AIDS patients and tell them to go
> to rural areas where there are no medicines.
>
> Surely a government which turns so viciously on its own people must
> be acting in response to a serious threat to its power, an armed
> rebellion or organised sabotage at least. No. Not at all. That has
> not happened and government has not mentioned it. The government
> says it is seeking to reduce crime and restore order to the cities
> of Zimbabwe. There has been too much illegal activity and this must
> be stopped; informal trading venues and illegal dwellings were
> havens for criminals, foreign exchange dealers, fraudsters;
> purveyors of stolen property, making once beautiful cities filthy
> and unsafe. This is a clean-up operation which will catch the
> criminals, drive the forex back into the banks, and black market
> goods into legitimate channels.
>
> It is unspeakably depressing to watch government and party leaders
> trying to defend the indefensible. Raze whole suburbs to catch a
> few criminals? Deprive people of earning a living to stop thieves?
> How many more thieves will be created? With a national housing
> backlog of two million units, bulldoze more than 80,000? Where is
> the once very professional police force whose training teaches them
> how to identify and apprehend criminals? Where are the health
> officials who enforce hygiene standards and the town planners who
> design orderly housing developments? Why the sudden need to restore
> beauty to the cities?
>
> Of course it is true that the cities of Zimbabwe have deteriorated
> during the past ten years. Visitors from other parts of Africa once
> gawked at Harare, wondering how such a beautiful, orderly
> municipality could really be African. It was well-planned, most
> people were in employment, there was little sign of the shanty
> towns and street traders common in other African metropolises.
>
> But things have changed, for several reasons. First is the
> deterioration in standards of government, especially the growth of
> corruption, which sees by-laws flagrantly ignored for the price of
> a small bribe, and awarding of contracts to cronies incapable of
> delivering the services. Second was the effect of the economic
> decline resulting from the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme
> (ESAP), introduced in the early 1990's. Many urban workers lost
> their jobs, and government encouraged them to turn to the informal
> sector to create their own incomes, in manufacturing, services and
> retail trading; councils which resisted were ordered by central
> government to relax by-laws to accommodate them. Third was the
> effect of the farm invasions of 2000 and thereafter. On the one
> hand these produced a flood of displaced farm workers, many of whom
> crowded into the slums of Harare, and on the other it opened former
> farmland to be allocated without any planning to loyal supporters
> of ZANU PF for informal settlement. Fourthly, when the opposition
> MDC won control of most urban councils between 2000 and 2002,
> government deliberately undermined their operations, using its
> powers under the Urban Councils Act to prevent rate increases in
> line with hyperinflation. Borrowing powers to develop housing and
> upgrade crumbling infrastructure, especially in water and sewage
> reticulation, were systematically denied. The decline of Zimbabwe's
> cities is in large part, therefore, the direct result of
> government's economic and political mismanagement.
>
> Then suddenly, without consultation, public deliberation, or even
> the simplest level of information, government declared itself
> obsessed with illegality, and determined to eliminate it from
> Zimbabwe. This seemed strange in view of the fact that it is the
> government that has been content to ignore legality whenever it
> threatened to restrict its own operations, flouting court orders in
> regard to holding of elections, seizures of land, release of
> detainees from prison, and prosecution of known criminals. But
> Zimbabweans have come to know that government uses the law when it
> finds it convenient and abuses it to pursue its political goals.
>
> In this case, the line between legality and illegality has become
> blurred. Many of the informal traders had licences issued by the
> local authorities, but many did not. Many of those who did broke
> the law in other ways, by receiving stolen goods or dealing in
> foreign currency or black market goods, but most did not. The
> settlements around Harare which have now been destroyed had the
> blessing of the highest government authorities, who had allocated
> stands, arranged in some cases for financing, and publicly
> encouraged the recipients to build homes. Does this make them legal
> if the necessary planning laws have been ignored? The people are
> now being punished for taking government instructions as legality.
>
> The cry by government that traders and home-owners were illegal is
> thus partly correct, and partly not. However, the methods used in
> carrying out their operation of destruction are clearly not legal.
> The actions of the police have all been taken without due process,
> and violate statute law, our constitution, and international law.
>
> The Urban Councils Act specifies that an illegal structure can only
> be destroyed when notice of 28 days has been given to the owner and
> occupier and opportunity has been given for a court application; no
> one was given such notice. The common law does not permit the
> deprivation of property in the possession of anyone without legal
> sanction; those who had their buildings and their trading goods
> destroyed or seized had their property illegally despoiled. The
> constitution guarantees the right to be protected from arbitrary
> deprivation of property, and from cruel, inhuman and degrading
> treatment. Surely destroying one's home and leaving them in the
> open is cruel and degrading by anyone's estimate. The United
> Nations Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights provides
> that everyone has the right to shelter, while the African Charter
> on Human and Peoples Rights has been interpreted, in a case brought
> against Nigeria, to mean that a government may not evict anyone
> from his home without providing alternative accommodation. How can
> our government claim that it is restoring legality, when all the
> means it is using are quite clearly infringements of the law at
> every level?
>
> The effects and costs of the operation are certainly too huge to
> measure. Six weeks since its beginning, the tsunami continues to
> destroy people's lives. The original estimates of 200,000 to
> 250,000 persons displaced have by now doubled. The 300,000 school
> children displaced from schools was given by the Ministry of
> Education for Harare only, after only two weeks of demolitions. In
> Mutare, Bulawayo, Victoria Falls, Beitbridge, Harare itself, and
> many other towns and cities, countless thousands more have since
> been affected. A million traders and their families losing their
> livelihoods will have an immeasurable effect. Of course many will
> begin again because they simply have to feed their families, legal
> or not legal. But in total, how much business is being lost for
> every sector of the economy? And how many of these were sending
> money and food home to the rural areas. We simply can't know.
>
> Perhaps falling back in horror at what they have done in the past
> weeks, the government has suddenly announced a programme of
> reconstruction. Thousands of stands will be serviced and houses
> built over the next three years. Although only four houses have
> been built in a week, 9,000 are to be ready in two months. This
> raises more questions than it answers: where will the money come
> from in a cash-strapped economy? Who will pay for the houses? And
> most important of all - if government can mobilise the money to
> build houses, why didn't they do it before smashing down the ones
> that already existed? The cost of re-housing Indonesian communities
> affected by the natural tsunami last December is estimated at $US5
> billion for 500,000 still homeless. We have at least that number of
> homeless people now. Where in our wildest dreams do we imagine we
> will get funding to rebuild what we have ourselves destroyed? Our
> economy was already in a state of complete collapse - what some
> have referred to as meltdown. Rebuilding on this scale is pure
> delusion.
>
> But as government's efforts at damage control pick up pace, more
> themes have emerged. Applicants for new trading licences and
> allocation of stands will be "vetted" - a term that has not been
> defined. It is only assumed that they will be checked for criminal
> records (few will be found) and asked to produce ZANU PF membership
> cards. Already we are told that the stands at Whitecliff Farm are
> being reserved for civil servants - police, army and CIO primarily;
> they are certainly not the people who were displaced. Women
> arrested for protesting were finger-printed and told they would
> never get vending licenses again. "Presumptive taxes" will be
> levied on informal traders, who will pay income tax on "presumed
> income". While party lackeys wheel and deal and survive on
> kick-backs and bribes, the struggling poor will provide for the
> instruments of their own oppression.
>
> Perhaps more sinister, all these processes of "reconstruction" have
> been removed from the local authorities who legally have
> responsibility for them. Licences have always been issued by the
> councils, not by the police. Housing stands have been allocated by
> the council housing departments. Now we have unknown authorities
> responsible for allocating these resources. We have new "task
> forces" controlled by the army assigned to supervise the
> reconstruction. Clearly, there is an all-out attempt to usurp the
> designated powers of elected councils completely and emasculate any
> democratic participation of the people. We are truly heading for a
> military state, where central government takes everything, leaving
> no democratic space for anyone else. We are even to have chiefs for
> cities, since they will better implement government policies!
> Government is no longer by elected officials, answerable to the
> people. It is by appointees of those clinging to power by the
> barrel of the gun.
>
> As we struggle to give a rational explanation for these seemingly
> deranged acts of destruction several points emerge clearly:
>
> 1. This is very obviously a pre-emptive assault on urban
> populations, the stronghold of the opposition, and the potential
> source of any meaningful threat to ZANU PF's power; its main aim
> seems to be to forcibly relocate poor people to rural areas by
> making it impossible for them to live in towns;
>
> 2. It is not only an attack on towns, but on informal activities in
> rural areas as well - wood carvers and sculptors, gold diggers,
> even fishermen; nor is it an attack only on opposition supporters,
> as many of ZANU PF's members have also been affected;
>
> 3. It seeks to impose government and ZANU PF control on sections of
> the economy where their grip has slipped in recent years - in the
> control of foreign exchange rates, the collection of taxes and the
> determination of who benefits from resource allocation. As such it
> is a desperate attempt to ensure that the little wealth that
> remains is channelled through the hands of government, to be spent
> as they see fit;
>
> 4. It is not going to improve the national economy - in fact it
> will cripple it further, and it will have horrendous consequences
> on the lives of millions of Zimbabweans, reducing hundreds of
> thousands more to penury;
>
> 5. It has been undertaken in a typically ZANU PF way - suddenly,
> violently, illegally and recklessly, without regard to the
> disastrous consequences;
>
> 6. One more very large nail has been hammered into the coffin of
> Zimbabwean democracy, which is rapidly being replaced by an
> illegitimate oligarchy amassing wealth for themselves while the
> people starve, and maintaining their position by military rule.
>
> And Africa turns its back. They do no want to know. We helped South
> Africans when they were fighting a force too powerful, why do they
> deny us the same? We do not want to be rescued by the developed
> world. We want to be rescued by our fellow Africans, understanding
> our plight and standing by the principles to which they committed
> themselves in the African Union, the Harare Declaration, numerous
> international human rights instruments, the SADC and NEPAD. Why do
> they not care? Why do our pleas fall on deaf ears?
>
> *************************************************************
> AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
> providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
> a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
> Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
>
> AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus at igc.org. Please
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> or to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about
> reposted material, please contact directly the original source
> mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see
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>
> ************************************************************
>
>
>
>


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801

tel. 217-333-6519
fax 217-333-2214
akagan at uiuc.edu
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