U.N. Report on Zimbabwe Slams Slum Destruction

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U.N. Report on Zimbabwe Slams Slum Destruction

By WARREN HOGE
Published: July 22, 2005

UNITED NATIONS, July 22 - The United Nations today condemned the mass destruction of urban slums and shantytowns in Zimbabwe by the government of Robert G. Mugabe as a "disastrous venture," saying it had left 700,000 people homeless and created a "humanitarian crisis of immense proportions."

In a tough-worded report, the United Nations demanded that the activity be stopped immediately, that compensation and assistance be arranged for victims and that the leaders of the campaign be prosecuted.

The report also suggested that the operation could amount to a case of crime against humanity.

In an accompanying statement that called the report "profoundly distressing," Secretary General Kofi Annan said, "I call on the government to stop these forced evictions and demolitions immediately, and to ensure that those who orchestrated this ill-advised policy are held fully accountable for their actions." (Ewww, feel his wrath. :blah2: )

Mr. Annan said the United Nations would "urgently" seek agreement with the government in Harare to mobilize assistance "on the scale that is required to avert further suffering." He urged the government to recognize the state of emergency and give free access to international aid workers.

The government campaign, which began without warning on May 19, has resulted in the bulldozing of shacks, workshops and market stalls across Zimbabwe's urban centers, with the evicted robbed of their livelihoods and forced to withstand winter weather in tents and makeshift shelters and transit camps.

Mr. Mugabe has defended the undertaking, called "Operation Restore Order," as an urban renewal plan designed to bring stability to Zimbabwe by cracking down on illicit activities and illegal structures. The report said that the program was referred to derisively by locals as "Operation Tsunami."

The 100-page report, compiled after a two-week fact-finding trip by Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, a Tanzanian expert in rural economics, said that removals were "carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering" and left Zimbabwe in "a virtual state of emergency" from which it would take years to emerge.

While the report said that the government of Zimbabwe was "collectively responsible" for what has occurred, it laid direct blame on an unnamed "few architects" of the policy and said the people of Zimbabwe should hold them accountable.

At a press conference, Mrs. Tibaijuka turned aside repeated questions over whether Mr. Mugabe himself wasn't one of the plan's architects. "I was not sent on an exercise to apportion blame," she said. She also declined to say whether Mr. Mugabe had expressed any remorse over the victims in either of the two meetings she had with him. (remorse?? Talk about your stupid questions. )

Speaking less diplomatically in her report, she said, "It remains the strong recommendation of the envoy that the culprits who have caused this man-made disaster be brought to book." (hmmmm, how about Mugabe?)

In an apparent rebuke to Mr. Mugabe's claim to be acting to rid Zimbabwe of the vestiges of colonialism, Ms. Tibaijuka said that the government had pursued "a disastrous venture based on a set of colonial-era laws and policies that were used as a tool of segregation and social exclusion." Man, now I've heard EVERYTHING!

The blunt report comes at a time when African leaders have resisted criticizing Mr. Mugabe despite evidence of the widespread devastation his policies have provoked.

Tanzania, Namibia and Zambia are among those that have praised Mr. Mugabe's economic policies in recent months or stopped protesters from faulting them. The African Union, the organization created five years ago to promote continent-wide economic, political and human rights standards, responded to a recent demand from the Group of 8 industrial nations by calling Zimbabwe's crisis an internal matter.

Thabo Mbeki, president of Zimbabwe's powerful neighbor, South Africa, has long argued that "quiet diplomacy" is needed to help Zimbabwe, and he has remained silent on the mass evictions.

In the report, the United Nations called on Harare to halt immediately all demolitions, arrange compensation to those who had been made homeless and put into place humanitarian aid measures with particular emphasis on helping women and children, who, Mrs. Tibaijuka said, were the worst affected. The report recorded 40,800 affected families as headed by women.

Mrs. Tibaijuka, who heads the United Nations' human settlements program, known as Habitat, said that 92,460 housing structures and 32,538 small and micro business places had been bulldozed.

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Mebbe dey don't wanna buy dey's own...

Why are Zimbabwe police seizing radios?
25 March 2013 - Wind-up, solar-powered radios might seem like an excellent idea to help cash-strapped Zimbabwean villagers pass the long, dark evenings.

But the authorities seem to disagree and have confiscated hundreds of sets in recent months. Villagers in in the east of the country were terrified one night during a police raid in a door-to-door search for radios. "By close to midnight, they had taken about 30 radios from people," said Clara Kadzviti, who lives in the village in rural Chinamora district, about 50km (30 miles) east of the capital, Harare.

She and two other villagers were made to identify their neighbours who had radios, capable of picking up FM, AM and shortwave signals, which had recently been handed out by a small non-government youth organisation that had been in the area building a road and some community toilets. "They took my cell phones and demanded to know the identity of people in my phone," she said, explaining how bedrooms and kitchens were thoroughly inspected. "A lot of people were taken to the police station and we were warned that those that would be found with the radios [in future] will disappear."

The confiscations have left some people fearing that in the run-up to elections, the free media guarantees in the newly approved constitution will not be respected. But the police force has said the radios are being used to spread "hate speech", brought into the country by unregistered groups ahead of the polls expected in July after four years of power-sharing between President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party and the Movement for Democratic Change. "We have evidence that they have been smuggled in from some of the Western countries - and these radios are used to propel propaganda in the rural areas," police spokeswoman Charity Charamba said.

'Security threat'