 |
|
|
|
|
| author/source:Sunday Times (UK) |
| published:Sun 5-Jun-2005 |
| posted on this site:Sun 5-Jun-2005 |
|
| Article Type : News |
|
| Depopulation of cities |
 |
|
By a Special Correspondent, Harare
Until a few days ago, Mbare on the outskirts of Harare was Zimbabwe’s largest market, recommended in guidebooks for a lively afternoon visit, and also one of the capital’s oldest townships. Yesterday, along with much of the country, it looked like a place flattened by war. Street after street had been turned into a battleground of twisted wreckage, torn wood and piles of broken bricks. Sirens wailed and plumes of smoke rose from the smouldering ground, in the midst of which stood the occasional wardrobe or iron bed-frame, all that remained of family homes. A few figures picked among the debris like vultures, while others huddled in small dazed groups at the sides. Every so often, one of Zimbabwe’s new Chinese warplanes roared across the sky. All along the main road to the bus station were lines of people with their remaining belongings bundled on their heads, like refugees escaping from battle. The perpetrator was not some enemy invader or even a rival ethnic group, but the embattled citizens’ own government.
Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian regime has chosen to consolidate its recent election victory by bulldozing homes and demolishing markets, leaving vast swathes of the capital and other cities in ruins and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees with neither shelter nor livelihood. Locals are calling it the Zimbabwean tsunami. “This is Pol Pot style depopulation of cities,” said David Coltart, legal affairs spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). “It’s a sinister pre-emptive strike designed to remove the maximum possible number of people from urban areas to rural areas where they are easier to control.” Operation Murambatsvina or “Clean Up the Filth” began with no warning two weeks ago when trucks of police and youth militia clad in brand new riot-protection gear arrived at Hatcliff, a shanty town. Stunned residents were ordered to leave and go back to the rural areas from which they came, as police began smashing their dwellings and a large local orphanage. Others swept through the centre of Harare, rounding up the many thousands of traders who survive by selling everything from chewing gum to second-hand clothes and even the colourful women flower sellers who have operated in Africa Unity Square for decades. Flowers and wooden curios were thrown onto bonfires as their owners watched in disbelief.
It was the start of what has since become a nationwide scorched earth campaign. In cities from Mutare in the east to Bulawayo in the south, police have torched homes, demolished market stalls, detaining more than 20,000 traders, and bulldozed shanty towns. Even the woodcarvers at the tourist resort of Victoria Falls were attacked, their stalls smashed and hundreds of carved hippos and giraffes thrown on fires. The MDC estimate that more than 1m people have been left homeless and left sleeping in the open in winter temperatures dropping to near freezing. The opposition believe it is no coincidence that the targets have been the cities which voted overwhelmingly against Mugabe’s ruling Zanu PF party in the March 31 elections. “It’s retribution against those who voted MDC,” said Nelson Chamisa, National Youth Chairman for the MDC and an MP whose own constituency in Harare is one of the most affected areas. One MDC member said he believed that the government had intelligence that they had been holding meetings of grassroots cells looking at organising an popular uprising - modelled on the successful “Orange revolution” in Ukraine late last year that brought a pro-western government to power. A police spokesman described the action as designed “to wipe out pockets of resistance”.
The government claims the centre of Harare had become unsightly and that the campaign is aimed at shutting down black market operators whom they accused of trading scarce commodities such as sugar and the staple mealie meal, and illegal foreign exchange transactions. Every day last week anonymous letters were printed in the state-owned Zimbabwe Herald newspaper supporting the clean-up campaign as “long overdue”. Another suggestion was that the vendors had been cleared out to make way for Chinese traders. China has become Mugabe’s new best friend, supplying commercial and military planes and sending in advisers. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that people were given almost no warning and have been provided with no alternative. With unemployment at 80%, selling sweets or phone cards, cutting hair or mending shoes by the side of the road is the only way most people can survive. Yesterday many of the victims were too scared to talk to a British journalist, fearing the presence of intelligence agents in their midst. At Mbare, people milled around stunned. A few brave souls were still trying to sell odd things they had managed to retrieve, only to be rounded up again by police. One man showed me heaps of rotting vegetables stamped and trodden on by laughing militia, an incredible insult in a country where aid agencies estimate almost half the population of 11m is facing starvation.
Nearby, a group of women huddled by piles of empty chicken coops, one breastfeeding a tiny baby. “What are we supposed to do?” asked one. “We have nothing left to sell and now sleep here, freezing at night. We cannot send our children to school. How can they do this and give us nowhere else to live or work?” When no police were around, a man in a black felt hat sold me a kitchen sieve at an exaggerated price to raise the bus fare for him and his family to move to a village near the Mozambique border. The man said his home of seven years was first bulldozed then set ablaze on Tuesday, destroying everything he had worked for in just an hour. “They came at 6am. We were still sleeping, then they started breaking the house with no warning. I have five children including a seven-month-old baby and they were terrified. “To think I used to vote for him,” he added, pointing at a torn calendar on the ground bearing Mugabe’s face. There were similar scenes in Bulawayo. Traders at the town’s Fifth Avenue market, which was licensed by the city council, sat on the kerbside staring at the wreckage in disbelief. The clean-up campaign is the latest in a series of measures against Mugabe’s own people to have been carried out by the increasingly irrational 81-year-old president. The violent land seizure campaign that began five years ago has destroyed commercial agriculture and turned a country which exported food to the region into a basket case. Far from redistributing land to the landless, most of the farms have ended up in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies. Some believe the campaign was launched because Mugabe was nervous about an increasingly restive population suffering from massive shortages. After having pulled out all the stops to stock the shops for the elections when foreign observers were present, apparently using emergency supplies, the shelves have subsequently been bare of basic items.
One of the country’s biggest wholesalers said his weekly deliveries were down to a quarter due to the lack of diesel for haulage trucks. He rattled off a list of items absent from his warehouses: “No mealie meal, hardly any sugar, no cooking oil, no soap, no Coca-Cola. No packaging so we have bread but no bags to sell it in. Last week flour supplies were cut by 70%.” So desperate is the situation that shop workers are body-searched when they leave work to check they are not stealing food. In an apparent attempt to shift the blame for the shortages, police and revenue authority inspectors were sent into supermarkets all over the country last week, checking stock and prices and accusing owners of hoarding and overpricing. With the black-market dollar rate four times the official one, hotels were also accused of “forgetting” to declare foreign exchange. A supplement published in the state press listed major hotels such as the Sheraton with how many US dollars each guest had spent. Petrol is the biggest problem. The queues are the longest they have ever been: on Thursday I counted 248 cars in a queue at one filling station in Bulawayo, some of which had been there for four days. There was not a taxi to be had in the entire city. The lack of fuel has brought the bus service to a near halt and everywhere people are walking and hitchhiking. Cleaners at a lodge in Harare said they had to leave home at 3am to be at work by 9am.
It is a sign of Mugabe’s disregard for international opinion that the “clean-up” campaign was going on while James Morris, the head of the World Food Programme, was visiting Zimbabwe. The WFP is considering resuming food aid that Mugabe refused last year claiming the country was set for a record harvest of 2.4m tons. Instead it reaped just 600,000, about a third of its needs. Now, with the demolitions that have left almost a tenth of the population homeless, the regime has created a new humanitarian crisis to add to the lack of food. Yesterday, Trudy Stevenson, a Harare MP, slammed the Red Cross for refusing to assist and appealed for international assistance to bring in plastic sheeting for people to sleep under. On Friday, the German ambassador and some Dominican nuns distributed food among the displaced of Hatcliff who have been sleeping in the open for two weeks, but in most areas people have received nothing. “This is a massive humanitarian crisis,” said Stevenson as she took blankets to some of the estimated 10,000 sleeping outdoors at Hatcliff. Factories in Harare such as the Lion Match Company were reporting less than half their workforce reporting for work because their homes had been destroyed. Those who did turn up said they spent all day worrying whether they would still have a home to go to by the end of the shift. Although the opposition admits to have been shaken both by the campaign and the lack of response from people, some argue this must be the spark for civic society to join together and finally act to end Mugabe’s tyrannical rule. “We’ve realised that playing by the rulebook doesn’t work,” said Nelson Chamisa. “The people have had three elections stolen from them and now they must respond.”
back to top |
|
|
|
|
