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| author/source:Cape Times (SA) |
| published:Mon 20-Jun-2005 |
| posted on this site:Mon 20-Jun-2005 |
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| Article Type : News |
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By Jonathan Pindor
The sight of the mist rising out of the Victoria Falls gorge, said David Livingstone, was so beautiful that it stopped angels in their flight. Last week, the dark, acrid smoke of burning homes billowing up on the other side of the falls village, would have caused those angels to hasten on their way in horror. In a nationwide purge that the government has called Operation Murambatsvina, "unwanted" sectors of the urban population were being targeted for relocation to rural areas, precipitating a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions. Victoria Falls, a tourist mecca with a highly developed adventure industry and many elegant hotels, had not been spared. Shacks, brick houses and spaza shops - most owned by respectable citizens - were set alight in President Robert Mugabe's "clean-up" campaign of "illegal structures". Two days earlier armed police had moved into town; outsiders come to torch the homes of their countrymen. They began at 3am in the coldest hour of a winter's night, ordering people out of their beds, giving them scant warning before dousing their shacks with petrol and setting them alight. Families, confronted by guns, stood mutely in the township's dusty streets, gaping at the state-sanctioned arson.
It didn't stop at shacks. Armed with a council plan, the police began setting alight brick houses. When their owners protested that they had paid for and been given the stands and building rights by the council, police claimed they'd been illegally issued by a corrupt official and had to be demolished. Spaza shops were next. Clustered along township roads, they had been the economic lifeblood of hundreds of residents. Throughout the country, urban people were being forced into the drought-ravaged rural areas where there are high levels of impoverishment and starvation. Yet there are few buses to take them and a chronic shortage of fuel. The crackdown is being seen by most victims as a post-election crackdown on Movement for Democratic Change supporters. At the elegant Victoria Falls Hotel, an impeccably dressed waiter was clearly deeply traumatised as he served pots of Tanganda tea to wealthy holidaymakers. "I have to be here because I need this job," he lamented. "I've worked here for eight years. But my house was burnt, my wife is on the street with our baby. Where are we to sleep tonight?" He offered to take in a small digital camera to try to get some shots, but if he'd been caught, the consequences would have been dire. Armed police were everywhere and seemed jumpy and ready to shoot. His anger, though, made him willing to take the chance, but it seemed irresponsible of me to expose him to even further risk.
At a restaurant, the manageress was desperately worried about the furniture on her stoep. "All night people were coming to me with their belongings. They're from my church; I can't turn them away. They have nowhere to go, nowhere to put their possessions. But now I hear that if the police see furniture on your veranda they burn your house too. There was a lady with a two-month-old baby with nowhere to go. And it was cold, so cold. If you have two radios or two TVs, the police take one. They say you must be using illegal money to buy them. If they find you with forex (US dollars, rands or pounds) they take that too and tell you it is illegal to hold forex." The forced removals are occurring against a background of severe food shortages and unemployment levels in excess of 70%. In addition, Zimbabwe has one of the highest levels of HIV in the world with around 25% of the sexually active population infected. With the clampdown on information, it's difficult to estimate the number of people evicted - estimates are between 250 000 and a million. Victoria Falls is the tourist centre of Zimbabwe and both tour operators and hoteliers struggled to deflect questions from foreigners about the billowing smoke and absence of local people in the village. Some simply gave up trying.
"It's a bloody disaster," one operator told me. "How can we keep tourism going with this happening? Next I suspect we're going to be raided for forex. You have to charge foreigners in forex, but then you're supposed to run to the bank and change it into Zim dollars. But you can't buy anything in Zim dollars. They're cheaper than toilet paper and nobody outside the country will accept them. If you don't hold forex you can't get spare parts for your vehicles or replace broken equipment or even buy the sort of food that tourists expect." People in Victoria Falls were confused by South Africa's failure to intervene. There's even a wild rumour going round that the reason for President Thabo Mbeki's lack of response is that he owns a number of diamond mines in Zimbabwe. It's the only way people can understand his support for Mugabe. On a beautiful drive through the winter-yellowing mopane woodland to the Botswana border, a bus driver spoke about the destruction of his community. "It's a war," he said. "When Zanu PF took over we thought we'd be free. But it's the same government as before, only with black faces. We haven't won our freedom yet. It still has to come. It will come. Everything must end sometime... "
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