Zimbabwe police raze 20,000 shacks
Police in Zimbabwe say they have razed more than 20,000 shacks and other structures in what President Robert Mugabe calls an urban cleanup campaign – but what critics at home and abroad have decried as an assault on the poor.
Police Superintendent Oliver Mandipaka, quoted today in a government newspaper, said 21,194 “illegal structures” had been demolished nationwide, and 32,435 people arrested since “Operation Murambatsvina” – drive out trash - began May 19.
“The operation continues until we have weeded out all criminal elements countrywide,” Mandipaka told The Herald.
Zimbabwean clerics, doctors, teachers and human rights lawyers have called the mass evictions and arrests of street traders a crime against the poor.
The human rights group Amnesty International has condemned the government’s actions and the United Nations has called them a clear violation of human rights.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change has compared Operation Murambatsvina to the Cambodian Pol Pot regime’s efforts to drive urban people to rural areas for political “re-education”.
The opposition has its support base among the urban poor, and says Operation Murambatsvina is aimed at forcing them to rural areas where the government can more easily control them.
Education Minister Aeneas Chigwedere said in Johannesburg yesterday that people would be moved on to an “appropriate place”, adding that there is “nobody in Zimbabwe who does not have a rural home”.
But thousands of people who apparently have nowhere else to go are living amid the ruins of their bulldozed homes in the winter chill.
In a statement today, the Zimbabwe Teachers’ Association, representing most of the country’s 80,000 school and college professionals, described the evictions as “a catastrophe”.
