Zimbabwe July 2005 |
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| UN envoy slams blitz, (The Zimbabwe Independent, 2005-07-07):-United Nations Secretary-general Kofi Annan's special envoy to Zimbabwe, Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, has condemned the role of the police and army in the controversial Operation Murambatsvina. Tibaijuka, who last week extended her tour in Zimbabwe to today, said in Bulawayo on Wednesday police should not be involved because they were not a "cleaning agency". She also said the army should not be involved in the building of houses to accommodate thousands of refugees because it was not a "construction company". Tibaijuka said government should not "criminalise" the poor by labelling their homes "illegal structures" to justify its wanton vandalism of property. Tibaijuka was angered by ministers' constant reference to the demolished homes and market stalls as "illegal structures, squatter camps and slums". "There is no need to call the destroyed structures illegal or squatter camps because they are special to other people. To other people, what you destroyed are homes, they are special to them," she said. Government has been making frantic efforts to turn a demolition campaign into a development initiative, but Tibaijuka has resisted manipulation. After separately meeting three government ministers, Bulawayo mayor Japhet Ndabeni Ncube and civic groups, she came out with her guns blazing against the operation. Tibaijuka stunned Bulawayo resident minister Cain Mathema in a meeting, also attended by SMEs minister Sithembiso Nyoni, Home Affairs minister Kembo Mohadi, and police and army officers, by rejecting their explanations to justify police involvement. "The police are not a cleaning agency and their role should not be to demolish homes," said Tibaijuka. "The role of cleaning up cities belongs to the mayor of the city and in the case here (Zimbabwe) it is the mayor working together with the governor who can clean up a city," she said. The police claimed they had demolished 5 176 illegal structures and displaced only 9 444 people since the operation began in the city seven weeks ago. However, human rights groups said at least 200 000 township homes had been destroyed and up to a million people affected. A huge internal refugee population has been created and displaced people are held at transit camps nationwide. Matters came to a head between Tibaijuka and ministers after army officers said they would have built 1 003 houses by August month end. Tibaijuka queried what would happen to the rest of the displaced people. She also took issue with Mathema after he said the remainder of the people would be sent back to rural areas. "Rural repatriation does not work and it has never worked anywhere," Tibaijuka said. "The people are not here (in urban areas) because they want to be but because they are trying to get a living. Even in the United States and Japan people move into cities because they want to work and create small businesses that will help them survive. Zimbabwe is not an exception to that." Tibaijuka added: "I was born in a rural area, but I now work in Dar-es-Salaam. There is no way the government can relegate the people to the rural areas where there is poverty". She continued: "The poor are not criminals, the poor work hard but they achieve little and therefore they should not be criminalised." Mohadi claimed without producing evidence that most people in squatter camps had houses in the suburbs that they were renting out. Tibaijuka also questioned the role of the army in the rebuilding exercise and said the army was not a "construction company" and should not be involved in civilian matters. The army has announced that it will be producing 110 complete housing units every 10 days until the end of August. The UN envoy queried whether the houses would be complete given that there were only 40 days between yesterday and the deadline for completion of the units. "The houses you are talking about, have they been built? Because you only have 40 days to build 1 003 houses and I feel, time-wise, it is not feasible to complete the houses. But that is a challenge to you," Tibaijuka said. Tibaijuka visited Luveve on Wednesday night where she met with residents whose homes were destroyed before moving onto a church in Nketa that is housing close to 300 displaced people. She interviewed several people whose homes were demolished and saw first hand the damage caused by the exercise and the humanitarian crisis unfolding at the churches. Tibaijuka said Zimbabwe was not a serious issue when it came to illegal settlements and said for that reason UN Habitat did not see any reason to set up an office in the country. "Africa has a slum rate of 72% but Zimbabwe, according to a survey conducted in 2001, had a rate of 3,4% only and that is the reason Harare does not have a UN Habitat office," she said. However, Mohadi said the situation in Zimbabwe was grave and warranted government's clean-up operation. He went on to explain that the illegal structures in the city were used to harbour wanted criminals. "Since we embarked on the exercise crime has fallen drastically and we have recovered goods worth millions of dollars from the illegal structures and we believe they were harbouring criminals," Mohadi said.But Tibaijuka said she was in the country to see how the clean up was being conducted and not to listen to reasons why it was being executed. "We saw people sleeping out there in the cold, in the open," she said in Gweru on Wednesday. "The issue is not a clean city. Cleaning of cities cannot be an event, it has to be a process," she said. | |
South African Migration Project (SAMP) - Queen's University - http://www.queensu.ca/samp |