A year after Murambatsvina… more cruel evictions just before a Zimbabwean winter
May 15th, 2006
It’s almost a year ago exactly that the Zimbabwean government, under Robert Mugabe‘s leadership, embarked on Operation Murambatsvina – or, Operation Drive Out Trash. Koffi Anan called their actions
a catastrophic injustice to as many as 700,000 of Zimbabwe’s poorest citizens, through indiscriminate actions, carried out with disquieting indifference to human suffering
and he went on to say:
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.
A big outcry ensued, everyone was shocked and horrifed forcing the Zanu PF government to try and explain and justify by insisting that this was all to the good because it was building new homes for Zimbabweans to replace the old awful ones. (What a joke that was).
So here we are, on the brink of the freezing cold winter months again, this time with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight vision, and the Zimbabwean government – still under the leadership of Robert Mugabe – is doing it again! This today from IOL
Police in the Zimbabwean capital Harare have rounded up more than 10 000 squatters and street children and plan to send them to rural areas, reports said on Monday.
Under a fresh clean-up operation code-named Round Up, the police netted 10 224 people, many of them vagrants, touts and what the authorities call “disorderly elements,” said the state-controlled Herald newspaper.
“We are going to relocate some of the vagrants and street children to their homes,” said police spokesperson Munyaradzi Musariri.
The logic confounds me, the cruelty appalls me. Is this government exceptionally ill-advised, exceptionally evil, or exceptionally scared? Or is this simply about two fingers in the face of the world – an arrogant gesture that says ‘ the hell with all of you, we’ll hurt, humiliate and destroy our own people whenever we want because they’re OURS and we CAN?’
I suspect that fear of riots might be provoking some of this… fear. More than 1000% inflation (and that’s official now) might have something to do with it; poverty, hardship, hunger, unemployment. ReliefWeb have an article up with a title that says it all: “Inflation time bomb could shatter Mugabe’s rule.” Add to that the fact that Zimbabwe’s students are a bit annoyed and their annoyance is spilling over in various parts of the country. It’s starting to look untenuous, and I guess that some in the elite may be losing their nerve. How better to quell riots that to dispell and remove the potential rioters before it happens..? It worked last year after they angered everyone by rigging the elections.
I’m speculating, of course. The reasons are almost irrelevant, what matters is the human suffering. One thing I know for sure is that if even more poor people are being forced out into the middle of nowhere then there will be still more suffering, more deaths, more hardship. Does this government care? Or is it entirely focused on self-preservation, whatever the cost to Zimbabwean civilians?
It’ll be much harder for the Zimbabwean government to plead ignorance of the consequences post-Murambatsvina. Logic also dictates that those busy violating human rights will find it much harder to dodge accountability when the time of reckoning comes. Don’t even try and tell us that you ultimately mean well, because we now know you don’t and that you cannot build houses and homes. Don’t pretend that you know nothing about it, because it has happened before and you were fully aware of the outcry. Please don’t try and distance yourself from it because you’ve done nothing in one year to ensure it’d never happen again. Whoever you are, you are accountable.
