Zimbabwe is reported to arrest or evict thousands in big cities: printer friendly version

Zimbabwe is reported to arrest or evict thousands in big cities

By Michael Wines The New York Times
FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 2005

JOHANNESBURG Facing rising unrest over a collapsing economy, Zimbabwe's authoritarian government has apparently adopted a scorched-earth policy toward potential enemies, detaining thousands of people, burning homes and street kiosks, and routing large numbers of people from makeshift homes in major cities.

The scope of the operation, begun in mid-May, is unknown, in part because a nationwide gasoline shortage has prevented some of those following events in Zimbabwe from monitoring it firsthand. But reports in the local press and from witnesses indicate that the police have detained or arrested as many as 30,000 residents in big cities and evicted hundreds of thousands more from shantytowns on the fringes of most cities.

The Movement for Democratic Change, the main opposition party that was crushed in March elections that Western observers said had been rigged, contended at a news conference in the capital, Harare, on Wednesday that the police and soldiers had forced 1 million to 1.5 million people from their homes.

Experts estimate Zimbabwe's population at 10 million to 11 million people.

Journalists and human rights advocates interviewed by telephone on Wednesday recounted scenes in which large numbers of the evicted people were camped beside major highways, unable to return to the city but equally powerless to reach rural relatives because of the gasoline shortage.

Some of them, one human rights advocate said, had been there for a week or more.

"I don't think anyone has any idea of the scale - it's big," said that person, who refused to be identified because of the potential for government retaliation. "As things have rolled out, it's clear that they probably will clear every vendor and every unregulated selling site and, probably, every shantytown in Zimbabwe. If you do that, you're talking about a quarter of the population."

The government has said in state-run newspapers that the sweep is intended to rid Zimbabwe of its ragtag element and to shut down black-market operators who, the government claims, are buying up goods to create artificial shortages and drive up prices.

Ordinary Zimbabweans speculate, though, that the campaign is intended to make way for merchants from China, Zimbabwe's new and close ally, or to punish urban residents who voted against the government in parliamentary elections March 31.

The ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party was drubbed in major cities but officially won most of the vote in a nation that remains primarily rural.

Some political analysts say that President Robert Mugabe's government is making a pre-emptive move against urban unrest over the economic collapse, which has left store shelves empty of basic foodstuffs and made gasoline all but unobtainable.

The economy, always in peril, has sharply worsened since the elections as a shortage of foreign exchange has stopped businesses from buying imported components and kept food imports well below needs.

The police and soldiers have been called frequently in the past two weeks to put down protests and near-riots by consumers waiting in lines and by residents whose shanties were being demolished.

In Harare this week, as many as 3,000 people rioted as bulldozers knocked down shanties that the government insisted were illegal structures.

"Overnight," Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, said, "Zimbabwe has been turned into a massive internal refugee center with between 1 million and 1.5 million people displaced in Harare alone. Property worth millions of dollars has gone up in flames. Families are out in the open without jobs, without shelter."

A journalist in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-biggest city, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that people there were seething over police sweeps that had removed street vendors who supplied the poor with many of their basic needs.

"There's tension," he said. "The police are driving around with dogs in their trucks. They're expecting the worst. They know that things can't go on like this. Something is going to ignite in a fuel queue, or something like that."

Mugabe met Wednesday with the executive director of the UN World Food Program, James Morris, to discuss emergency food relief for the poor.

Last year Mugabe ordered most UN food deliveries to Zimbabwe halted, saying the country was "choking" on its own grain, but now he has said that the nation will need 1.2 million tons of food to make up for shortfalls in the next year.

At a news conference on Wednesday in Johannesburg, Morris said that Mugabe had made "a strong commitment" to permit deliveries of food aid for as many as four million Zimbabweans.

Morris said the government's campaign in shanties and informal markets was not discussed, because it was outside his agency's mandate.

Parliament session called

President Robert Mugabe has called Zimbabwe's Parliament into session several weeks early for its first meeting since March elections, which the opposition said were rigged, Reuters reported from Harare.

The announcement Thursday gave no reason for the decision to open Parliament early on June 9.

But the statement indicated that the session would look at a proposal by the ruling ZANU-PF to add an upper house to Parliament for the first time since independence in 1980.