HARARE — Police armed with batons and riot shields fought running battles with street traders this week as authorities pressed ahead with a clampdown against street vendors in Harare’s southern townships, a Zimbabwe newspaper reported yesterday.

Police have arrested at least 14706 vendors, seized their produce and fined them a total of Z$782m ($31000) across the country in the past two weeks in a revival of President Robert Mugabe’s hated Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out the Rubbish) according to figures released at the weekend.

They accuse the vendors of sabotaging Zimbabwe’s crumbling economy through black-market trading.

The United Nations (UN) says 700000 Zimbabweans have lost their homes, livelihoods or both in the so-called urban renewal campaign launched on May 19. Police have codenamed the latest sweep Operation Hatidzokereshure (No Sneak Return).

Paramilitary police “stormed streets around shopping centres” in the southeastern Harare townships of Budiriro, Mufakose and Glen View on Tuesday, the ruling party-allied Daily Mirror newspaper reported yesterday.

“Uniformed police on bicycles and in trucks engaged in running battles with the vendors, some of whom were refusing to let them impound their wares,” the paper said. Scarce commodities maize meal, cooking oil, soap, flour, sugar, rice, fish and chicken meat were impounded.

Police spokesman Loveless Rupere was quoted as saying the crackdown against illegal vending was a routine exercise.

Opposition legislator Priscilla Misihairabwe-Mushonga, who represents the riot-torn area, confirmed the clashes, but said: “The violence wasn’t too much. It was just the usual stuff which the police are doing.”

She said there were shortages of staples such as maize meal in local shops, forcing many residents to buy from vendors.

The informal sector is also one of the few remaining sources of jobs in a country facing more than 70% unemployment.

“What the police are doing is an act of wickedness and very intolerable, especially in these difficult times when it is hard to get a job,” the Mirror quoted street vendor Peter Gumbo as saying. “Most of us are eking out a living from selling these basic commodities. If these people are serious with what they are doing they should first find a sound alternative … for us.”

Some residents accused vendors of snapping up scarce commodities in bulk whenever shops had them, and charging exorbitant prices, the paper said.

Late on Wednesday, a rowdy crowd stretching back nearly a kilometre besieged a supermarket in Harare’s northern Avonlea suburb where sugar was on sale at the controlled price of Z$4500 a kilogram.

The black market price is more than Z$50000 ($2).

Zimbabwe’s agriculture-based economy has been in free-fall since the government began seizing thousands of white-owned farms in 2000 for redistribution to blacks. Years of drought have compounded the country’s difficulties, and an estimated 4-million of Zimbabwe’s 12-million people are in need of food aid, according to UN figures.

The state-controlled Herald newspaper reported this week that Mugabe had ordered the Murambatsvina blitz “to nip in the bud a Ukrainian-style revolution by dispersing the slum dwellers via the demolition of their habitats”.

The paper’s report contradicted previous government claims that there was no political motive for the demolitions, and that these actions were aimed at cleaning up urban slums. Opposition leaders claimed from the start the campaign was aimed at breaking up their support base among the urban-dwelling poor.