PRESIDENT MUGABE has bowed to international pressure and agreed to let the United Nations assess a state “clean-up” operation in Zimbabwe that is estimated to have made a million people homeless.
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Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, head of UN-Habitat, will be allowed to examine the destruction of thousands of homes and street traders’ businesses.
A spokesman for Mr Mugabe’s office said yesterday that after telephone calls from Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, about “the misplaced hue and cry” over the destruction of hundreds of thousands of “illegal” homes and street traders’ businesses, the Government had decided to allow Miss Tibaijuka’s visit.
The Government insists that it has moved to clean up “criminal havens” in the slums. Diplomats believe that the operation is a pretext for crushing political opposition to Mr Mugabe.
Whatever its rationale, aid agencies say that Operation Murambatsvino (“Drive out the Rubbish”), which is in its fifth week, has created a humanitarian crisis. Thousands of families have lost food, shelter and income and vast groups of people have been forced to flee to rural areas.
The Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference said in a statement this week: “Countless numbers of men, women with babies, children of school age, the old and the sick, continue to sleep in the open air at temperatures near to freezing. These people urgently need shelter, food, clothing, medicines, etc. Any claim to justify this operation as a desired orderly end becomes totally groundless.”
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Charity and church officials say that the Government is blocking attempts to deliver aid to the displaced. “They tell us we are trying to embarrass the Government when we distribute food and blankets,” one aid worker said. “They say we are from the Opposition.”
In a further move to undermine opponents of the Government, state radio announced that the Government had outlawed the growing of crops in tiny patches around urban areas — an important source of food for the urban poor.