Zimbabwe should stop evicting urban poor - UN report

[Ebusitanus]

Nothing happens to Mugabe, nothing at all, not as much as a wrist slap. Wonder where those 700.000 homeless will be heading? Who will ultimately pay for so much savagery? Who is getting blamed now, racist laws?

http://za.today.reuters.com/news/new...N-20050722.XML

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A tough U.N. report on Friday told Zimbabwe's government to halt its indiscriminate bulldozing of urban slums, which has cost 700,000 people their homes or jobs and affected 2.4 million others.
The report, commissioned by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, says the government's demolition of shantytowns was "carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering."
"The government should immediately halt any further demolitions of homes and informal businesses and create conditions for sustainable relief and reconstruction for those affected, said the report's executive summary.
The report, written by Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, the executive director of the Nairobi-based U.N.-Habitat, breaks the relative silence in the United Nations over President Robert Mugabe's policy of evicting slum dwellers from cities. Western nations have unsuccessfully tried to put the issue on the U.N. Security Council's agenda.
Human rights groups, the Commonwealth, the European Union, Britain and the United States have condemned the action, which has pushed the poor out of the cities in the depth of the Southern Hemisphere's winter.
The government has dismissed the accusations and says the crackdown, officially dubbed "Operation Restore Order," was intended to fight black market trading and other lawlessness in unplanned communities that had sprung up around the country.
But Tibaijuka's report says that regardless of the motive, the end result had enormous consequences and turned out to be a "disastrous venture" based on a set of colonial-era laws used as a tool of segregation and social exclusion.
Tibaijuka wrote that some 700,000 people had lost either their homes or their livelihoods or both as a result of the razing of the shantytowns. An additional 2.4 million people have in one way or another been affected by the demolitions.
She said immediate measures needed to be taken to bring those responsible to account and compensate people who have lost property and livelihoods.
But she did not put the blame on any individual, saying the government was collectively responsible for the action. Evidence suggested the operation was based on "improper advice" by a few people, she said.
The ill-conceived action, the report said, put an additional economic burden on the southern African nation, where more than 70 percent of the population is unemployed and food and fuel are in short supply.
Zimbabwe is saddled with foreign debt of about $4.5 billion and has been seeking a $1 billion loan from South Africa. But Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, South Africa's deputy president, who visited Harare last week, is believed to have refused to bail out Zimbabwe unless Mugabe stopped the demolitions.
Tibaijuka, a Tanzanian professor with a doctorate in agricultural economics, was sent to Zimbabwe by Annan and spent two weeks touring the country, leaving on July 9.
Mugabe, 81, and in power since independence from Britain in 1980, says Zimbabwe is being punished by opponents of his land reform program, in which the government seized white-owned farms to give to landless blacks.
But Zimbabwe's opposition contends the campaign is aimed at breaking up its strongholds among the urban poor and forcing them into rural areas where they can be more easily controlled by chiefs sympathetic to the government.
African members of the Security Council as well as Russia and China have opposed drawing attention to the Zimbabwe crisis, arguing that it was an internal issue rather than one of international peace and security, council members said. Western nations intend to ask Tibaijuka to address the 15-member body as a way of getting the matter on the agenda.