UN Experts deplore Zimbabwe's campaign of forced evictions by AP / BBC / AllAfrica / IRIN News 11:09am 25th Jun, 2005   27 June 2005    "UN housing expert arrives in Zimbabwe, 10 experts deplore forced evictions". (UN News)    United Nations human rights experts have expressed grave concerns about human rights violations resulting from the Zimbabwean Government's eviction of illegal dwellers.    10 United Nations Special Rapporteurs on several human freedoms and rights issued a statement expressing concern about the "recent mass forced evictions in Zimbabwe and related human rights violations" and raising questions about the negative effects on supplies of water and food, education and health care, including HIV/AIDS treatment.    The Government should "immediately meet its human rights responsibilities, particularly with regard to the situation of those people who have already been displaced," they said in a statement issued through the Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR).    They said they "deplore and demand an end to the Government's campaign of forced evictions and the conditions under which it has been conducted" and they expressed disquiet that "the forced evictions of so many people may soon lead to critical health and economic concerns that will be a major threat to life for the most directly affected Zimbabweans."    The evictions had targeted informal traders and families living in informal settlements, including women with HIV/AIDS, widows, children with disabilities and HIV/AIDS orphans and many of those evicted, including women, are reported to have been beaten by police, the experts said.    The people evicted were given no prior notice and no opportunity to appeal or to retrieve their property before its destruction, they said.    Johannesburg, June 23, 2005    Groups call for action against Zimbabwe. (Associated Press)    Rights groups showed a smuggled video Thursday of hundreds of thousands of poor Zimbabweans living in the open in the winter cold after the government tore down their homes in what it describes as an urban renewal project.    At news conferences in Africa and at the United Nations, more than 200 international human rights and civic groups said the campaign, known as Operation Drive Out Trash, was "a grave violation of international human rights law and a disturbing affront to human dignity."    Police prevent journalists from filming the demolitions, so the footage was collected clandestinely by the church-based Solidarity Peace Trust.    The groups, including London-based Amnesty International and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, released the footage showing bewildered families sleeping in the open in the winter cold after police torched and bulldozed their shanty town homes. Street markets were also targeted, their stalls left in smoldering ruins.    Zimbabwe opposition leaders, who have their base among the urban poor, say the monthlong campaign is meant to punish their supporters for voting against the ruling party in recent parliamentary elections.    President Robert Mugabe has described Drive Out Trash as an urban renewal campaign..Since police launched the blitz in Harare on May 19, it has been extended throughout the country, causing sporadic rioting as impoverished residents tried to resist the destruction of their homes and livelihoods.    This week, the campaign in a nation facing severe food shortages moved on to the vegetable gardens planted by the poor in vacant lots around Harare. Authorities say the plots threaten the environment.    International rights groups said at least 300,000 people have lost their homes by conservative estimates. The United Nations puts the figure as high as 1.5 million, though Zimbabwe police only acknowledge about 120,000.    More than 42,000 people have also been arrested, fined or had their goods confiscated, police said in the state-run Herald newspaper.    The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, who has been a sharp critic of the evictions, was shown on the human rights groups' video saying he was so angered by the campaign he was "ready to stand before a gun and be shot."    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." Charity and church officials say 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."    At Hatcliffe Extension, a Harare township, residents told human rights groups they were being forced from homes given to them by the government itself ahead of elections in 2000 and 2002.    They said in the footage they were driven in trucks to a patch of wilderness on the outskirts of the capital, where they were shown surrounded by their paltry possessions.    "We were dumped here by people with whips," said one young man, whose name was not released for fear of retribution. "We don't know what went wrong. We were given these stands (plots) by the government."    When lawyers asked a high court to bloc the Hatcliffe evictions, they were told the removals were justified because some residents had made improvements to their properties without prior government approval, Arnold Tsunga of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights said at a news conference in Johannesburg.    The rights groups urged the African Union, which is meeting in Libya next month, and the United Nations to act against Zimbabwe — but did not specify how.    They also demanded that Zimbabwe compensate the displaced and allow them access to humanitarian workers, who they say are currently being blocked from providing relief.    Copyright 2005. The Associated Press.    24 June, 2005    "Zimbabwe's human tragedy", by Alastair Leithead. (BBC News, Zimbabwe)    Lavender and Herbert Nyika tidied a small earth grave of their two-year-old daughter Charmaine. Her mother adjusted the small cross next to the scrap metal headstone and remembered the day that police came with bulldozers and destroyed their home. "I didn't even have time to bring Charmaine to safety," she told me. "She was killed when the walls collapsed on top of her." A piece of red plastic flaps in the wind outside the Nyika's home - a symbol of loss in the family. All that remains of the house itself is the foundations and a pile of rubble. At least two other children have also been killed. Charmaine's family blame the government, saying it is they who tell the police to continue the destruction.    A conservative estimate from the UN puts the number of displaced people at 275,000, but it appears to be a lot more than that on the ground.    Riot police are systematically going from suburb to suburb in the towns and cities, destroying the homes of the poorest Zimbabweans and leaving them destitute and desperate.    But these are not all illegal or makeshift settlements - many are brick and concrete houses and business that were built during Zimbabwe's colonial days.    In Bulawayo, the church halls are full of the newly homeless. "They came to my home and they burned it down," one man told me as he stirred a pot of bubbling maize meal. "They say they have a strategy, they say they are clearing up the towns." Those who made it to refuge in church grounds are the lucky ones.    The destruction is now taking place on such a scale that the police cannot keep up. In some cases they are forcing people to demolish their own homes, or charging them a fee to do it. Those who choose to do it themselves at least have one last opportunity to salvage some meagre possessions or a piece of roofing to take with them as they are displaced.    Displacement camps    Outside Harare, thousands of people have been dumped on a farm by the government and left to fend for themselves without clean water, food or sanitation.    At one of the camps, Caledonia Farm, intelligence agents mingled among the dispossessed. The entrance was blocked by police, forcing us to sneak in through the bush to see the conditions there.    People arranged what was left of their possessions around them as though they still had a home, taking shelter under a few sheets and blankets. Elsewhere, others sleep in the open or try to go out to their extended families in rural areas.    But a lack of fuel in some places makes that increasingly difficult; buses stand in petrol queues while the people sleep in the bitter cold of Zimbabwe's winter.    It is like a scene from a natural disaster, but the Zimbabwean government is doing this to its own people. But for what purpose? Some believe the campaign is meant as punishment to the urban voters who sided with the opposition; others say it is to disperse an angry poor population before thoughts of revolution can surface from within it. Others see a longer term purpose of creating a new class of rural poor, dependent on government aid and ultimately prepared to support the government because of that aid.    Whatever the government's motivation, this is a human tragedy - and it gets worse by the day.    June 23, 2005    "Civil Society coalition calls for End to Evictions in Zimbabwe". (IRIN News)    An African coalition of civil society groups appealed on Thursday for intervention by the African Union (AU) and the UN to stop the forced eviction of informal settlers and traders in Zimbabwe.    "We want the AU to pressurise the Zimbabwean authorities to stop the evictions and allow humanitarian aid agencies to assist those who have been left homeless," Arnold Tsunga of the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) told IRIN.    At least 200,000 people have been left without shelter since the operation to 'clean up' Zimbabwe's cities and towns began last month. Authorities claimed the operation was aimed at ridding urban areas of informal flea markets and illegal residential shacks and houses, saying they had become a haven for criminal activities.    Five press conferences were held across the continent on Thursday, where the joint appeal made by NGOs, including Amnesty International, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights urged Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, as chair of the AU, to put the crisis in Zimbabwe on the agenda of the upcoming AU assembly, scheduled to take place in Libya on 4 and 5 July.    The coalition also called on relevant bodies at the UN, including the Secretary-General, to publicly condemn the ongoing mass human rights violations and take effective action to stop them.    UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced the appointment this week of Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, the Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, as his Special Envoy for Human Settlement Issues in Zimbabwe to investigate the situation.    Tsunga claimed there had been instances where aid agencies had been prevented from providing assistance to affected communities; ZLHR had sought court interventions to stop the eviction, but failed.    "Tens of thousands of ordinary Zimbabweans have been left sleeping on the streets next to the rubble of their destroyed homes - it is time that the African heads of state took action," said Hassen Lorgat of the South Africa-based Zimbabwe Solidarity and Consultation Forum.    Lorgat added that civil societies across the region were attempting to form a coalition to strengthen support for their counterparts in Zimbabwe. Other NGOs joining the appeal are the Inter-Africa Network for Human Rights, the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, and the International Crisis Group.    3 June 2005    "UN housing rights expert urges Zimbabwe to halt mass evictions", by Miloon Kothari. (UN News)    With a wave of forced mass evictions reportedly taking place in Zimbabwe, the United Nations expert on housing rights today urged Government authorities to halt the campaign, saying that it could constitute a gross violation of human rights.    Miloon Kothari, who is the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the right to adequate housing, reminded the Zimbabwean authorities of their obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights, which the country ratified in 1991, and which bars such evictions unless strict conditions are met.    Zimbabwe, he noted, was also a member of the Commission on Human Rights, resolutions of which have stated that that the practice of forced eviction constituted a gross violation of human rights.    Mr. Kothari urged the Government to reply to his appeal on an urgent basis, providing detailed information on the events and on the measures taken to ensure compliance with Zimbabwe's international law obligations under the human rights instruments it has ratified.
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