[Marxism] Mugabe and the homeless

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

From ABC television's Nightline, Nov. 3rd:

JONATHAN KARL, ABC NEWS
(Voice Over) Robert Mugabe calls this "operation clear the filth." The
destruction is so widespread, people in Zimbabwe call it "operation
tsunami." The devastation is even visible from space. An entire
neighborhood wiped off the face of the earth in just two weeks. In an
exclusive interview, President Mugabe told ABC News he is simply trying to
clean up slums.

(Off Camera) You announced the program on May 19th, correct? Some of the
destruction happened within days and some people had absolutely no notice
that their homes were going to be destroyed.

PRESIDENT ROBERT MUGABE
No, every people were given notice, generally. Perhaps some people had not
heard that the government was going to destroy ...

JONATHAN KARL
(Off Camera) Well, what do you say to somebody whose home - somebody comes
to you, "your home has to be destroyed now"? They have no notice. What do
you say to those people?

PRESIDENT ROBERT MUGABE
Well, maybe, if it's just one person - we say it's an exception. But if
it's the whole lot of people, then of course there is a case. But it wasn't
like that.

JONATHAN KARL
(Voice Over) The pictures tell a different story. Women with young children
in the rubble of their homes. A UN report says since May, 700,000 people
have been left without homes or livelihoods. We confronted President Mugabe
with one of the reports eyewitness accounts.

JONATHAN KARL
(Off Camera) This 19-year-old says, "I was living in a cottage with my
younger sister and my disabled brother. Then, the cleanup operation came
and destroyed the cottage. Now we have nowhere to go and we are sleeping
outside. Our blankets and our other property were stolen. We're not going
to school because we no place to stay. We're sleeping outside with my
disabled brother in a cold place." This is just one of thousands and
thousands of stories.

PRESIDENT ROBERT MUGABE
Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands. Where are the
thousands? You go there now and see whether those thousands are there.
Where are they? A figment of their imagination. They exaggerated this.
Obviously, when you destroy slums, even as you prepare new places for them,
there is a dislocation, disorganization of a family for that moment. And
please understand us. We have to clean, to do the cleanup operation,
destroy slums and get these people into new homes.

JONATHAN KARL
(Off Camera) The UN report says 500,000 people have been left homeless with
no place to go.

PRESIDENT ROBERT MUGABE
They say 700,000.

JONATHAN KARL
(Off Camera) 700,000 have either lost their livelihoods or their homes or
both. And you talk to people in the human rights community who have been to
Zimbabwe, who have done the research on this and they say that this number
is -vastly understates the problem. It's over a million people that are
left without homes.

PRESIDENT ROBERT MUGABE
That's nonsense. Anyone who wants facts, you come and see what's happening.
We removed them from slums and put them in new places. It wasn't just a
sudden, you know, thing that we felt we had to do. It had been planned for
quite a long time, with funds having been set aside to provide new homes
for people. How else could we have done it? Just tell me.

===

NY Times, November 13, 2005
In Zimbabwe, Homeless Belie Leader's Claim
By MICHAEL WINES

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe - President Robert G. Mugabe has one word for reports
that Operation Drive Out Trash, the urban-demolition campaign aimed at slum
dwellers that his government describes as a civic beautification program,
has rendered thousands of his impoverished citizens homeless.

"Nonsense," he told ABC News in an interview broadcast on Nov. 3.
"Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands. Where are the
thousands? You go there now and see whether those thousands are there.
Where are they? A figment of their imagination."

Clearly, Mr. Mugabe has not been to Bulawayo.

Just three miles west of the center of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest
city, Robson Tembo and his wife, Ticole, live in the open air in a small
pen, 12 feet by 12 feet, built of deadwood and scrap. Rows of plastic
grocery sacks hold the assets they have collected over 72 years.

Five miles north, Nokuthula Dube, 22, her two daughters and two orphaned
relatives are squatting in an unfinished two-room house of cinder blocks.
During a reporter's recent visit, an unidentified woman lay curled up on
the concrete floor of the house's only closet, sleeping.

On the other side of town, Gertrude Moyo, 28, lives with her four children
and seven other families in tents, pitched in the bush.

More than simple homelessness binds the three families. Until a few months
ago, they all lived in Killarney, a shantytown with an improbable name that
had housed Bulawayo's less fortunate citizens since the early 1980's.

Today, Killarney is a moonscape of sunbaked dirt, scrub and burned-out
rubble. Last May and June, police officers reduced its huts to wreckage,
burned their remains and routed the area's more than 800 residents as part
of Operation Drive Out Trash.

"They had iron bars as long as this," Mr. Tembo said of the police,
stretching his arms wide. "They demolished part of every hut, and then they
told us to destroy the rest."

Mr. Tembo said he refused, and so the police finished the job, leveling his
two-room home built of wooden poles and metal walls.

More than five months after the demolitions began, Zimbabwe's government
continues to insist that the destruction of 133,000 households, by its own
count, was a long-overdue slum-clearance effort that has caused its
citizens only temporary inconvenience.

The government contends that most of those made homeless have been
relocated to the rural villages where they lived before migrating to the
cities, mostly to look for work. Others, it says, will be placed in
thousands of new homes being built to replace the illegal huts that have
been razed.

Mr. Mugabe has rejected the United Nations' attempt to raise $30 million to
aid the victims of Operation Drive Out Trash on the ground that Zimbabwe
has no crisis. Despite a public appeal by Secretary General Kofi Annan on
Oct. 31, the government so far has rejected any assistance that implies
that its evicted citizens are in distress.

Yet many are in great distress. Relying on the estimates of Zimbabwe's
government, the United Nations says 700,000 people were displaced by the
May and June demolitions and a later campaign, Operation Going Forward, No
Turning Back, in which police officers routed those who tried to return to
the cities and rebuild.

An August survey of more than 23,000 Zimbabwean households by the South
Africa-based advocacy group ActionAid International places the number of
those made homeless as high as 1.2 million - more than 1 in 10 Zimbabweans.

Where many have gone is a mystery. The government carted thousands to
holding camps that were later disbanded, and transported thousands more by
trucks into the countryside and left them there, ostensibly near their
rural homes. Those people are registered with local officials, but almost
certainly, they are but a fraction of the total.

In the Nkayi district, a vast expanse of bush terrain north of Bulawayo
with 110,000 people, fewer than 700 families are known to have been
relocated, according to church officials involved in assisting them.

Similarly, the government's home-building plan has fallen far short of its
promises and of the demand. Mr. Mugabe pledged three trillion Zimbabwe
dollars for construction in July - about $30 million in American dollars,
and dropping steadily given Zimbabwe's 400 percent inflation rate. But the
national treasury is all but bare, and in Bulawayo, where 1,000 homes were
promised in short order, fewer than 100 are being built.

So where are the homeless?

"This remains what I'd call an invisible humanitarian crisis - invisible to
international eyes, the reason being that those who were displaced have
been dispersed," said David Mwaniki, who oversees ActionAid's work in Zimbabwe.

Many are probably with relatives; a few have fled the country. Others are
in the bush, surviving off the kindness of neighbors. Many more have
vanished into hovels and tents and half-built houses.

The United Nations says 32,000 of Bulawayo's 675,000 residents lost their
homes and were ordered to leave the city during the demolition campaign;
city officials put the number at 45,000. Torden Moyo, who directs an
alliance of local civic groups called Bulawayo Agenda, says there is no
doubt where they have gone.

"Ninety-five percent are now back," he said. "They're still struggling,
still homeless, still penniless, still shelterless. They've been made
refugees in their own country."

Killarney is proof of that. Before the demolitions, it was dirt-poor but
thriving, subdivided into three villages with stores and services. All that
has been razed and burned. Northeast of town, not far off the road to
Bulawayo's airport, Nokuthula Dube, her own children and an orphaned niece
and nephew share the two rooms of a half-finished home. Ten stunted
cornstalks and some greens grow in a makeshift plot outside, but the five
live on donated cornmeal from a nearby church.

Ms. Dube returned from her niece's school in June to find her home in
Killarney's Village One wrecked and on fire. Homeless and pregnant, she
lost her housecleaning job in a nearby suburb. Her husband, Nomen Moyo, had
to move away to keep his job as a gardener. Ms. Dube said she and the
children walked for a week, sleeping by the road, before finding the shell
where they now live.

In September, Ms. Dube had a daughter, Mtokhozisi. She left her 3-year-old
daughter, Nomathembe, and the two orphans - 10-year-old Pentronella and
14-year-old Kevin - alone while she gave birth in a local hospital. She
walked home from the hospital with her newborn. "I left in the morning,"
she said, "and arrived around 3."

A few weeks ago, a man who said he was the house's owner appeared. "He
wants us to leave," she said. "He's claiming that this is his house."

Asked where they would go, she said, "Only God knows."

Across town, Gertrude Moyo, who lived in Killarney for 23 years before
being driven out on June 11, lives in a 10-foot-by-15-foot tent with her
four children. Her husband died a year ago. She said the police first took
the family to a transit camp for the homeless, then to the tent. Mrs. Moyo
said she was told to wait for a new home.

In fact, the government is building a row of houses next to her tent, and
says they are for victims of the demolitions. But Ms. Moyo said the police
had told her that her family was going not to a new home, but to a plot of
farmland north of town.

Robson Tembo and his wife drifted from one church to a second, then to a
succession of relatives' homes before finally returning in late September
to Killarney's Village Three. They built their scrap-metal enclosure not
far from the two-room home in which they once lived, and which the police
had razed in May.

Once a miner, Mr. Tembo is now too infirm to walk very far, much less work.
A son who cleans houses gives the couple maize; a second sometimes brings
money.

Mr. Tembo's great worry, he said, is that the police, who cruise up and
down Killarney's main dirt road, will evict the couple again. "I'm from
Malawi," he said. "But if they tear down this hut of mine, I will stay
here, because I have nowhere to go in Malawi."

Local church workers, who have assumed much of the burden of finding and
caring for the homeless here, say that about 240 of Killarney's residents
have returned, many living in the sort of scrap-metal lean-to's that the
Tembos cobbled together.

Down a dirt path, past the charred remains of huts in what was once
Killarney Village Two, Mhulupheki Tshuma, 29, his wife, Ncadisani, and
their 20-month-old son survive by scavenging plastic containers and
collecting white pebbles, which Mr. Tshuma sells as decorations for graves.
Two other children have been sent to live with relatives elsewhere in town.

Mr. Tshuma was born here, and his parents died here. The family lived in a
two-room mud hut when the police arrived in early June and burned it down.
"The only thing I took out," Ms. Tshuma said, "was the children."

After wandering for three months, they returned on Sept. 4 and built a
hovel. The police demolished it on Sept. 29. Now they live in the open air,
their living space bounded by knee-high mud walls and pieces of rubbish.

Mr. Tshuma said the police returned early this month and beat him roundly,
telling him he had to leave. But that is impossible. "We came here," he
said, "because we didn't have anywhere else to go."


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