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The United Nations estimates that the campaign, Operation Murambatsvina, using a Shona word meaning "drive out the rubbish," has so far left , people homeless and 30, vendors jobless. Human rights and civic leaders say the numbers could be several times that, a view that seemed plausible during a four-day visit to Harare and Bulawayo, the nation's second-largest city, and points between. No matter the precise numbers, the campaign is clearly one of the most aggressive steps yet taken against the Zimbabwe population by a government that has in recent years met rising international condemnation for stifling its opponents.
On the road from Bulawayo to Harare, pickup trucks and rickety handcarts groan with the belongings of newly evicted families, and fires from torched flea markets flicker in the dusk.
The police man roadblocks and drive trucks through slums littered with bulldozed houses looking for resistance to the ongoing purge, but there is none. In shattered Harare-area townships like Mbare and Mabvuku, a slum of about , people 10 miles east of Harare, the homeless sit beside furniture and clothes rescued from the destruction. There and elsewhere thousands sleep in the open, on farms and urban streets, in Zimbabwe's near-freezing winter nights.
The police ransacked and burned whole blocks of vendors' stalls this week and last in Bulawayo, and razed squatter camps, slums and roadside stands last week in Victoria Falls. The campaign has spread to rural areas like Rimuka, a township 85 miles southwest of Harare, where policemen equipped with riot gear destroyed homes and stands on Tuesday.
Then they told them to pick up their things and leave. Some other older people were crying, just like saying, 'This is the end of my life. Where will I put my things? Where will I go? Mugabe says the campaign is a long-overdue step to rid Zimbabwe of what he told Parliament on Thursday was "a chaotic state of affairs" in the nation's cities and towns.
The street vendors being uprooted work in the black market and pay no taxes, he has said, and the shacks being demolished were built illegally on plots already occupied by registered homes that have been spared destruction. Mugabe said in a speech on May Beyond their crumbling roads and overtaxed utilities, he said, urban areas "had become havens for illicit and criminal practices and activities which just could not be allowed to go on.
But by attacking the shanty dwellers and so-called informal traders, whose black-market businesses have supplanted much of the official state-dominated economy, the government also hopes to reclaim control of the foreign currency that the official economy desperately needs. That would solidify Mr. Mugabe's authority at a time when Zimbabwe's economic and human crises seem to have eroded it.
One Harare political analyst who refused to be identified for fear of retribution said: "I think they know what the country is going to look like in a few months, and they want to clear out the towns, to clear these people way out of here. It's a governing strategy, no doubt about it. Whatever the political benefits, however, witnesses and experts say the impact on the campaign's targets is already proving catastrophic.
With no income and no homes, many families are fleeing to the countryside, where both poverty and hunger are worse even than in the cities, and jobs are nonexistent.
With no black market to offer basic goods that the state-run economy has failed to provide, shortages of food and gasoline are certain to worsen. The government has rounded up some of the newly homeless and deposited them on farms, telling them that they will be offered legal housing later. But that seems unlikely; in Harare alone, a city of 1. Meanwhile, the evicted are further crowding the overstuffed homes of relatives and neighbors, or sleeping in the open. Stories of suffering and death abound.
Kanyuchi told of encountering a funeral procession last week for two children who died of exposure after being evicted.
Suicides also are rising because of the "brutal" evictions, said the special rapporteur on adequate housing at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Miloon Kothari. Kothari said Friday in a telephone interview from Geneva. They just have nowhere to go. Interviews this week with victims of the campaign only underscored that point.
Last year we stayed at Norma Jean's, which we found a bit underwhelming. Thank you so much, Angela! I really appreciate your very clear and precise tips.
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