Zimbabwe accused of creating "crisis"

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Six months after Zimbabwe's government tore down the homes and businesses of hundreds of thousands of city dwellers it considered potential political opponents, at least 570,000 people remain homeless, many living outside with little or no shelter, according to a new Human Rights Watch report.

Zimbabwe's government is deliberately obstructing efforts by humanitarian groups to assist the displaced, the group said, creating what it termed a "massive humanitarian crisis" that the government has tried to conceal and other African nations have largely ignored.

"The very survival of many, particularly children and the chronically ill, is at risk. This appalling situation cannot be allowed to continue," urged Tiseke Kasambala, a Human Rights Watch researcher, at a Johannesburg news conference Thursday.

During a visit to Zimbabwe in October, researchers from the New York-based rights group found families living in the rubble of their former homes, trying to shelter under their belongings or packed into the already crowded homes of relatives. In one instance, investigators found five orphans huddled under a piece of tin roofing after police had demolished the cottage left to them by their parents and then burned the plastic sheeting they had been using as a makeshift shelter.

The government has refused to allow relief agencies to provide tents or plastic sheeting to displaced families because "it would be an acknowledgement of the massive crisis it has created," Kasambala said. "This is a crisis that is being hidden away."

President Robert Mugabe denies that thousands are homeless in the country, calling reports to the contrary "a figment of [the] imagination."

Zimbabwe's government insists its demolition effort — termed Operation Murambatsvina, or "Clear Out the Filth" — was simply a public-order campaign designed to raze illegal homes and businesses and clear out areas where prostitutes and undesirables lived.

But political analysts say the government's subsequent campaign to push most of the displaced out of the cities — strongholds of opposition to Mugabe's government — and into the rural areas is an effort to gain greater political control, in part by dispersing opponents and by leaving them dependent on aid handed out by rural chiefs loyal to Mugabe's government.

The eviction campaign, which destroyed even well-made brick homes in many neighborhoods as well as long-established street markets, has left hundreds of thousands with no homes and no source of income, the group said. Children are dropping out of school as their parents can no longer afford to pay the fees; others are contracting pneumonia after months of sleeping outside, in the cold and rain.

The displacements also have disrupted the country's anti-retroviral treatment program for people with AIDS, and thousands have dropped out after being dumped in rural areas, far from their treatment clinics. Others no longer have sufficient food to make the drugs effective. Many young women, left without any source of income, also are turning to prostitution to survive, a situation likely to drive up the country's HIV infection rate, researchers said.

"This is a terrible situation," said Kasambala, one of the Human Rights Watch investigators who traveled to Zimbabwe, now in the throes of an economic meltdown after Mugabe seized most of the country's farmland and handed it to political cronies and peasants too ill-equipped to farm it effectively.

The United Nations' World Food Program reported Thursday that at least 3 million Zimbabweans will need food aid to survive until the next harvest, in part because prices of the national staple, corn, have soared 500 to 700 percent since last year.

While the Zimbabwean government is primarily responsible for the desperate situation of those displaced by Operation Murambatsvina, organizations such as the African Union and aid groups organized under the U.N. also are failing to adequately address the situation, the human-rights group charged.

United Nations officials, reached Thursday in Harare, declined to comment on the report. But the U.N.'s emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, is due to visit Zimbabwe to assess the situation starting Saturday.