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Zimbabwe demolitions: Your accounts | |||||||||||||
The crackdown known as "Operation Murambatsvina [Drive out rubbish]", which the United Nations says has left some 200,000 people homeless, has been condemned by Zimbabwe's churches, teachers and doctors. Police have met some resistance from township residents in Bulawayo while demolishing what the government calls "illegal structures". President Robert Mugabe said it is needed to "restore sanity" to Zimbabwe's towns and cities. Have you witnessed the demolitions taking place in Zimbabwe? What do you think about these actions? Send us your views and experiences. You can also send your pictures and video to: yourpics@bbc.co.uk If you are willing to talk to the BBC News website about your experiences, please include your telephone number. It will not be published. If you would like to remain anonymous please ask.
The following comments reflect the balance of opinion we have received so far: I am a policeman in Bulawayo, and I tell you that these slums are filled with
criminals and opponents of the elected government. Once again the western media
makes up lies about the Mugabe government when it is a clean-up mission to make
the city beautiful and prosperous for the law-abiding. Out of our business
please! I agree with Zimbabwe government for the demolitions but let there be land
for the victim.
At midday three pickup trucks arrived at the intersection of Corn Street and Owunje Road. About thirty men got out and divided into three or four teams. They worked down Corn Street, summoning residents from their homes. Once a group of three or four houses were emptied, the team leader would throw in a bottle of gasoline and a piece of burning cloth. The teams then moved on to the next group of houses. Because they were concentrated over such a small area, there was no resistance. Those ahead of them desperately trying to empty their homes, those behind hopelessly trying to extinguish the flames. Corn Street has no public water supply. After an hour, the men returned to their vehicles and rested, drinking beer.
By mid afternoon they had lost interest, and drove away. About forty homes on
Corn St were gutted, leaving at least 150 men, women and children without
shelter. To my knowledge there was only one injury, a woman who tried to enter
her burning home, and sustained severe burns on her legs. Neighbours took her to
a local clinic.
On 14 June the police made their way to Mabvuku, one of Zimbabwe's townships, they totally destroyed the small cottages that were housing a better half of that community's population. Many people were seen walking up and down the street in the middle of night. No-one was spared, not even 80-year-old grannies. The government has gone
mad, people say. If they won an overwhelming majority then why terrorise all
these people? People are sleeping out in the open and worsening the food
shortages. University students at Midlands state university are now stranded because the
cottages that they were staying in have been destroyed. The international community and the UN in particular have failed to take
action against human rights violations in Zimbabwe. Mugabe has clearly proved to
be an enemy of the people. How can he evict people he yesterday encouraged to
repossess their land? What is legal in Zimbabwe? Thanks for the news. We really need it as our state controlled media does not
cover some of these issues. People are really suffering in Zimbabwe's cities and
towns and we really need Mugabe and his government to do something positive
about it, even to resign before the situation is too horrible. Total carnage is the only feasible description of what I have witnessed over
the past three to four weeks. Intimidation by and presence of military personnel
are the only prevention of a mass demonstration in my opinion.
The regime is merciless. Our brothers and sisters are suffering. I am also
one of the victims. My landlord was ordered by the council to demolish the
cottage that I have been staying in. I am now living with a cousin. The
Zimbabweans have been made to suffer by this power-hungry man. It is numbing the way these clean ups are taking place. Lifetime investments
and the very livelihoods destroyed in the wink of an eye. There is no better way
to describe it except blatant Satanism I think. There is a chill that goes down
your spine the moment the trucks full of police and the bulldozers arrive.
Machiavelli at his best... use maximum force to shock into despair!
We are calling the operation our tsunami because it is sudden and its
after-effects devastating. The operation does not care whether you are for the
ruling party or not. The war veterans are the hardest hit, as they were building
illegal structures on unallocated land. The police came, saluted the Zimbabwean
flag at one war veteran's home, then removed the flag and proceeded to demolish.
It is a humanitarian crisis. On a positive note, the cities are now
clean.
I am the Director and founder of Amakhosi Theatre in Makhokhoba, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. For the past four days the theatre centre has been covered by black clouds of smoke as riot police order residents to burn down their survival stands, while ordering others to destroy their homes. Hundreds of artists are homeless as I write and their families have been affected by the operation. I am producing a TV series Amakorokoza that runs on Zimbabwe TV1 every Tuesday and when we went to shoot at the homestead of the Nkala family were we have been shooting for the past two years all their four huts had been pulled down and thatching grass burnt. I counted a convoy of 12 heavily loaded police cars, armed for war, ordering every villager to knock down their huts. Over 2,000 families have been staying here since 1984. We could not film but just stood there shocked by what was happening before our eyes. A crying Mrs Nkala pulled out documents to prove that Zanu-PF had been promising to resettle them for the past 12 yrs... and now this. Zanu-PF works in amazing ways! When I came to the theatre this morning I met at the garden one of the actors whose house extension has been pulled down. I asked where he slept and he told me that he slept behind a sofa with his wife and 16 other relatives in one room. I asked him why he had come to the theatre today as the Zanu-PF government had just announced that they have made 250,000 stands [plots of land] available. I asked him: "Why are you not somewhere registering to get a stand?" He said, "Ah I will not do that because they will come after us when we have put all our sweat in developing the stands and pull everything down accusing us for some wrong doing." While the smoke fills the clouds everyone asks themselves what the objective
of Zanu-PF is by doing this to its citizens. Why are they doing this? I have
learnt one thing from this experience - great leaders can do great things.
It's pathetic, traumatising, terrible and health threatening. I finished my
degree last year. I was working in Harare, living in an illegal shack. I am now
heading for my rural home, Mhondoro. I have nowhere to stay, so I am forced to
resign. 13 years of education wasted. How do you expect the nation to develop
when the educated are driven out of the cities?
My two roomed home was destroyed yesterday. The police came while I was at work and instructed my wife to remove all belongings from the two cottages before razing them to the ground. When I and the two families lodging in the cottages came back from work at around 6pm, we found only the wreckage. This was despite a three months notice broadcast on ZTV by Minister Chombo, giving us three months to regularise these structures. It is also puzzling me that even in police camps, there are many illegal structures such as tin houses, wooden cabins etc that are spared by the police. I really believe this operation is politically motivated as the police openly ask us to reconsider our positions. I am also wondering why they are not arresting all those who illegally sold council land to people first or made them refund the people they defrauded first before the destruction. Is it to cover up? Or is it a ploy to send people in disarray so that they
will not come back to claim their monies? Imagine people who each paid Z$10
million for the stand and incurred a further Z$100 million to build, being given
30 minutes to destroy and leave and told "go back where you came
from". This is a terribly chaotic situation. Many people have been left homeless and
hopeless. The act was mistimed, in the middle of winter, and with no eviction
notices for people to prepare alternatives. However, I believe in a just God who
will act in His time against such a cruel regime. My message to Zimbabweans is
to look up to God, who knows all our needs and will support and strengthen us in
such trying times. I witnessed the demolition of Tongogara camp, Mufakose and Mbare. The post demotion scene looks more like a war zone after air raids - there is rubble all over not to mention the many women and children left homeless. Some with nowhere to go. It's just pathetic that anyone with a God given conscience should protest. If what is considered legal supersedes basic human rights to basic shelter in
winter then one is left wondering the moral basis of our constitution and
actions. Surely a more humane way of dealing with urban overpopulation could
have been found. I am a Zimbabwean now trying to make a living in the UK. I returned to a few weeks ago to visit family. Unfortunately while I was there we drove through and witnessed the so-called clean up on Whitecliff Farm. Hundreds of riot and armed police, some just in civilian clothing, were burning, bulldozing and physically smashing anything and anyone that got in their way. It is now winter in Zimbabwe and apparently a lot of these people have been rounded up and put into fenced areas, like concentration camps, with nothing but the clothes on their back. They have no shelter, nothing. They were starving already, and now are homeless and freezing. Whatever they did own was loaded onto separate trucks and never seen again. I
just wonder and would love to know what it is going to take for this madness to
stop and for the people of Zimbabwe to just have a break.
When hundreds of thousands of people are made homeless by war the UN quickly steps in and it is made an issue for the Security Council. Yet here we have those same thousands being thrown out onto the streets in winter, being made needlessly homeless, children have been pulled out of school and some of the adult population have had to quit their jobs and not a word from the UN. A correspondent somewhere likened this to the madness of Pol Pot and yet the world stands by. What has the world learned then? What use is it for us to tell you of eyewitness accounts, so that the world might be entertained, pass the day by with idle ruminations on our plight because we have seen that the world can't be moved? But the stories are moving. People traumatised beyond action who live out on the streets simply because they don't have the energy nor the will to pack up their belongings and go elsewhere out of the biting cold. I saw a man who tried in vain to sell his wardrobe at a giveaway price so
that he could buy firewood to keep his family warm and fed during the night. In
the end he broke it up and used it as firewood. These are the stories but there
is so much more to tell because you can't really tell it until you've spent the
night out, homeless, without hope of finding another and felt the cold,
desolation and despair. I am waiting for the room I am staying in to go down,
maybe tomorrow or the day after. Then I'll write an eyewitness account. I hope
it will do someone some good, pass the day off a touch easier. | |||||||||||||
Those ahead of them desperately trying to empty their homes, those
behind hopelessly trying to extinguish the flames 
