Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2005. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Los Angeles Times - December 20, 2005
Robyn Dixon
Like thousands of people dumped in rural areas after the government razed squatter shacks and street stalls, she crept back to the remains of this settlement outside Zimbabwe's second-largest city, Bulawayo, because she could not survive in the countryside.
As the Zimbabwe government and United Nations argue about providing shelter for the people who have been thrown out of their homes, thousands like Ms. Lunga have no secure refuge and live in fear of police raids.
The U.N.'s top humanitarian affairs official, Jan Egeland, tried to persuade President Robert Mugabe this month to accept tents for those left homeless after the government implemented "Operation Murambatsvina," a Shona phrase meaning "clean out the filth." The demolitions, which began in late May, destroyed the homes of 700,000 people and affected a total of 2.4 million people, according to a highly critical U.N. report.
"The humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe is extremely serious, and it is deteriorating," Mr. Egeland told journalists after his visit this month, describing the evictions as "one of the worst things at the worst possible moment in Zimbabwe."
But Mr. Mugabe told Mr. Egeland, "We are not a tents people. ... We believe in houses," said presidential spokesman George Charamba.
The government has agreed, however, to accept food aid for 3 million hungry people, almost a quarter of the country's population.
Zimbabwe announced a massive housing construction plan in the aftermath of Operation Murambatsvina, but by December a few hundred houses had been built and the program had ground to a halt. Human Rights Watch said the program was unaffordable to the vast majority of displaced people because it required proof of regular salary and payment of a deposit.
After riot police and bulldozers destroyed houses in Killarney, thousands of displaced people found shelter in the city's churches until police evicted them again. They were sent to the countryside in what critics call a campaign to dismantle the opposition's urban support.
When Ms. Lunga, a 43-year-old widow with HIV, arrived in the village she'd been exiled to, she found no food and no clinic. She struggled back to the ruins of Killarney, along with hundreds of others, but she has no money for transport to Bulawayo clinics or churches where food is handed out, and is too ill to make the walk of nearly two hours.
She lay curled on a ragged blanket on the dank ground in a smoky, leaking hut. She had a fever and had been vomiting for three days, but she had not seen a doctor since the evictions last summer.
The Rev. Albert Chatindo of the Christian Faith Fellowship Church is coordinating efforts to trace those evicted and to feed the hungry, but he said the churches did not have enough food or vehicles to feed those sent into the country.
"I see the government has no love for the people. Since they moved them and dumped them, they never followed up," he said.
Mr. Chatindo said the demolitions dismantled delicate social networks of support: Most people had no family or friends in the rural areas they were sent to. Some had been rejected by local chiefs.
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