Chicago Tribune - December 2, 2005
Laurie Goering, lgoering@tribune.com

Worse, 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," Tiseke Kasambala, a Human Rights Watch researcher, urged 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 overcrowded 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 acknowledgment of the massive crisis it has created," Kasambala said. "This is a crisis that is being hidden away."

Mugabe denies homelessness

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 that its demolition effort--Operation Murambatsvina, or "Drive 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, first in the cold and now in the 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.

Groups also faulted

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 UN also are failing to adequately address the situation, the human-rights group charged.

Fearful of being ejected from the country entirely and then being unable to help anyone there, the UN has failed to stand up to the Zimbabwean government's efforts to obstruct the delivery of aid, Human Rights Watch officials charged.

When UNICEF erected tents in one Harare camp for the displaced, for instance, police quickly tore them down again, the group said. UN officials wrote a letter of protest but then didn't publicize the situation or take further action when the Zimbabwean government simply ignored the letter.

Since then, the UN has failed to come up with a plan to track the displaced, particularly those forced into rural areas, or help hundreds of thousands still without shelter or regular access to food, the group charged.

Fearful of Mugabe's reaction, "they've folded their hand of cards before Harare's called them on it," said Lance Lattig, an Africa specialist with Human Rights Watch.

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

Lattig also criticized the African Union for not denouncing Mugabe's eviction campaign, even after the group's own special envoy on the rights of refugees and the internally displaced was barred from entering the country.

"In the spirit of African solidarity," he said, African nations remain hesitant to criticize even "gross violations of human rights."

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