UN report slams Zimbabwe's razing of urban slums

UNITED NATIONS - A UN report has called Zimbabwe's bulldozing of urban slums a disastrous venture and blamed the government for the demolition campaign but avoided putting responsibility on President Robert Mugabe.

The report's author, Tanzanian Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, executive director of the Nairobi-based UN-Habitat agency, which deals with urban slum dwellers, said the crackdown was "carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering."

Tibaijuka's report said some 700,000 people had lost either their homes or livelihoods or both in demolitions that affected another 2.4 million people in one way or another.

She and Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his own statement, called on the government to stop evictions immediately and to ensure those who orchestrated the policy be held accountable.

At a news conference, Tibaijuka, sent to Zimbabwe for two weeks by Annan, stressed, however, that the world needed to help the southern African nation recover and send aid to humanitarian groups and the government.

She said it was not up to her to assign blame, especially against Mugabe. The 81-year old former revolutionary leader has many friends in Africa as well as in China, which supported him in the war for independence from Britain in the late 1970s.

"President Mugabe was obviously concerned about what happened," said Tibaijuka. "It was very clear that here was a leader who wanted to leave this behind him."

Her report said the government was collectively responsible for the action but evidence suggested the operation was based on "improper advice" by a few people.

BREAKS SILENCE

Still, the tough report, the first detailed survey of the destruction, breaks the silence in the United Nations over Zimbabwe. The African Union has not commented publicly and the United States, Britain and European countries have tried without success to put the crisis on the UN Security Council's agenda.

The current council president, Greek Ambassador Adamantios Vassilakis would like Tibaijuka to brief the 15-member body on Tuesday or Wednesday but China and Algeria said they had to ask their governments first, council members reported.

The Zimbabwean government has dismissed criticisms of the crackdown, officially dubbed "Operation Restore Order," saying it was intended to fight black market trading and lawlessness in unplanned communities around the country.

Zimbabwe Foreign Minister Simbarashe Mumbengegwi called the report biased, hostile and false, saying it "described the operation in vastly judgmental language which clearly demonstrates its inbuilt bias against the operation."

He told a news conference in the capital, Harare, that to allege that the action violated national and international legal frameworks "is definitely false."

But Tibaijuka said that regardless of the motive for the evictions, the end result was a "disastrous venture" in the cities in the depth of the southern Hemisphere winter.

The ill-conceived action, she said in the report, put an additional economic burden on Zimbabwe, where more than 70 per cent of the population is unemployed, and food is scarce.

Zimbabwe is saddled with foreign debt of about US$4.5 billion and has been seeking a $1 billion loan from South Africa. But Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, South Africa's deputy president, is believed to have refused the loan unless the demolitions stop.

Mugabe says Zimbabwe is being punished by opponents of his land reform program in 2000, in which the government seized white-owned farms to give to landless blacks. Britain withdrew aid to the program, accusing Mugabe of giving land to cronies.

But Zimbabwe's opposition contends the campaign is aimed at breaking up its strongholds among the urban poor and forcing them into rural areas where they can be more easily controlled by chiefs sympathetic to the government.

- REUTERS