Fourteen Western embassies challenged the Zimbabwe government on Saturday to acknowledge it faced a humanitarian crisis following a campaign of evictions and the demolition of thousands of homes, shacks and markets across the country.
The Western nations said that they shared the deep concern expressed earlier this week by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan about the plight of tens of thousands of people made homeless in the May-June urban clean-up campaign, known in the local Shona language as Operation Murambatsvina, or Drive Out the Trash.
”We share the UN’s dismay at the rejection by the government of Zimbabwe of offers of UN assistance to the most vulnerable groups, in particular in relation to the provision of temporary shelter,” the embassies said in a joint statement.
The government has said it will not accept help to provide temporary shelters for the homeless, and denies that displaced families are in need of immediate humanitarian aid.
It said it would only accept aid to erect permanent housing.
The government said the evictions campaign — in which homes, shacks and market stalls were bulldozed — was aimed at clearing illegal settlements and curbing black-market trading by stall holders.
The United Nations estimated at least 700 000 people were left homeless and another two million market vendors and stall-holders lost their means of livelihood.
”Tens of thousands of people [are] still homeless and in need of assistance five months after the eviction campaign began,” said the embassies of Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, the European Union, Greece, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
”We endorse the Secretary-General’s appeal to the government of Zimbabwe to ensure that those who are out in the open, without shelter and without means of sustaining their livelihoods, are provided with humanitarian assistance,” they said.
The donor nations said they were committed to providing substantial resources to tackle what they called ”grave humanitarian needs” in the country.
The government insisted in a response to the United Nations that the most urgent needs for shelter have been met, and that Annan was misinformed about conditions facing displaced families before the upcoming rainy season.
Zimbabwe is suffering acute shortages of food, gasoline and essential imports in the worst economic crisis since independence in 1980.
The collapse of the economy has been blamed largely on economic mismanagement, corruption and the often violently seizures of at least 5 000 white-owned commercial farms in Zimbabwe, once a regional breadbasket. – Sapa-AP