United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is due in Zimbabwe in March to see for himself the effects of the government’s controversial shack clearance campaign, the state-controlled Herald reported on Friday.
A foreign affairs spokesperson was quoted by the newspaper as saying that President Robert Mugabe agreed to the visit after discussion’s with a top UN official at the Franco-African summit held in Mali in December.
”At that meeting with the UN Under Secretary General for Political Affairs Professor Ibrahim Gambari it was agreed the Secretary General of the UN, Mr Kofi Annan, would visit Zimbabwe in March this year at a mutually agreed date,” foreign affairs
spokesperson John Mayowe said in a statement.
The visit by the secretary general comes after two UN envoys visited the country last year and condemned the government’s controversial clearance of shacks, homes and flea markets in towns and cities across Zimbabwe.
The six-week-long Operation Murambatsvina, launched last May, is estimated to have made 700 000 people homeless and jobless.
At a conference of his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union — Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) party held last month, Mugabe described the two envoys — Anna Tibaijuka and Jan Egeland — as ”agents of the British”.
Delegates at the conference resolved that Zimbabwe would not host any more UN envoys.
Mugabe’s government claims that both Tibaijuka and Egeland wrote one-sided reports on the urban clearance campaign.
The authorities say Operation Murambatsvina was meant to ease pressure on overcrowded municipalities and stamp out a flourishing black market in fuel, foreign currency and scarce goods.
Critics and the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) say it was meant to chase restless urbanites out into the countryside where Mugabe’s party dominates.
The Herald said the authorities hoped Annan’s visit would stop the UN sending a ”flurry” of envoys to the Southern African country.
”Hopes are high that Mr Annans visit would thwart Western plans to send a flurry of UN envoys to Zimbabwe in a bid to portray the country as a disaster area warranting the intervention of the UN Security Council,” the Herald, which closely reflects government thinking, said in its report.
But relations are tense between the UN and the Zimbabwean government, which has rejected an offer of tents that the world body wanted to use to shelter thousands of people living rough following the demolition of their homes.
The government has also said it does not accept the design of houses the UN wants to build for some of those made homeless.
The government said a model of one of the houses the UN intends to build — made partly of asbestos — was ”sub-standard”. – Sapa-DPA