Zimbabwe civic society will next week commemorate Operation Murambatsvina, the government’s controversial urban-renewal exercise last year under which armed police and soldiers demolished townships and city backyard cottages, leaving close to a million people homeless.
The commemoration — which will see civic society activists and journalists touring city suburbs to assess the plight of residents a year after the demolition exercise — is being organised by the National Association of Non-Governmental Organisations (Nango), grouping civic organisations in the country.
”The objective of the field trip is to give the media an opportunity to derive an accurate picture of the impact of the operation and an insight as to the relevance of the commemoration to affected groups,” wrote Nango official Fambai Ngirandi in a letter to the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists that was shown to independent news provider ZimOnline on Wednesday.
The home-demolition campaign began on May 17 last year without prior notice and just weeks after the government had won a controversial parliamentary election.
The campaign — which was roundly condemned by Western governments, the opposition, churches and human rights groups as a violation of poor people’s rights — continued until July, with President Robert Mugabe only ordering security forces to stop demolishing people’s homes after the United Nations had sent in a special envoy to probe the exercise.
In an unusually hard-hitting report by a UN diplomat, the special envoy, Anna Tibaijuka, said the home-demolition campaign had left at least 700 000 people homeless while indirectly affecting another 2,4-million people.
Tibaijuka said the government urban-renewal campaign had violated human rights and possibly breached international law.
Mugabe and his government, who insist the controversial exercise was necessary to battle crime and restore the beauty of Zimbabwe’s cities, rejected the UN report, saying Tibaijuka had been under pressure from Western countries to write a negative report in a bid to demonise Harare. — ZimOnline