Posted on 06/04/2005 9:09:33 PM PDT by quidnunc
Harare – Until a few days ago, Mbare on the outskirts of Harare was Zimbabwe’s largest market, recommended in guidebooks for a lively afternoon visit, and also one of the capital’s oldest townships. Yesterday, along with much of the country, it looked like a place flattened by war.
Street after street had been turned into a battleground of twisted wreckage, torn wood and piles of broken bricks. Sirens wailed and plumes of smoke rose from the smouldering ground, in the midst of which stood the occasional wardrobe or iron bed-frame, all that remained of family homes.
A few figures picked among the debris like vultures, while others huddled in small dazed groups at the sides. Every so often, one of Zimbabwe’s new Chinese warplanes roared across the sky. All along the main road to the bus station were lines of people with their remaining belongings bundled on their heads, like refugees escaping from battle.
The perpetrator was not some enemy invader or even a rival ethnic group, but the embattled citizens’ own government.
Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian regime has chosen to consolidate its recent election victory by bulldozing homes and demolishing markets, leaving vast swathes of the capital and other cities in ruins and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees with neither shelter nor livelihood. Locals are calling it the Zimbabwean tsunami.
“This is Pol Pot style depopulation of cities,” said David Coltart, legal affairs spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). “It’s a sinister pre- emptive strike designed to remove the maximum possible number of people from urban areas to rural areas where they are easier to control.”
Operation Murambatsvina or “Clean Up the Filth” began with no warning two weeks ago when trucks of police and youth militia clad in brand new riot-protection gear arrived at Hatcliff, a shanty town. Stunned residents were ordered to leave and go back to the rural areas from which they came, as police began smashing their dwellings and a large local orphanage.
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This is hard to watch go unstopped.
It must be a living hell there on the ground.
I can't believe this is allowed to go on.
Hopefully they return armed to kill him and his friends.
+++
This would be the best outcome.
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