Members of the Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) group, march on the streets of Harare, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005. About 10 women were arrested during the march advocating a boycott of Senatorial elections set for November 26 in Zimbabwe. (AP Photo)
Posted on 11/17/2005 1:43:44 PM PST by NormsRevenge
HARARE, Zimbabwe - Zimbabwe has backtracked on its refusal to allow the U.N. to help build emergency housing for people whose homes were demolished in a government eviction campaign.
U.N. officials in Harare said Thursday that Housing Minister Ignatius Chombo accepted the assistance in a letter earlier this week. Building is to start next week on the first 10 of a proposed 2,500 units.
The government had initially refused U.N. offers to provide temporary shelters for families made homeless by a campaign of evictions in May and June, saying it wanted permanent structures.
Yasuhiro Ueki, the U.N. spokesman in Harare, said U.N. officials were now discussing technical details with the government.
"We are not talking about tents here," he said. But he added that they would not be conventional houses, even though they would stand on a concrete base and floor.
"They are rather small," he said.
Chombo's letter said the government had approved the U.N. request to proceed with the first phase of the building program.
Ueki said U.N. humanitarian agencies were deeply concerned by the plight of evicted families still living in the open as the annual rainy season approaches.
The United Nations estimated at least 700,000 people lost their homes and another 2 million market vendors and stall-holders lost their means of livelihood in the countrywide evictions known in the local Shona language as Operation Murambatsvina, or Drive Out the Trash.
Tens of thousands of homes, shacks and markets were demolished by bulldozers in the operation widely criticized by human rights groups.
The government had said it would not accept help to provide temporary shelters for the homeless and denied the evictions created a humanitarian crisis in a country already reeling from the worst economic crisis since independence in 1980.
It said the evictions were aimed at clearing illegal settlements and curbing black-market trading by market stall holders and it would only accept aid to build permanent housing.
Chombo's letter made no mention of the evictions or that the shelters proposed by the United Nations were not conventional dwellings.
Zimbabwe is suffering acute shortages of food, gasoline and essential imports.
The collapse of the economy has been blamed largely on economic mismanagement, corruption and the often violent seizures of at least 5,000 white-owned commercial farms in the country, once a regional breadbasket.
Members of the Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) group, march on the streets of Harare, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005. About 10 women were arrested during the march advocating a boycott of Senatorial elections set for November 26 in Zimbabwe. (AP Photo)
A Zimbabwean woman stands in the smouldering ruins of her Harare house which was demolished in June 2005. At least 14 young children have died of salmonella poisoning in Zimbabwe's capital Harare as the city battles an unrelated dysentery outbreak that hospitalised 200 people.(AFP/File)
And how long before he razes those to the ground also?
That should keep Jimmy Carter busy for awhile and out of our hair.
Why is the UN giving housing to a nation that destroyed it's own?
Oh, wait. This is the UN we're talking about.
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