Zimbabwe condemns UN emergency houses for homeless

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe launched another verbal attack on Wednesday on United Nations efforts to house those left homeless by the government's demolition of shanty towns, describing one model house as a "mockery to Africans."

President Robert Mugabe's government has rejected offers of emergency aid from the world body for thousands whose homes were destroyed during its urban clean-up campaign this year, although it says it wants U.N. help to build permanent homes.

Mugabe has led vicious attacks on the U.N. and senior officials including Secretary-General Kofi Annan, accusing them of unfairly dramatizing Zimbabwe's humanitarian crisis on behalf of his Western critics. The U.N. says the crackdown displaced 700,000 people from their homes or jobs in the informal trading sector.

On Wednesday, Zimbabwe's state-controlled Herald newspaper said Local Government Minister Ignatius Chombo had condemned as "substandard and a mockery to Africans" a model emergency two-roomed house put up by the U.N. at an estate where thousands are living in plastic shacks.

He said the house, with walls made of bricks and asbestos sheets, fell short of government expectations and human dignity.

"This structure is not permanent. We want permanent houses for our people," the minister was quoted as saying.

"Comrade Chombo described the house ... as below human dignity, saying the people who designed the structure had been guided by a 'this-is-good-for-the-African' attitude," the newspaper said.

Local UN officials were not available for immediate comment.

BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe - President Robert G. Mugabe has one word for reports that Operation Drive Out Trash, the urban-demolition campaign aimed at slum dwellers that his government describes as a civic beautification program, has rendered thousands of his impoverished citizens homeless.

"Nonsense," he told ABC News...

Clearly, Mr. Mugabe has not been to Bulawayo.

More than simple homelessness binds the three families. Until a few months ago, they all lived in Killarney, a shantytown with an improbable name that had housed Bulawayo's less fortunate citizens since the early 1980's.

Today, Killarney is a moonscape of sunbaked dirt, scrub and burned-out rubble. Last May and June, police officers reduced its huts to wreckage, burned their remains and routed the area's more than 800 residents as part of Operation Drive Out Trash.

"They had iron bars as long as this," Mr. Tembo said of the police, stretching his arms wide. "They demolished part of every hut, and then they told us to destroy the rest."

Mr. Tembo said he refused, and so the police finished the job, leveling his two-room home built of wooden poles and metal walls.

More than five months after the demolitions began, Zimbabwe's government continues to insist that the destruction of 133,000 households, by its own count, was a long-overdue slum-clearance effort that has caused its citizens only temporary inconvenience.

The government contends that most of those made homeless have been relocated to the rural villages where they lived before migrating to the cities, mostly to look for work. Others, it says, will be placed in thousands of new homes being built to replace the illegal huts that have been razed.

Mr. Mugabe has rejected the United Nations' attempt to raise $30 million to aid the victims of Operation Drive Out Trash on the ground that Zimbabwe has no crisis. Despite a public appeal by Secretary General Kofi Annan on Oct. 31, the government so far has rejected any assistance that implies that its evicted citizens are in distress.

Similarly, the government's home-building plan has fallen far short of its promises and of the demand. Mr. Mugabe pledged three trillion Zimbabwe dollars for construction in July - about $30 million in American dollars, and dropping steadily given Zimbabwe's 400 percent inflation rate. But the national treasury is all but bare, and in Bulawayo, where 1,000 homes were promised in short order, fewer than 100 are being built.

Ninety-five percent are now back," he said. "They're still struggling, still homeless, still penniless, still shelterless. They've been made refugees in their own country."

Killarney is proof of that. Before the demolitions, it was dirt-poor but thriving, subdivided into three villages with stores and services. All that has been razed and burned. Northeast of town, not far off the road to Bulawayo's airport, Nokuthula Dube, her own children and an orphaned niece and nephew share the two rooms of a half-finished home. Ten stunted cornstalks and some greens grow in a makeshift plot outside, but the five live on donated cornmeal from a nearby church.

Across town, Gertrude Moyo, who lived in Killarney for 23 years before being driven out on June 11, lives in a 10-foot-by-15-foot tent with her four children. Her husband died a year ago. She said the police first took the family to a transit camp for the homeless, then to the tent. Mrs. Moyo said she was told to wait for a new home.

In fact, the government is building a row of houses next to her tent, and says they are for victims of the demolitions. But Ms. Moyo said the police had told her that her family was going not to a new home, but to a plot of farmland north of town.

Down a dirt path, past the charred remains of huts in what was once Killarney Village Two, Mhulupheki Tshuma, 29, his wife, Ncadisani, and their 20-month-old son survive by scavenging plastic containers and collecting white pebbles, which Mr. Tshuma sells as decorations for graves. Two other children have been sent to live with relatives elsewhere in town.

Mr. Tshuma was born here, and his parents died here. The family lived in a two-room mud hut when the police arrived in early June and burned it down. "The only thing I took out," Ms. Tshuma said, "was the children."

After wandering for three months, they returned on Sept. 4 and built a hovel. The police demolished it on Sept. 29. Now they live in the open air, their living space bounded by knee-high mud walls and pieces of rubbish.

Mr. Tshuma said the police returned early this month and beat him roundly, telling him he had to leave. But that is impossible. "We came here," he said, "because we didn't have anywhere else to go."