Mugabe praises police after 1.5m left homeless (Guardian)

[Up2Late]

(I know their is little interest in African Politics here, but it's amazing how similar the language Mugabe's uses and his ideas, to what's comes out of the WH these days. Really, I guess, "Birds of a feather...")

Mugabe praises police after 1.5m left homeless

Agencies
Friday June 24, 2005

The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, today congratulated police on their role in a campaign against slum-dwellers that has left 1.5 million people homeless. The campaign has triggered a wave of international condemnation and seen thousands of homes bulldozed and torched over the past month. Although it has targeted opponents of Mr Mugabe's regime, it is officially described as an urban renewal campaign.

Operation Murambatsvina - a word meaning 'drive out trash' - has resulted in the destruction of shantytowns, street markets and even vegetable gardens set up by many city dwellers facing acute food shortages.

Addressing a police graduation ceremony on Thursday, Mr Mugabe said the campaign was wiping out havens for criminals and black market profiteers. Last week, state radio quoted him as saying he was "happy that a new breed of organised entrepreneurs will emerge".

"The government is fully behind the clean up and applauded the police for ensuring the success of the operation," he said. Zimbabwe's opposition, much of whose support is among the urban poor, says the campaign is aimed at punishing people for voting against the ruling Zanu-PF party in the country's recent elections.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/zimbabwe/article/0,2763,1513999,00.html?gusrc=rss>
(more at link above)

[pie]

1. You are right. Sounds just like bush.

[arcos]

2. Let's see what Mugabe's defenders here will say....

:eyes:

[1932]

5. The other side of the story (which I'm not endorsing):

The MDC convinced a lot of people in the countryside to move to the city and set up these towns on the outskirts of the city, and they were going to incite them to riot once they got a critical mass of people and desperation. (This town popped up pretty recently, according to this version of the story.)

Mugabe knows that he's not going to win the international public relations battle either way -- by suppressing a riot later, or clearing the towns now --and he decided he'd be better off clearing them out now.

Clearing them out now meant that the police went around telling people to tear their own houses down. It looked bad, but there was no violence. Letting the MDC have this town reach critical mass and then having people worked into a frenzy almost certainly would have meant a riot violently suppressed by the government later.

Mugabe also wants these people out working the land. In Zimbabwe, the wealth in the cities comes from working the land out in the country. There's no wealth to get in the city if nobody is out in the country working the land. So Mugabe probably rationalizes this by thinking that these poor people on the outskirts of the city are never going to make any money. If they go back and work the land, there will be a chance at wealth for them.

And before you bite the head off the messenger, I emphasize, I'm not even playing devil's advocate. I'm not advocating this argument. I just thought you'd like to know the other side of the story, which I heard on BBC's World Service, or Radio Deutchevella, or someplace like that, when this first started a few weeks ago.

[arcos]

13. I understand...

I'm sure there's much more to this story than what the news piece tells us, but anyway I don't consider Mugabe a good guy... sure, the government has promised to build new houses, as has been said in this thread. But in no way I can support Mugabe or think he's a good guy after all the authoritarian bullshit he's into.

[1932]

17. I'm sure Zimbabwe will be better when he's gone, but a lot of hatred of

Mugabe from the west really comes down to problems the IMF has with him not agreeing to go with the Washington Consensus (read Stiglitz's Globalization and its Discontents if you don't know what the Washington Consensus is).

Mugabe used to be much much worse than he is now. In fact, the West used to like him when he did things like his civil war when he actually killed a lot of black Zimbabweans. But the thing that he used to do that made the western media praise him then was that he didn't hold the British to the Lancaster Agreement (to give all the colonial land back to Zimbabweans) and he followed the Washington Consensus.

You can mark the exact moment when the media changed their opinion. It was when he decided to enforce the Lancaster Agreement and when he rejected the Washington Consensus.

[Up2Late]

7. Did you see that coming? Are you followed by a Mugabe defender?

This is the same guy who kick all the "White Farmers" off their land and then almost caused a famine, because the people he gave the land to, didn't know how to farm, right?

[1932]

8. Was that really the problem? People didn't know how to farm?

I read that the problem was that Mugabe wouldn't let the people build structures on the land for some reason. If they couldn't build barns, they couldn't keep many animals, and if they couldn't keep animals, they could only farm as much as they could plow with a few animals.

So the government promissed to bring tractors around, but a lot of farmers never saw the tractors, which was, apparently, because they didn't have enough fuel, which was because the Zimbabwean dollar has lost value, so Mugabe opened a few Zimbabwean investment banks, which the IMF told him to close becasue they were cutting into American bank profits (made by capital flight, apparently, which makes it hard for Zimbabwe to keep their money valuable, which makes it hard to buy gas, or soemthing like that)...oh, and then there was the bad weather that's hurt all Zimbabwe's neighbors too.

In other words, I don't think that it had anything to do at all with farming knowledge. I think black farmers have the farming knowledge gene and the willing to work hard gene.

[Up2Late]

9. Are you asking me a question? Because I was asking the person...

...who's post I was replying to, a clarification question. I only know what I heard on NPR the last few years, and what I've read here, and what the U.N. has said about him. From my limited knowledge Zimbabwe, I would say Mugabe sounds like a terrible President.

I purposely did NOT reply to you because you seem to think you know everything about Robert Mugabe and what's going on inside his Government. Who the Hell are you anyway? So far, you impressed me as a remarkably Rude and unpleasant person to have around.

Why don't you do us all a favor and write what you think has been going on in Zimbabwe and in the mind and Government of Robert Mugabe over the last 10-15 years. Because I, like most Americans, know very little about most of Africa, let alone enough to debate someone who acts like they know everything about Zimbabwe.

[1932]

16. I probably know only a little more than you know, and I've written it

out here.

I've heard the argument about land reform in central and south america and south africa that's it's wrong because you're giving land to people who are too stupid and lazy to farm, and I've heard the crticism that that's racist and merely an argument for maintaining the inequitable status quo. In fact, in South Africa after land reform, the farmers who took over are actually more productive than the corporate farmers who were using the land before land reform.

Every liberal/progressive evaluation of land reform I've heard has said that the thing holding back the recipients of land is capital (in the form of loans), but that it's easier to get capital when you have land as collateral, and that aquiring knowledge is relatively easy (especially when you're the person in control of the land). I've also read that a problem with land reform in latin america has been that often the poor are so desperate that they sell their title back to the rich for a fraction of its value, so you have to put in some mechanisms that reduce the incentive to sell imediately.

Hope none of that offended you. It's just stuff that I've read. And perhaps you'll appreciate why I might have wanted to share that after reading your post which I'm sure you didn't intend to be racist, but which repeats a cliche that people are often willing to believe (that black and poor farmers just can't farm as well as rich white farmers) because it is subtly racist.

[arcos]

12. not right now...

But I've had big discussions with Mugabe supporters... I understand the opposition may be worse, but that doesn't mean that Mugabe is a good guy either way. He's viciously homophobic, and that's enough to lose any respect I may have for his other policies.

[barb162]

3. that man is destroying that country very quickly

[1932]

4. Not that it matters, but that "M" word means "clean up" or "restore order"

There's a Zimbabwean artist named Murambatsvina. He's a sculptor.

[bemildred]

6. Give that man a job at the Department of Health and Human Services. nt

[Judi Lynn]

10. An overlooked part of the article:

The Zimbabwean government has pledged to build new houses for those it has made homeless.

It's buried within the article. Apparently it is accurate to understand they aren't just being abandoned.

[arcos]

11. But when?

Ok, they pledged to build houses, but when? Within a few months? Within a couple of years? Within 10 years?

[oscar111]

14. Mugabe and social benefits {food, shelter, jobs, doctors} Where he stand?

most confusing to read all this..

Pls sum up in a few words, the essence of his rule so far... acts not promises only.

Is he LW.. giving social benefits.. or RW?

i am totally unclear on Mr. M.

[Laughing Mirror]

15. BBC says UN says 250,000 homeless

The Guardian says 1.5 million. Somebody from the proud old colonial predatory UK press needs to get their numbers straight.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4620977.stm

Zimbabwe's president has defended his government's campaign of demolitions and evictions which the UN believes has left about 250,000 people homeless.

...

I remember the urban renewal project in 1960s in Southwest DC, where my family is originally from, that cleared out 35,000 very poor people from those shacks and shanties and wretched slums that were a horrible eyesore right in the shadow of the US Capitol, and were of course a terrible embarrassment to the capital of the free world and of course had to go.

What happened to those poor displaced people? They got warehoused in festering hot chicken coop cinderblock projects hidden away on the other side of the river where no tourist ever goes and nobody could ever see them.

Poor people are fucked no matter where they live.

[1932]

18. What's the population of Zimbabwe? 10 million? 15 million?

I'm too lazy to google, but I'm going to guess that the population of Harrare (is that where this shanty town was?) is less than 5 million -- maybe 2 million or 1 million and the whole country is maybe 12 million.

1.5 million people would be a significant percentage of the population outside of Harrare and would have been like a second city right next to the existing city.

[fedsron2us]

19. These people moved to Harare because of Mugabe's policies

After independence nearly all new investment was channeled by Mugabe's Shona dominated government into Harare. As a consequence the majority of building and business development has occurred there. By comparison the Matabele capital Bulawayo has received virtually nothing and it infrastructure has hardly changed since the 1970s. Given these circumstance it is no surprise that hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans have flooded into Harare because that was where there was the best chance to eke out a living. Even though their shanty home have been demolished I expect these people will return to the capital at the first possible opportunity.

[1932]

20. I suspect that's generally right...

...but isn't the town that was cleared a recent development (last couple months?).

After independence, there was a bloody civil war in Zimbabwe (which the west was happy to see). I heard a ZANU-PF guy on the BBC a couple years ago say that the government regrets the attrocities they committed. I don't know if that means that they've tried to even out the distribution of wealth across those 70s political divides. But, if it's the case that this shanty town developed recently, I suspect it's not because of the 70s political divide, but because of something more recent (like the droughts and inflation -- and then there's the ZANU-PF spin: the MDC convinced people to move to the city to promote a destabilizing situation that would result in riots which the government would then violently suppress, which would undermine their authority).

[Up2Late]

21. UPDATE: African Union defends Mugabe (The Guardian)

African Union defends Mugabe

Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor, Vikram Dodd and Eric Allison
Saturday June 25, 2005
The Guardian

The African Union yesterday rejected calls by Britain and the US to intervene in Zimbabwe, where the president, Robert Mugabe, is conducting a slum clearance programme that has left hundreds of thousands homeless.

Desmond Orjiako, a spokesman for the AU, which represents 53 African states, said: "I do not think it is proper for the AU commission to start running the internal affairs of members' states." He suggested there were various good reasons for the demolitions, including preventing Harare turning into a slum.

The Foreign Office, which has been leading a campaign against Mr Mugabe, has expressed frustration over the last four years at the failure of South Africa and other AU members to act against - or even criticise - Mr Mugabe in spite of human rights abuses and rigged elections.

But Britain's position was weakened yesterday by a Zimbabwean archbishop, who urged it to stop sending failed asylum seekers back to the Mugabe regime.

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/zimbabwe/article/0,2763,1514360,00.html>
(more at link above)

(More NEW articles about Zimbabwe at this link, Click Here)

[mom cat]

22. US Supreme Court gives developers right to bulldose homes. How far

away from tha mugabee tactics in this country? read the following:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3944381

theearthisround (118 posts) Sat Jun-25-05 01:55 AM
Original message
Shocking New Developments In Supreme Court vs. Homeowners Case
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2005/240605new...

(snip)
Cristofaro's family have lived in New London for forty two years and the city had already previously seized his first home by imminent domain in 1971.

Cristofaro related a series of actions by local government officials and their hired New London Development Corporation thugs that amount to nothing less than outright intimidation, harassment and extortion.

These include;

- An insulting offer of $60,000 from the government on a home worth $215,000.

- Unannounced visits to Cristofaro's elderly parent's home demanding they sign a contract to hand over their property.

- Intimidating and harassing phone calls at all hours of the day.

- Parking bulldozers and wrecking balls outside the houses pointing at the property with threats of "your house is next."

- Revving the engines of the bulldozers outside the houses in the early morning hours of the morning.

- Cristofaro's mother becoming distraught and suffering a heart attack after being served with condemnation papers that said she no longer owned her property and had ninety days to leave.

- A death bed plea from a 93-year-old resident begging "what about my house, what about my house?" The man had been living in his home for 80 years. The contractors would park construction vehicles on his property, make his house literally shake and would, Waco-style, shine bright floodlights into his home as his blind wife cowered in fear.

- A threat to charge residents back rent if they lost the case, effectively meaning the homeowners will have to pay the city to be kicked out of their own homes. One resident, William von Winkle (pictured above), would owe the city $200,000 in back rent.

....
(much more)
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2005/240605new...