Secret film reveals Zim horrors

http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News/0,,2-11-1447_1757151,00.html

Secret film reveals Zim horrors
London - The Zimbabwean government cleared out camps for those it made
homeless in a so-called urban cleanup campaign after a UN investigator
condemned conditions there, secretly dumping their inhabitants on the
outskirts of the capital in even worse conditions, an international human
rights group said Saturday.

Amnesty International released footage it said had been smuggled out of
Zimbabwe. The footage showed people sheltering in an area known as Hopley
Farm under little more than blankets and sheets of plastic and lining up
with buckets at a mobile water tank.

Amnesty said it feared the problem was widespread, calling on the Zimbabwean
government to say whether other areas like Hopley Farm existed and ensure
aid agencies had access to them.

"Once you scatter throughout the country victims of this operation, it
becomes much harder to find them and give them assistance," Audrey Gaughran,
a London-based Amnesty researcher who was in Zimbabwe in late July and early
August, said Saturday.

Gaughran added that the campaign the government has dubbed Operation
Murambatsvina, or Drive Out Trash, should be seen in the context of
wide-ranging human rights abuses under Zimbabwe's increasingly autocratic
President Robert Mugabe. Security laws have outlawed basic freedoms of
association and speech. Independent journalists have been jailed and their
publications shut down.

Operation Murambatsvina "is the latest manifestation of a massive human
rights problem in Zimbabwe that's been going on for years," Gaughran said.

She said Amnesty obtained the Hopley Farm video shot earlier this month from
a source it would not name for fear of repercussions in Zimbabwe. A week
ago, Zimbabwe's security forces prevented Tony Hall, a Rome-based US
ambassador to the UN food agencies, from making a scheduled visit to Hopley
Farm.

Hall said he was quietly told the government did not want him to see
conditions there, but that the official reason given was that the military
ran the site and his delegation needed a special visitors permit from the
information ministry.

Gaughran said a group of the homeless had been dumped at Hopley Farm July
22, the day the UN released a report by housing expert Anna Tibaijuka
calling the clean-up campaign a "disastrous venture" that left 700 000
people without homes or jobs and violated international law.

The Zimbabwean government has accused Tibaijuka of bias and said the
clean-up campaign was meant to stem "chaotic urbanization" and improve the
lives of city dwellers. Opposition leaders claim the campaign is aimed at
driving their supporters among the urban poor to rural areas where they can
be more easily controlled.

The UN report described dire conditions at what the Zimbabwean government
had called "transit camps" for those affected by the campaign. Clearing the
transit camps appeared aimed at removing "this visible evidence of what had
happened," Amnesty's Gaughran told The Associated Press. "This may be an
attempt to hide people away."



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