ZIMBABWE: A key United Nations report sharply criticises the Zimbabwean government for bulldozing urban slums and insists it should stop razing shanty towns.
The report, commissioned by secretary general Kofi Annan and released to UN members yesterday, breaks the relative silence in the UN over president Robert Mugabe's policy of evicting hundreds of thousands of people. Western nations have unsuccessfully tried to put the issue on the UN security council's agenda.
Tanzanian Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, the executive director of the Nairobi-based UN-Habitat, who wrote the report after spending two weeks touring Zimbabwe, says more than two million people have been affected by the demolition.
Human rights groups, the Commonwealth, the European Union, Britain and the United States have condemned the action, which has pushed the poor out of the cities in the depth of winter.
The government has dismissed the accusations and says the crackdown, officially called "Operation Restore Order", was intended to fight black market trading and other lawlessness in unplanned communities which had sprung up around the country.
But Ms Tibaijuka's report says that regardless of the motive, the end result of action was illconceived, inhumane and put an additional economic burden on the southern African nation, where more than 70 per cent of the population is unemployed and foreign currency, food and fuel are in short supply.
The Zimbabwean government was given the report on Wednesday and has 48 hours to respond but it has made no comment so far.
President Mugabe says Zimbabwe is being punished by opponents of his land reform program. But Zimbabwe's opposition contends the campaign is aimed at breaking up its strongholds among the urban poor and forcing them into rural areas, where they can be more easily controlled by chiefs sympathetic to the government.
Western diplomats will attempt to get Ms Tibaijuka to brief the security council to put the issue on the agenda. African members of the council, as well as Russia and China, have been against drawing attention to the Zimbabwe crisis, arguing that it was an internal issue rather than one that affected international peace and security, council members said.