60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

mass violence in zimbabwe 2005 – murambatsvina 223
the operation. What they later presented to an astonished world was a
programme of urban renewal to rid the country of slums. It is not diffi
cult to discount the main thrust of these suggestions. Anyone with
a genuine concern for urban renewal starts with a plan for construction,
not destruction; and the concern for legality simply beggars belief,
coming from a government which had made a virtue of ignoring and
defying any law which stood in its way. The government itself had encouraged
lawlessness, not only through its violent extra-legal approach
to land reform, but through patronage, encouragement of informal
trading and housing construction and deliberate subversion of impartial
law enforcement. The black market currency trade was fuelled by
the government through mismanagement, through sourcing its own
forex (foreign exchange) on the black market, and through allocating
cheap forex to cronies for profi t making.
Furthermore, the government did not use legal means to achieve the
‘cleaning up’. One cannot combat illegality by another illegal act. It
claimed to be acting under the Regional and Town Planning Act
(Section 32), but this Act requires that a month’s notice be given to
demolish an illegal structure. The Urban Councils Act (Sections 199
(2) and (3)) states quite explicitly that the individual owner or occupier
of an illegal structure must be given notice of intention to destroy,
and has 28 days in which to fi le an objection. Only after the operation
had begun did Harare Council place blanket advertisements warning
people of the pending destruction of illegal dwellings. A date for the
beginning of the operation was given as June 20, but the demolitions
began almost immediately. In Bulawayo high-density areas, police
went street by street giving verbal notifi cation of one or two days. In
Victoria Falls shacks were just burned with virtually no notice at all.
Certainly, a government notorious for its promotion of lawlessness
and chaos cannot hide behind a claim of concern for legality and the
need to restore order. Besides, many of the structures and businesses
were in fact legal, built to plans approved by local councils, or operating
under licences and paying rents to council for stands.
Probable underlying reasons
What was the real reason? Various explanations have been given, none
of which seems quite adequate to explain the devastation which this
campaign visited on hundreds of thousands of lives, and on the body
of Zimbabwean society. But the government’s own explanations do
give hints at the real reasons – whereas lawlessness and disorder on the
farms may have seemed to promote government policy, the lack of
regulation in towns was beginning to work against them.