A year after Operation Murambatsvina ('Drive Out Filth'), the government's sudden campaign to purge informal settlements, the lives of thousands of affected Zimbabweans have not changed.Uprooted last year from homes built illegally in the capital, Harare, families with five or more members have been squeezed into tiny living spaces authorised by the government on the outskirts of the city, with no source of employment and, in some cases, no access to medical facilities.
At night, families of six or seven often share the mud floor of a temporary shelter or one of the few new government-constructed brick houses - both about 12sq.m - smaller than an average garage. If the families have yet to be allocated a house, they are sometimes crammed into even smaller spaces. Those who failed to make it to the camps have chosen to either reconstruct their demolished dwellings or return to their rural homes.
According to the Zimbabwean government, the operation was aimed at clearing slums and flushing out criminals, but left more than 700,000 people homeless or without a livelihood in the winter of 2005. As yet another winter sets in, living conditions in the open fields serving as resettlement camps around Harare could not be harsher.
Residents struggle to protect themselves from the biting winds or a passing shower, using plastic sheets as the doors and windows of unfinished brick houses or self-erected wood and corrugated iron shacks.
Full article: A year after urban purge conditions for displaced still grim
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Copyright IRIN 2006
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