VIDAL SHOULD BE INFORMED ABOUT ZIHOPFES CURRENT SITUATION

Zimbabwe is being hypocritically vilified by West

John Vidal

01 July 2005 11:59

For a month now, the BBC, CNN, ITV and others have been
reporting what has been portrayed as one of the greatest humanitarian and
human rights disasters in years. At least 200 000 people -- sometimes this
figure grows to 250 000 or even 300 000 -- are said to have been forcibly
evicted from slum areas of Harare in Zimbabwe. The figure peaked last week
at 1,5-million, last week the BBC reckoned that bulldozers were now
"crashing through the homes of 500,000 people".

In fact, only about 1,2-million people live in Harare and no one
is suggesting that half the population has fled in terror or that most of
the city has been wrecked. So where are all these allegedly terrorised
people? A few thousand have been filmed in makeshift camps but not many
more. Who is trying to count the numbers? They are almost always attributed
to an unnamed person in an unnamed United Nations (UN) agency. But read the
only UN statement on the evictions and it says nothing of 200 000 people.

The evictions -- which are clearly happening on a wide scale --
have been seized on by the West, and the former colonial power Britain in
particular, as another reason to demonise President Mugabe and further
humiliate long-suffering Zimbabwe. It's open season on the Harare regime and
it appears that anyone can say anything they like without recourse to
accuracy or reality. Whipped into a frenzy of hypocritical outrage, the
European Union(EU) , Britain and the United States (US), as well as the
World Bank -- all of which have been responsible for millions of evictions
in Africa and elsewhere as conditions of infrastructure projects -- have
rushed to condemn the "atrocities".

The vilification of Mugabe is now out of control. The UN
security council and the G8 have been asked to debate the evictions, and
Mugabe is being compared to Pol Pot in Cambodia. Meanwhile, the evictions
are mentioned in the same breath as the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic
cleansing in the Balkans -- although perhaps only three people have so far
accidentally died. Only at the very end of some reports is it said that the
Harare city authority's stated reason for the evictions is to build better,
legal houses for 150 000 people.

Perspective is needed. The summary removal of people at gunpoint
from their homes is indefensible, almost certainly unnecessary, and probably
economically counter-productive, but it is not unusual in the developing
world. Every year millions of poor people are evicted to make way for
tourism, dams, roads and airports, for events like the Olympics, and for the
gentrification and beautification of cities, national parks and urban
redevelopments.

Nor is it new. Forced evictions, brutal land grabs and slum
clearances were all used by Britain's own rulers in the past to enlarge
their estates, build bigger, more modern cities, construct reservoirs, make
way for railways and lay out fine parks and fashionable areas for the newly
rich to live. Rapidly developing countries are now doing the same as the
rich world did during its own industrial and urban development.

The difference is mostly in numbers. According to UN-Habitat,
the Nairobi-based agency that concerns itself with the urban environment,
hundreds of millions of the world's poor are technically illegal squatters
living in slum communities like those in Harare, liable to be moved on by
private landowners or by governments. In the past five years, slum clearance
programmes have forced more than 150 000 people out of their homes in Delhi;
300 000 people were evicted to make way for Olympic sites in Beijing; 100
000 were moved on in Jakarta; 250 000 were forced out of dam sites in India;
and as many as a million in Lagos and Port Harcourt in Nigeria. There are
many more.

Yet those who like to call themselves "the international
community" say nothing about these mass evictions and the world's press has
been mostly silent. For the World Bank to condemn the Zimbabwean evictions
was particularly rich. According to its own calculations, the bank has
funded projects that have required the eviction of at least 10-million
people.

So why are the Harare slum clearances so different? As
international monster of the moment, Mugabe is unacceptable to Britain and
the West mainly because he has chosen to evict whites and redistribute land
grabbed in colonial times. The fact that the African Union and other African
leaders are not prepared to condemn him for the Harare evictions reflects
the fact that they, too, recognise the injustice of the colonial land
ownership inheritance and do not want to see Africa bullied again by the
West.

But there may be another reason why African leaders have not
condemned the evictions. Urbanisation is overwhelming most African cities,
which have been flooded by impoverished people forced off the land.
According to the UN's 2003 study of urbanisation and slums, the driving
force behind the slums of Africa and Asia is not bad governance or tyrants,
but laissez-faire globalisation, the tearing down of trade barriers, the
privatisation of national economies, structural adjustment programmes
imposed on indebted countries by the IMF, and the lowering of tariffs
promoted by the World Trade Organisation.

Like every city in the world that has tried to clear its slums,
Harare will find that history repeats itself. This year, Zimbabwe faces
massive food shortages that will force more of the urban poor into
destitution and drive yet more people off the land into the cities to look
for work. The poor, punished for their poverty rather than for voting one
way or another, will become poorer and the shacks and shelters so brutally
pulled down in the past month will just go up somewhere else.

However, an alternative to forced evictions is emerging right
under Mugabe's nose. Last year, 250 homeless Zimbabweans, members of the
Federation of Slum and Shackdwellers, negotiated the provision of land from
the city authority. They have now planned the layout of their community,
worked out the costs of the homes and are ready to build. Where are they?
Harare.-- © Guardian Newspapers 2005

John Vidal is the Guardian's environment editor