US embassy cable - 05HARARE830

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 HARARE 000830 
 
SIPDIS 
 
AF FOR DAS T. WOODS 
AF/S FOR B. NEULING 
OVP FOR NULAND 
NSC FOR DNSA ABRAMS, SENIOR AFRICA DIRECTOR C. COURVILLE 
DEPT FOR DS/IP/AF, DS/IP/ITA 
USAID FOR A/A LLOYD PIERSON 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/31/2010 
TAGS: PGOV, PREL, PHUM, ASEC, ZI, Restore Order/Murambatsvina 
SUBJECT: A LOOK BACK AS OPERATION "RESTORE ORDER" ENTERS 
WEEK FOUR 
 
REF: HARARE 737 
 
Classified By: Charge d'Affaires, a.i, Eric Schultz, under Section 1.4 
b/d 
 
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Overview 
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1. (C) As the GOZ,s crackdown, code-named Operation 
&Murambatsvina8 or &Restore Order8 enters its fourth week 
it shows no sign of slowing down.  The crackdown began 
shortly after Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono,s national 
address on May 19, in which he blamed the informal economy 
for sabotaging the government,s economic program.  The 
police subsequently entered Harare,s &high-density 
suburbs,8 slums peopled by the country,s poor and largely 
bastions of support for the political opposition.  Armed with 
torches, sledgehammers and bulldozers the police began 
systematically destroying &illegal8 homes as well as 
informal markets. 
 
2. (C) The crackdown intensified the following week.  The 
police responded violently to resistance from slum-dwellers, 
arresting over 20,000 people.  By the end of the third week 
of the crackdown credible estimates of the number of people 
who had lost their homes and businesses ranged up to 200,000. 
 The destruction has not been confined to Harare but has 
included all of Zimbabwe,s major towns and many smaller 
cities as well.  Mutare, the third largest city, has seen 
some of the worst destruction, with some 50,000 people made 
homeless. 
 
3. (C) The homeless and destitute victims of the crackdown 
have been told to return to their &rural8 roots; in many 
cases they were forced to do so.  However, many of these 
people were turned away from rural villages, and are now 
caught in a no man,s land ) unable to rebuild and unable to 
move.  Many are sleeping out in the open, trying to protect 
what,s left of their possessions and to protect themselves 
and their families from Harare,s cold winter nights. 
 
4. (C) Despite the suffering that has already occurred, the 
government has signaled that the operation will continue -- 
to its &logical conclusion8 in the words of one senior GOZ 
official.  The focus now seems likely to shift to rural 
areas, specifically the small holder farmers who were 
encouraged a few short years ago to seize land on white 
commercial farms and who are now seen as an impediment to 
productive large-scale commercial farming.  As Zimbabwe 
braces for the next phase of the government crackdown, and as 
a food emergency looms ever closer, the Embassy provides the 
eyewitness accounts below of the what has already occurred 
as, in the words of the country,s religious leaders, the GOZ 
makes war on the poor rather than on poverty. 
 
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Around Harare 
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5. (SBU) It is not possible to drive around Harare without 
noticing the changes.  Checkpoints have been maintained 
nearly continuously on most major roads.  Nearly all flea 
markets and roadside stalls have been demolished or 
preemptively torn down by vendors.  Even in areas designated 
by the City of Harare as &People,s Markets,8 the vendors 
are gone.  On May 28, in the Operation,s early days, a local 
Embassy employee went to a shopping center she frequents in 
Zengeza, a southern suburb of the city.  She was told that 
the police had been there an hour earlier and told the 
vendors to move.  As she watched, two police trucks with 
policemen in riot gear accompanied by a garbage truck pulled 
up.  Police drove off the vendors, burned the stalls, and 
loaded the goods on the garbage truck.  Anyone who did not 
run away was beaten. 
 
6. (C) On June 13, embassy officers in Harare interviewed a 
woman from Hatcliffe Extension, a northern suburb.  She said 
all the homes in her neighborhood were destroyed two weeks 
ago, and police moved the woman and part of her family to 
Caledonia Farm, a holding center for displaced persons about 
20 kms east of Harare.  Some of her children had gone to stay 
with relatives in a rural area near Mutare.  At Caledonia 
Farm, the family was sleeping in the open with thousands of 
others, with few sanitary facilities, no cooking facilities, 
and no transportation back to Harare, where she worked.  Her 
children have not been able to return to school.  Last week 
police told her that she and her family would need to vacate 
Caledonia Farm and return to her &rural home8 in eastern 
Zimbabwe by Wednesday, June 15. 
 
7. (C) In a June 2 visit to Mbare, Harare's oldest and 
largest high-density suburb, Embassy officers saw innumerable 
homes reduced to rubble, with possessions and building 
materials on fire, as were what had been formerly roadside 
stalls.  Thousands of people milled about in open fields or 
along roads with furniture, suitcases, and whatever they 
could salvage from their households.  Many homes still stood, 
but we witnessed many families dismantling surviving 
structures themselves in an apparent effort to salvage some 
building materials.  People were also selling their 
possessions and one man approached Embassy staff offering to 
find whatever we wanted to buy.  On a later visit, a Combined 
Harare Residents Association (CHRA) member told poloff on 
June 6 that police were telling Mbare residents they would 
impose a Z$3 million fee for each structure they had to 
destroy ) additional encouragement for people to destroy 
their own homes. 
 
8. (SBU) Police destruction is now including what appear to 
be fully authorized, fee-paying facilities.  On May 31, 
Embassy staff visited a business complex near Harare,s 
airport whose owners had purchased the land from the city 
four years ago and have been paying for city of Harare 
services.  Authorities told the owners that the City Council 
had no record of their purchase and that there was no 
official authorization for the buildings they erected.  The 
owners have every reason to fear for the future of their 
business.  The demolition also has not been limited to 
opposition strongholds.  The Political Counselor visited the 
war veteran squatter camp on White Cliff Farm, on the western 
edge of Harare.  The camp comprised thousands of cinderblock 
shacks on one-acre plots built over the past five years.  The 
entire camp had been razed the week before, and, by the time 
he visited the site June 5, few of the thousands of former 
residents remained.  Their whereabouts were unknown. 
 
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Other Cities 
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9. (C) Driving on the Mutare road from Harare, June 1, 
Embassy staff saw plumes of smoke rising from the 
high-density areas of Mutare.  Upon entering the city center, 
we saw police officers in Mutare,s central square preparing 
to force merchants to tear town their stands.  In the 
high-density suburbs, residents were taking down their own 
businesses and homes.  The area was thick with smoke.  The 
police had sent warnings ahead and residents were not waiting 
for their arrival.  One resident told us that he, his wife, 
and their two children were sleeping on what used to be the 
foundation of their home.  Mutare Mayor Kagurabadza confirmed 
that many people were now sleeping outdoors in the cold, 
while others were reportedly moving back to their rural 
homes.  We observed people exiting the city on trucks loaded 
with possessions or waiting for rides with bags and boxes. 
Kagurabadza said many of the people whose homes had been 
destroyed in Mutare were still employed but were finding it 
difficult to get to work with nowhere to sleep or put their 
personal property. 
 
10. (SBU) The weekend of May 28 and 29, an Embassy officer in 
Victoria Falls saw dozens of homes burning and people milling 
about in the streets holding their possessions, uncertain of 
where to go or what to do.  Some of the victims reported that 
police were confiscating electronic goods for which the 
individuals did not have receipts. 
 
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Smaller Towns and Rural Areas 
----------------------------- 
 
11. (SBU) Rural displacement has taken place largely off the 
radar of media and NGOs.  However, the ZANU-PF stronghold of 
Bindura in the heart of Mashonaland was completely cleared of 
flea markets and "unauthorized" homes.  Displaced persons 
were dismantling their homes when embassy staff drove through 
on the morning of June 3.  One couple told us that police had 
already demolished their vendor stall and had given them 
until noon that day to vacate their home.  They said they had 
nowhere to go and planned to return to their rural home. 
 
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Comment 
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12. (C) The GOZ's inhumane treatment of its own population on 
such a massive scale is shocking in and of itself.  However, 
given that the government is systematically creating a larger 
pool of vulnerable people with a food crisis imminent, it may 
go well beyond just inhumane.  These have been evil acts by 
an evil regime.  In the past month, we have heard few people 
in Zimbabwe, local or foreign, query us about the basis for 
the Secretary,s designation of the GOZ as an &outpost of 
tyranny.8  As we have reported elsewhere, the challenge the 
international community faces is how to help the people of 
Zimbabwe when their own government seems at war with them. 
In that regard, the passiveness of the people (and the 
opposition) in the face of government repression is 
disheartening.  The apparent degree to which Zimbabweans seem 
prepared to absorb abuse and suffering without resistance 
offers little hope that badly needed regime change will come 
any time soon to Zimbabwe. 
SCHULTZ