US embassy cable - 05HARARE949

C O N F I D E N T I A L  HARARE 000949 
 
SIPDIS 
 
 
DEPT FOR U/S BURNS, AF A/S NEWMAN, DAS WOODS; OVP FOR 
NULAND; NSC FOR ABRAMS, COURVILLE; AID FOR PIERSON AND 
COPSON 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 07/01/2015 
TAGS: PREL, PGOV, PHUM, ZI, Restore Order/Murambatsvina 
SUBJECT: UN SPECIAL ENVOY BRIEFS ON MISSION RESULTS: 
CRITICA OF GOZ BUT CALLS FOR 'CONDITIONED' ASSISTANCE AND 
ARGES FOR ENGAGEMENT 
 
 
Classified By: CDA Eric Schult for reasons 1.4 (b) and (d) 
 
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Summary 
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1. (C) UN Special Envoy Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka briefed the 
donor community July 8 on the results of her visit.  In a sop 
to the GOZ, she called Operation Restore Order 
&well-intentioned,8 but was nonetheless highly critical of 
its underlying assumption that urbanization could be reversed 
and of the wide scale suffering it had caused.  Tibaijuka 
encouraged the donor community to assist its victims. 
However, anticipating donor questions and concerns she agreed 
the assistance could not be unconditional.  The government 
would have to agree to end the operation, facilitate 
assistance, and allocate urban plots of land (&stands8) on 
which people could receive assistance and eventually rebuild. 
 In a private conversation afterwards, one of her aides told 
CDA that the report to the Secretary General would be openly 
critical of the GOZ but would be written with a bias toward 
engagement as the best way to help the victims.  End Summary. 
 
 
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&Well-Intentioned8 but Abusive Operation 
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2. (C) Tibaijuka said she had met with President Mugabe and a 
&number8 of Ministers earlier that day, which she described 
as yet another indication of the seriousness with which the 
GOZ took her visit.  She noted for the record that she had 
deliberately strayed from her schedule and had not been 
obstructed in doing so.  (N.B. We know from other sources 
that the GOZ tried to restrict what she saw but gave up after 
a few days because the wide-scale of the destruction made it 
impossible to hide fully.)  She added that Zimbabwe was 
&relatively stable,8 which the international community 
should see as an important asset, but that the operation had 
caused widespread anger, which could turn to anger and 
undermine that stability. 
 
3. (C) Tibaijuka said there were considerable assistance 
needs in Zimbabwe as a result of Operation Restore Order, 
which she described as &well-intentioned8 but which had 
caused a &lot of problems.8  Part of her mandate as head of 
UN-Habitat was to eliminate or upgrade slums, which had been 
the operation,s stated purpose.  The problem in Zimbabwe was 
that homes had been destroyed not because they were slums -- 
most would not have fit the technical definition -- but 
because they were illegal.  The GOZ,s strict adherence to 
the law had led to indiscriminate destruction. 
 
4. (C) In addition, Tibaijuka said the GOZ had 
unrealistically expected people to return to their rural 
&homes.8  As an African who had grown up in a village and 
moved to the city (Dar es Salaam), she had tried to convince 
the government that urbanization in Africa was irreversible, 
at least for a government not willing to use force.  Thirty 
percent of the displaced people had moved to the countryside 
but the rest had stayed in urban and peri-urban areas.  Many 
of these were sleeping in the open.  Particularly problematic 
were second and third generation Zimbabweans of Malawian or 
Mozambiquan roots, who had no rural &home8 to return to. 
 
5. (C) Tibaijuka said the GOZ had committed many errors in 
conduct of the operation.  The sheer scale had been among the 
most egregious: more than 130,000 households and well over 
500,000 people had been affected.  This had overwhelmed the 
country,s capacity to cope with the human suffering the 
operation had caused.  In addition, the methodology had also 
been a significant problem: the overzealous police and the 
military had destroyed homes and businesses without 
consulting local authorities.  In many instances, they had 
destroyed legal structures. 
 
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Donor,s Role and Concerns 
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6. (C) Tibaijuka thanked the donor countries for their 
assistance to Zimbabwe and Africa, especially food aid and 
HIV/AIDs assistance.  She hoped the donors would once more 
assist Zimbabweans in need, adding however that it should be 
done on the basis of &positive conditionality,8 by which 
she meant the government should be encouraged to allocate 
&stands8 or small plots of land to the displaced in urban 
areas and to change its laws to facilitate the building of 
permanent structures on the stands.  To that end, she 
intended to establish a permanent UN-Habitat office in Harare 
as part of the UN Mission. 
 
7. (C) The donor community responded to this appeal with a 
number of questions and concerns, which reflected their 
frustration with the situation, and their skepticism of the 
government,s true motivations and future plans.  The 
Australian Ambassador challenged Tibaijuka,s description of 
the operation as &well-intentioned.8  Tibaijuka responded 
that there were many theories on why the GOZ had chosen to 
undertake the operation at this time and that she would 
include those details in her report to Secretary Annan.  She 
had, however, deliberately chosen to emphasize the urban 
renewal aspects of her mission as an &access8 point with 
the government. 
 
8. (C) The CDA noted the moral hazard implied by providing 
assistance while the operation was on-going and asked if she 
had received any assurances it would stop.  Tibaijuka said 
she had not and acknowledged that the operation was still 
ongoing.  She called ending the operation an appropriate 
condition for providing assistance and added that she 
genuinely believed that Mugabe had been ignorant of the scale 
of the destruction before her visit.  UNDP Resrep Zacharias 
noted in that regard that he planned to meet with GOZ 
Ministers the fooling week to press for its end. 
 
9. (C) The Canadian representative noted there was also a 
moral hazard in assisting Zimbabwe with reconstruction 
following what was in effect a man-made disaster.  Tibaijuka 
responded that the immediate need was for tents and other 
temporary shelters, rather than reconstruction, which would 
best be supplied to people living on the stands on which they 
would eventually build (or rebuild).  The EU Representative 
and the Acting USAID Director expressed skepticism that the 
government would move quickly to resettle people and noted 
its propensity for political favoritism in dispensing aid. 
Tibaijuka said another condition should be that the NGO 
communities distribute the assistance and that they do so in 
a non-partisan manner. 
 
10. (C) Finally, the French Ambassador noted his personal 
disquiet that no one in the government had expressed either 
public or private regret over the operation or shown any 
awareness of the scale of suffering.  Tibaijuka responded 
that deep down she believed many in the GOZ realized that a 
mistake had been made, otherwise why else would they have 
spent so much time trying to justify themselves.  However, 
she acknowledged that no one in the GOZ had expressed regret 
to her either. 
 
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Tibaijuka Aide Report; Need for Engagement 
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11. (C) CDA met privately with Tibaijuka,s principal 
political aide, Nicholas Yu, following the briefing.  You 
said from the UN team,s perspective they had accomplished 
three things.  First, the team had established that human 
right violations had occurred.  You said GOZ had clearly 
failed to follow accepted international practices, and even 
its own laws, with respect to forced evictions, which the 
report would make clear.  Second, the GOZ had realized that 
its attempts to &spin8 the facts otherwise were not 
working.  Finally, the government,s critics in the 
opposition and civil society had similarly realized that they 
had to report accurately -- the UN had caught them 
exaggerating on several occasions. 
 
12. (C) You said the report to the Secretary General would 
not be written in &UN-speak8 but would be written with a 
 
bias toward engagement.  He described Mugabe and the GOZ as 
&cornered rats,8 who would continue to lash out at the 
people of Zimbabwe unless given a way to escape from a mess 
of their own making.  To that end, it was useful to describe 
the operation as something that had started out as an urban 
&clean-up8 meant to please Mugabe and which had spun out of 
control as various other actors had jumped on board with 
their own agendas.  That said, the UN team,s bottom-line was 
that the operation had been both stupid and mean and would 
ultimately be unsuccessful -- people would eventually return 
to urban areas and rebuild, only this time the slums would 
look even worse. 
 
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Comment 
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13. (C) Tibaijuka and her team decided early on to take the 
GOZ's intentions with respect to Operation Restore Order at 
face value; in effect to concentrate on how and not why. 
To that end, she has been critical both in private and 
public of the operation's excesses, but has avoided a 
blanket condemnation or any public discussion of GOZ 
motives.  It remains to be seen what this approach will 
accomplish.  It has so far failed to end the operation or 
to assist in any meaningful way its victims. On the whole, 
however, and despite GOZ attempts to twist the visit to 
suit its purposes, it does seem to have helped substantiate 
international criticism and put the GOZ on the defensive, 
even within Africa and with its own citizens. The next 
steps are in New York.  If the report is genuinely critical 
and if the Secretary General uses it appropriately, it 
could put a lot of added pressure on the regime and its 
apologists - especially in South Africa. 
SCHULTZ 
 
 
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