Pictures show destruction of Zimbabwe clearances

LONDON - Human Rights Group Amnesty International released satellite images today showing the obliteration of a large community during last year's settlement clearances in Zimbabwe that made some 700,000 people homeless.

The particularly graphic before and after shots show the destruction of the Porta Farm settlement 20 km west of Harare that was until last year home to up to 10,000 people.

Where once stood 850 structures including homes and schools is now empty scrub land with only the outlines of the former streets to hint at what used to be there.

"These images ... are a graphic indictment of the Zimbabwean government's policies. They show the horrifying transition of an area from a vibrant community to rubble and shrubs," Amnesty Africa director Kolawole Olaniyan said.

The pictures from Digital Globe, Inc. were acquired, processed and analysed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science with funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation., and given to Amnesty.

The Zimbabwean government said it launched Operation Murambatsvina (Restore Order) in May last year to remove illegal settlements that had mushroomed around Harare.

It was widely condemned as brutal and inhumane, and critics accused President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF government of using it as an excuse to victimise urban opposition strongholds.

Amnesty, noting that government supporters also lost homes, said the clearances and forced dispersal of the inhabitants back to rural villages was at the behest of the security services who feared the settlements were set to explode.

Inflation in the former breadbasket of Africa is now running officially at 1,040 per cent -- but unofficially at 1,800 per cent -- and 90 per cent of the population are below the poverty line.

So catastrophic are conditions in the former British colony of Rhodesia that average life expectancy is now just 34 years compared with 55 when it won independence in 1980.

The irony of Porta Farm is that it was established by the government in 1991 as a temporary home for thousands of squatters whose shacks had been demolished in Harare in clean-up exercises ahead of a Commonwealth summit hosted by Zimbabwe.

Although their stay at Porta was meant to be temporary, the settlement expanded over the years as rising poverty in the capital Harare drove people to the settlement where they eked out a living from fishing and working on neighbouring farms.

Porta farm residents clashed with police while resisting eviction from the settlement in 2004. Police however denied a report by Amnesty that some 10 people died as a result of teargas fired during the clashes.

- REUTERS