The nightmare continues to unfold in Zimbabwe. Publius Pundit has previously reported on Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s “Operation Clean Up” which aimes to abolish private property, make homeless masses of people who oppose him, and ban independent traders and small businesses which are the only real economy Zimbabwe still has – see The Mugabe-China Connection, and Zimbabwe is Mugabe’s Personal Fiefdom. This is essentially an update, as the results of “Operation Clean Up” become clear, with excerpts from the Times of London, “Mugabe’s human rubbish dump“:

WHEN President Mugabe????????s Government announced plans to ???????clean up??????? the country????????s cities more than two weeks ago, many Zimbabweans wondered what the innocent-sounding phrase really meant. Now they know.

Thousands of street stalls demolished. More than 23,000 informal workers arrested. Entire neighbourhoods burnt to the ground or razed by bulldozers. Hundreds of thousands of poor people left homeless in the middle of winter…

Police started out by rounding up informal traders, from carpenters to cigarette sellers and gold-panners. Attention then turned to areas housing the cities???????? poor. In squatter villages such as Hatcliffe Extension, where people were settled in the early 1990s during a clean-up before a visit by the Queen, residents were forced to tear down their tiny wooden shacks.

In recent days police moved into areas such as Joshua Nkomo Heights, where people had ???????? illegally, the Government said ???????? built large sub- urban-style brick houses. Television pictures showed bulldozers knocking down homes as tearful residents watched helplessly. Mr Kothari said that he feared that between two and three million people ???????? a quarter of Zimbabwe????????s estimated twelve million population ???????? could be targeted in the operation, which has been declared legal by the courts.

Most of the newly homeless are living on the streets. A local journalist interviewed by telephone yesterday said that rents in some areas of Harare had doubled as the evicted residents desperately sought new accommodation. He said that some of the people had been taken to a government- run farm, while others had fled from the city to seek shelter in the countryside, where they were encountering more problems…

After long delay, the members of the nascent African Union have started to take gingerly steps toward protecting the people of Darfur in the Western Sudan. Nothing has been done about Zimbabwe, even though this situation threatens to destabilize the entire region, and from a humanitarian perspective is probably worse, since it involves starving a broad cross-section of the population, not just people of a specific region. This lack of action may be related to Mugabe’s close and – in the past – supportive relationship with South African President Thabo Mbeki.

Contributed by Kirk H. Sowell of Window on the Arab World, and More!