c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Religious and human rights groups, along with a top U.N. official, are calling on the Zimbabwe government to end its campaign of evicting the urban poor and destroying their shacks and market stalls.

An estimated 200,000 people have lost their homes and another 30,000 have been arrested or detained since the government began its “cleanup” May 19, according to Miloon Kothari, a U.N. expert on housing.

“We are seeing in the world, and Zimbabwe is a good example now, the creation of a new kind of apartheid where the rich and the poor are being segregated,” Kothari told reporters at a June 3 news conference in Geneva. “This kind of a mass eviction drive is a classic case where the intention appears to be that Harare become a city for the rich, for the middle class, for those that were well off … and the poor are pushed away.”

“We have a very grave crisis on our hands,” he said. “It is quite clearly a gross violation” of human rights.

On Tuesday (June 7), an American teaching at the United Methodist Church’s Africa University in Mutare, Zimbabwe, was deported after he was caught filming police destroying shacks of the urban poor, Ecumenical News International reported.

Howard Smith Gilman, 68, an unpaid geography teacher, was held in prison for 10 days following his May 27 arrest. On June 6, a court failed to convict him of violating Zimbabwe’s media laws by practicing journalism without permission from the government. The offense carries a two-year jail term.

Instead, he was fined a total of 300,000 Zimbabwe dollars ($33) on charges of breaking the country’s censorship and immigration laws and was deported, ENI reported.

Zimbabwe’s economy has shrunk 50 percent in the past five years and the unemployment rate is estimated to be 70 percent. Agriculture, which once made Zimbabwe the breadbasket of Africa, has collapsed since autocratic President Robert Mugabe began a controversial program of seizing white-owned farms and turning them over to blacks.

Mugabe, 81, has led Zimbabwe since its independence from Britain in 1980.

Urban street vendors have been a mainstay of Zimbabwe’s “informal” or unofficial economy, dealing in everything from clothes to sugar, gasoline and foreign currency.

Since the country’s March 31 parliamentary elections, the economy has been in a free fall, leaving store shelves empty.

Zimbabwe’s churches have called on the government to end the crackdown, dubbed Operation Restore Order.

“We call upon this government to engage in a way against poverty and not against the poor,” the Zimbabwe National Pastors Conference, which represents clerics from the country’s major churches, said in a June 2 statement.

“The visibility of these street traders is simply a manifestation of the economic depression which we are experiencing … . No amount of police action will sweep this current reality under the carpet.”

Amnesty International also has criticized the campaign, saying the security forces are using excessive force in destroying homes, demolishing kiosks and beating people.

Separately, the International Crisis Group based in Brussels, Belgium, issued a report saying that unless the international community starts planning together for a peaceful transition to a post-Mugabe era, Zimbabwe will spin into even deeper chaos and violence.

“The United States, the European Union and international financial institutions should make it clear there will be no resumption of normal relations unless there are real changes, not only in the names at the top of the government structures but in governance,” the think tank said.

“Economic meltdown, food insecurity, political repression and tensions over land and ethnicity are all ongoing facts of life that the (March 31) election has not changed for the better in any way,” it said.

It called on the international community to press Mugabe to set a date for his retirement sooner than 2008, to begin a credible transition process and to seek unrestricted access for humanitarian groups in Zimbabwe.

A week ago, the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, James Morris, said the combination of drought and Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown means 3 million to 4 million people will need food assistance in the next year.

Last year, Mugabe ordered most World Food Program deliveries to Zimbabwe ended because, he said, the country was “choking” on its own grain. Now, he has told Morris, the nation will need 1.2 million tons of food to make up for shortfalls.

MO/DEA/RB END RNS