Foreign Correspondence

[otraque]

Your reference to the photos seeming like post Tsunami was spot on, it is what the populace in Zimbabwe are calling it.
<<The UN report said the operation was popularly referred to locally as Operation Tsunami because of its speed and ferocity. While Mr Mugabe has promised to rehouse the former slum dwellers, the UN expressed scepticism given that the Zimbabwe economy was crippled.

The report said: "Even if motivated by a desire to ensure a semblance of order in the chaotic manifestations of rapid urbanisation and rising poverty characteristic of African cities, nonetheless Operation Restore Order turned out to be a disastrous venture based on a set of colonial-era laws and policies that were used as a tool of segregation and social exclusion. There is an urgent need to suspend these outdated laws."

The victims were among the poorest and it would take years before the people and society as a whole could recover. "The vast majority of those directly and indirectly affected are the poor and disadvantaged segments of the population. They are today deeper in poverty, deprivation and destitution, and have been rendered more vulnerable>>
The central points that raise major suspicion.
One: The laws to justify this are from the time of the British Colony rules and laws.
That the motive is political << The Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party, countered that it was partly politically motivated, aimed at the areas that had supported the MDC.

Trudy Stevenson, an MDC representative in the Zimbabwe parliament, welcomed the report's findings. "That is wonderful - music in my ears," she said.>>
And most importantly Mugabe's claim that the now fully homeless will be given new habitatition soon when he has no money to do it.
Why, drive them out with such speed and blietzkrieg violence if this was actually part of a civil process to rehabilitate the slums.The events contradict any such claim that this is for a good purpose.
It is being done with lightening speed and brutality with NO relocation plans having even started such that it smacks of an operation to reduce the population of the dirt poor that have MDC sympathies rather than any operation with kind intent, indeed it smacks of dark, cruel intent to eliminate opposition. Welles