Background
Overall responsibility for the clearances rests with the ruling party, ZANU-PF. The previous Chairperson of the Harare Commission, Dr. Jameson Kurasha, initiated Operation Murambatsvina weeks after the disputed elections were held there. The Harare Commission led by Sekesai Makwavarara is currently running the affairs of the City of Harare despite the fact that there is a pending application to the High Court questioning its authority to do so. The Commission itself was appointed by Ignatious Chombo, the Minister of Local Government, Public Works and Urban Development, leading one Zimbabwean newspaper to comment that "President Mugabe, through the Minister of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing, Ignatious Chombo, is now effectively in control of the City of Harare".
Mugabe said the clearances are needed to carry out "a vigorous clean-up campaign to restore sanity" and he has described the program as an "urban renewal campaign." Chombo has described the operation in terms of 'restoring order': "It is these people who have been making the country ungovernable by their criminal activities actually." The Zimbabwean Police Commissioner, Augustine Chihuri, said that Operation Murambatsvina was meant to "clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy."
While police have carried out most of the demolitions, they have been supported by the army and the National Youth Service. Many inhabitants have been forced to destroy their own homes, sometimes at gunpoint.
People whose homes have been demolished are being told to return to the rural areas or face further action from the Zimbabwe Republic Police and the dreaded Central Intelligence Organization. Education Minister Aeneas Chigwedere claimed that there is "nobody in Zimbabwe who does not have a rural home".
Read more about this topic: Operation Murambatsvina
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)