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2005-06-17 Africa: Subsaharan
Zimbabwe extends demolitions to rural areas
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- Zimbabwe has extended the destruction of informal homes and businesses from the cities to rural areas, police told state radio Friday. The government calls the campaign a cleanup effort, but critics at home and abroad say it is a violation of human rights and inspired by politics. Police spokesman Austin Chikwavara said his force has started tearing down shacks and kiosks found at major crossroads in Chirumanzu, Umvuma and Lalapanzi in the Zimbabwe Midlands, between 200 kilometers (124 miles) and 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of the capital, Harare. Another police spokesman, who was not identified, told the radio station that police also are demolishing homes built without permission on some of the thousands of farms seized from their white owners for redistribution to black Zimbabweans who are in tight with Bob.
However, Security Minister Didymus Mutasa maintained in the same broadcast that the monthlong campaign was aimed only at cleaning out city streets and would not affect the government's rural strongholds.
The government's Operation Murambatsvina, or Drive Out Trash, has already left more than 250,000 city dwellers homeless in the winter cold.
Oh no! Not the Brutal Zimbabwe Winter!
Police also have arrested more than 30,000 vendors, accusing them of dealing in black market goods and attempting to sabotage Zimbabwe's failing economy.
President Robert Mugabe's dismissed propaganda chief condemned the evictions Thursday as "barbaric." Jonathan Moyo, addressing his first public meeting in the capital since he was fired in January, said the blitz was linked to a power struggle within the ruling party over who would succeed the 81-year-old Mugabe. "It seems to be a directionless activity of some mischievous group which imagines it can profit by this in some mysterious way and position itself ahead of the pack in the succession game," he told the gathering at a Harare hotel Thursday.
That cleared things things right up. Thanks, Jonathan.
Moyo, who spent five years as information minister, was fired for opposing Mugabe's choice of Joyce Mujuru as a vice president. Moyo backed parliamentary Speaker Emmerson Mnangagwa, who represents a younger generation of ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front members.
Opposition leaders say the eviction campaign is aimed at driving their supporters among the urban poor into rural areas, where they can be more easily controlled. "The government wants to depopulate urban areas ahead of the 2008 elections and re-create a rural peasantry in which voters are brought under the control of local chiefs and Mugabe's militias," Sydney Masamvu, an analyst from the International Crisis Group think tank, said in a statement Friday.
SEE: Cambodia, Pol Pot

As the unpopular drive spreads, Zimbabwe officials sought to play down superstitious fears that the ancestors have been angered. Residents of a small mining town told a government newspaper that the presence of a baboon in a destroyed shack was a sign of the ancestors' displeasure. The animal leaped out of the shack as it was being pulled down and refused to leave the site in Shurugwi's Mukusha township, 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of Harare, The Herald reported. Many Zimbabweans believe the spirits of ancestors inhabit wild animals and invade human habitations to take revenge when offended. "We are not really concerned because a baboon can never harm a person," police spokesman Patrick Chademana told The Herald.
Only when he's president of Zimbabwe
Posted by Steve 2005-06-17 11:06|| || Front Page|| [11160 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 a baboon can never harm a person

You might want to talk to the guy bringing the birthday cake to his old pet chimp - a baboon looks a lot stronger than the chimps that took him half apart.
Posted by VAMark 2005-06-17 11:34||   2005-06-17 11:34|| Front Page Top

#2 ...and attempting to sabotage Zimbabwe's failing economy.

How do you sabotage a failing economy?
Posted by tu3031 2005-06-17 12:31||   2005-06-17 12:31|| Front Page Top

#3 1)If Dick Durbin had reserved some of his vitriolic rhetoric aimed at the Gitmo soldiers for this regime he might not be in the hot water that he is.
2)Just hope that not a penny of the aid slated for Africa is going to Zimbabwe.
Posted by GK 2005-06-17 12:32||   2005-06-17 12:32|| Front Page Top

#4 Per Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Baboons "are very destructive to crops, and, because of their large canines and powerful limbs, they are dangerous adversaries, especially since they travel in troops."

Reinvented Pol Pots are dangerous too.
Posted by mom 2005-06-17 13:01||   2005-06-17 13:01|| Front Page Top

#5 of informal homes

Martha said it was the new way?
Posted by Moshe Shipman 2005-06-17 13:38||   2005-06-17 13:38|| Front Page Top

#6 Pal, anything with four-inch fangs and a brain the size of a chimp's can seriously hurt you.
Posted by mojo">mojo  2005-06-17 14:29||   2005-06-17 14:29|| Front Page Top

#7 Oh no! Not the Brutal Zimbabwe Winter!

Temperature in Harare has been ranging from 48F at night to 75F in the day.
Posted by Pappy 2005-06-17 14:40||   2005-06-17 14:40|| Front Page Top

#8 I remember one night in Liberia when the night watchman for the compound knocked on the door to ask for a blanket, because it was too cold for him to sleep. (It had dipped below 60.)
Posted by James">James  2005-06-17 16:34|| http://idontknowbut.blogspot.com]">[http://idontknowbut.blogspot.com]  2005-06-17 16:34|| Front Page Top

#9 When I was child I remember a documentary over baboons. There was a leopard who had killed a gazel and before he could draw his prey to a tree for eating it, a baboon appeared fought the leopard. None was seriously hurt but the leopard abandonned his prey. Baboons can't rake with their claws for disemboweling like leopards do but their teeh are bigger than those of the leopard.

For chimpanzes they don't have baboon's teeth but an animal who spends his life in treees will develop inmensely powerful arms.
Posted by JFM">JFM  2005-06-17 17:50||   2005-06-17 17:50|| Front Page Top

#10 Yeptrees good, big brains and crazy strong arms.
Posted by Shipman 2005-06-17 19:55||   2005-06-17 19:55|| Front Page Top

#11 Baboons are the brownshirts of the ape world. Alone they are dangerous, but they prefer to attack in packs.
Posted by trailing wife 2005-06-17 21:47||   2005-06-17 21:47|| Front Page Top

#12 like Jackals or Sigma Chis
Posted by Frank G">Frank G  2005-06-17 22:12||   2005-06-17 22:12|| Front Page Top

00:47 Jairong+Scourge+of+the+Gepids2435
00:45 Jairong+Scourge+of+the+Gepids2435
00:44 Jairong+Scourge+of+the+Gepids2435
00:40 Grey Stones
00:17 Skidmark









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