JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Police and security forces in Zimbabwe's capital forced thousands of slum dwellers to demolish their homes Friday after the government said their shacks were illegal.
Witnesses described chaos in Harare as riot police surrounded burning shacks. Some of the newly homeless huddled in the rubble with the few belongings they could salvage.
Officials with President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party dubbed the campaign Operation Restore Order, describing it as a city cleanup in the wake of recent elections, which were condemned by the international community as unfair. But others said it was retribution against the urban poor, who had voted overwhelmingly for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
"People were tired and confused," said Trudy Stevenson, an MDC official in north Harare. "They spent the entire night destroying their own houses at gunpoint.
"They were saying, 'What are we going to do?' A lot were saying, 'Now we see the government is cruel.' There were children standing among their belongings looking very confused."
The demolitions began Thursday evening, when more than 3,000 police were deployed to evict people from their shacks. Further operations are planned for the coming days. The displaced people were to be taken to a new location outside Harare, but many were spending their second night in the open Friday, with winter just weeks away.
MDC activist Tonderai Ndira, 28, from the Harare suburb of Mabvuku, said he saw dozens of people being beaten by police as they resisted the shack demolitions in the Kudzawana district.
The police "were burning the houses," Ndira said. "People were angry. They were retaliating and throwing stones at the police. They were denying to vacate their houses, so they were being forced."
But in other areas, witnesses reported that frightened residents had meekly destroyed their dwellings as ordered.
The demolitions follow last week's crackdown on Harare's thriving black market. Police surrounded street traders, burned or bulldozed their stalls, destroyed their goods and arrested thousands.
Zimbabwe's economic crisis and high levels of unemployment have forced many urban poor to become illegal traders. The crackdown comes amid severe shortages of food and gasoline across the country after the almost total failure of this year's harvest due to drought and controversial agricultural policies.
