Amnesty International has reported that that the victims of mass evictions in urban areas of Zimbabwe in 2005 continue to suffer. Extracts from the country report on Zimbabwe in Amnesty's 2007 annual report:
The situation of thousands of people whose homes were destroyed as part of Operation Murambatsvina (Restore Order) in 2005 continued to worsen, with no effective solution planned by the authorities. The government continued to obstruct humanitarian efforts by the UN and by local and international non-governmental organizations….
Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle (Better Life), a house-building programme launched in 2005 ostensibly to provide housing to victims of mass forced evictions, failed to provide a remedy for the majority of them.
By May, one year after the programme's launch, only 3,325 houses had been built, compared to 92,460 housing structures destroyed in Operation Murambatsvina. Construction in many areas appeared to have stopped. Many of the houses designated as "built" were unfinished, without access to water or sewage facilities, and uninhabited.
Moreover, the new houses were largely inaccessible to the hundreds of thousands of victims of the forced evictions. They were too expensive for the majority to afford, even if they were offered the chance to purchase them, which frequently they were not. The process for allocating the new – albeit largely incomplete – houses and bare residential plots lacked transparency. Houses and land plots were allocated to people who had not lost their homes during Operation Murambatsvina and at least 20 per cent of the houses built were earmarked for civil servants, police and soldiers.
Despite the government's repeated claims that Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle was a programme under which houses would be built by government for victims of mass evictions, in reality people were allocated small bare plots of land, without access to adequate water or sanitation, on which they had to build their own homes with no assistance.
The government continued to forcibly evict groups of people, often from the place where they had moved after their homes were demolished during Operation Murambatsvina. These forced evictions were traumatic for victims and resulted in further loss of possessions. At least three small-scale evictions were reported in Harare alone.
In April and May the police threatened to forcibly acquire 200 plots of land at Hatcliffe Extension New Stands settlement just outside Harare to extend a nearby police boarding school. Fifteen families would be affected. After protests by AI and the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, the authorities reversed the decision.
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On 15 June municipal police forcibly evicted a group of approximately 150 internally displaced households who were living in makeshift shacks along the Mukuvisi river in Harare. The group had been living there since the brick cottages they had been renting were destroyed a year before. The police pulled down their structures with crowbars and set them alight. They told the people they had to move, but provided no alternative accommodation.
The government continued to hinder and frustrate humanitarian efforts to provide emergency shelter. After repeated rejections of UN temporary shelter solutions during 2005, in March the UN was finally given permission to erect some temporary shelters. By the end of 2006 approximately 2,300 shelters had been erected. This compared with a UN target for the provision of emergency shelter, based on need, of 40,000 households in August 2005, reduced to a target of 23,000 households in 2006.
