Excerpt from "A billion lives"

Mugabe's response to Murambatsvina: Excerpt from "A billion lives"

By Jan Egeland

Tents are for Arabs

Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe looks older and frailer than I remembered him from photographs and film footage. He moves slowly and is thinner. He leans on the right arm of his chair for support as he speaks. As someone who campaigned against apartheid during my student years, I am slightly in awe of the hero of the liberation struggle against Ian Smith's white minority regime as he peers at me through thick glasses. I feel like a student undergoing an examination by an eminent professor. The president is notorious for keeping people waiting and I think we have done quite well to see him by 9:15 a.m. this rainy Tuesday, December 6, 2005, after only fifteen minutes in an anteroom of the presidential palace in Harare. I know this will be one of my most difficult missions and meetings ever.

Nearly three years earlier, my predecessor as UN relief coordinator, Kenzo Oshima, a more polite and diplomatic envoy than me, had been kept waiting for hours in the presidential antechambers before being lectured for an hour about UN shortcomings. This time, probably because of the international publicity surrounding my mission, we do not have to wait and it seems I will be allowed to speak uninterrupted. It is a unique opportunity to speak truth to power. Zimbabwe was called "the jewel" and "the bread basket" of Africa after its liberation from white minority rule in 1980. The economy, the infrastructure, and the educational system were among the best on the continent. Twenty-five years later it is synonymous with economic collapse and political repression. It started at the end of the 1990s. Large and productive farms were nationalized and white farmers were forced to hand over their estates to ill-prepared veterans from the liberation struggle and political activists from Mugabe's party, the Zanu PF.

The need for land reform in a country where a few white colonizers had claimed the best farming land is indisputable. But reform was brutally enforced in the worst possible manner for the farmers, the agricultural sector, and the population at large. Production plummeted, the black farm laborers lost their jobs, and little food made it to the markets or to foreign exports. A country that had had a large food surplus could not feed itself, and had to rely on foreign emergency aid and remittances from the growing number of Zimbabweans who have to leave the country to make a living. As both domestic and foreign investors fled the country, a general breakdown in the rule of law fueled the economic crisis. Mugabe's government was however undeterred and continued to fund ambitious public programs that principally benefited the political and tribal groups that supported the government. To cover the enormous state budget deficits the National Bank was instructed to print additional money that created inflation, and later hyperinflation. Today the Zimbabwean economy is arguably more mismanaged than any other in peacetime.

I am primarily going to discuss the massive homeless problem Mugabe has created almost overnight through his "Operation Restore Order," a brutal eviction campaign that began seven months ago. I spent hours yesterday walking among some of the seven hundred thousand destitute and homeless people who are living under makeshift plastic sheeting or in the open after being evicted from shantytowns across Zimbabwe. The evictions were not only particularly brutal and chaotic in the way they spread throughout the country, but profoundly political, turning out many who did not support the government party and leaving urban areas to regime supporters who would like cleaner and leaner cities and less competition for jobs. Those evicted were not only among the poorest and most vulnerable in the country, many were sick with AIDS or tuberculosis. I saw and spoke to dozens of families who had lost everything when their tiny "illegal" brick houses were bulldozed, or their small vending shacks burned and torn apart by security forces in an operation that began in May.

The presidential office is smaller and nicer than the grotesquely oversized staterooms that so many African presidents preside in. As planned, I start our discussion by describing the shocking scenes I saw in the slums of Hopely Farm, and the Whitecliff and Hatcliff suburbs on the outskirts of Harare. I explain that we need to discover how we can most rapidly and effectively help with food and shelter for the homeless. President Mugabe carefully enunciates each syllable in his academic English as though addressing someone who does not speak his language. He is immediately on the defensive. While acknowledging his awareness of "a problem," he seems intent on downplaying a situation that has scandalized the world with its callous indifference to human suffering. His most outrageous comment comes as I try to impress upon him the urgent need for emergency shelter for the thousands of families with children who are at great risk with no shelter, no food, and no income. The UN is willing to supply tents immediately as a short-term answer to the problem.

As I press, the tenor of Mugabe's calm, lecturing tone rises. There is a hint of barely repressed anger as he says, "We do not feel comfortable with the term 'shelter.' Shelter has connotations of impermanency and we build for permanency." As I seek to return to the need for immediate action he is clearly angered. "Keep your tents, we do not need them. Tents are for Arabs!" Stunned, I ask him to repeat what he said. "We want to give real houses to our people. Tents are for Arabs," he says again. It is a phrase that in its absurdity will reverberate through my office. "We may have an accommodation problem," Mugabe continues, "but the 700,000 figure is exaggerated. People can be sheltered by their families." He embarks on a semantics lecture, suggesting the term "shelter" sends the wrong meaning: "The word connotes impermanency. We want permanent housing here. In terms of humanitarian needs it is not even as bad here as in South Africa. The South Africans have sent delegations here to learn from our housing programs.

"When I was a boy herding my godfather's cattle and it rained I looked for 'shelter' where I could find it - under a tree or in a nearby hut. That is shelter. You can provide food if you want to and build permanent houses with us, but not provide 'shelter' in the form of tents." It is one of those situations when you do not know whether to cry, laugh, or shout. With the UN resident coordinator Agostinho Zacarias and my OCHA colleagues Agnes Asekenye-Oonyu and Hansjoerg Strohmeyer, I am failing to get the head of state to admit the gravity of the situation in his country - that his people are in desperate need of precisely the things we offer. Through the UN agencies, the International Organization for Migration, and excellent local and international NGOs, we can help meet acute emergency needs. But instead of saying "How can we help you help our people," the man wants to lecture me about the shortcomings of official UN terms and concepts!

I try to explain that there is no money for any form of more permanent housing since the donors are reluctant to help even with temporary shelter. They regard Zimbabwe's problems as the direct result of Mugabe's evictions, and his agricultural and economic policies. "Donors will only pay for temporary shelters. They think it's indefensible that there are no tents allowed. Disaster victims accept tents in Louisiana, Florida, and in Europe. Why not here?" I ask. "The UN is politicized," Mugabe says. "You want to provide an image of refugee camps here. Our attitude to tents is negative." Nodding from the nearby black leather sofa in Mugabe's small, white-walled office are the permanent secretary of the President's Office and the ministers of foreign affairs and defense. It is difficult to know whether he believes what he is saying because the nodding ministers never seem to tell him what he does not want to hear.

The UN is politicized, Mugabe says, because it is dominated by Britain and its stooges - among whom I, a Norwegian, am soon lumped. Mugabe is particularly angry with the UN because a field visit several months earlier by Anna Tibaijuka, the African head of UN Habitat, our organization for urban issues and housing, had first alerted the world to the full extent of Zimbabwe's housing disaster. He suggests that Tibaijuka would be better advised to visit Nigeria, which has a far greater "cleanup" program under way than Zimbabwe. "It is clear to us that the UN is being used by Britain for political purposes," he repeats. "That is why we are sensitive to your own presence." Mugabe's body language and that of his ministers express their profound skepticism about the motives behind the UN's work in Zimbabwe. Mugabe speaks slowly. "We are beginning to lose confidence in the United Nations and even the secretary-general."

Urban renewal campaigns and removal of unauthorized buildings and squatters take place all the time all over the world. I had, however, called Zimbabwe's eviction program "the worst possible thing at the worst possible time" when it was at its brutal height in May, June, and July. I had no interest in castigating the government of Zimbabwe. Apart from protesting against apartheid, I supported our Scandinavian assistance to the liberation struggles against the white minority regimes of both Rhodesia and South Africa. But we have to tell the truth about what is taking place in the country that President Mugabe rules. I lean forward, seeking eye contact, and try again: "The purpose of my mission on behalf of your fellow African, Secretary-General Kofi Annan, is to discuss how we can more effectively contribute to meet humanitarian needs in Zimbabwe. The challenges here are, as we all know, daunting: There are more than three million who need food assistance. There are one million orphans caused by AIDS."

"We are willing and able to assist the people if we know whom you will cover and if you will do more to enable the work of the humanitarian organizations. We are less effective here than in most other places due to all the restrictions on our work. We use tents in the emergency phase for the homeless in Europe, America, and Asia. Tents will only be one of the ways we would like to provide shelter to the most needy of the hundreds of thousands who are homeless. I saw thousands yesterday who have nothing. Your government housing programs are small and still not completed. Those who live under plastic sheeting or out in the open want the tents that we can provide."