With media attention focused on the Middle East, the situation in Zimbabwe has slipped off the radar. But Audrey Gaughran of Amnesty International says that the situation has gotten dramatically worse, as President Robert Mugabe clings onto power.

“If you went to Zimbabwe in 1998 and you returned now, it’s unbelievable the levels to which things have sunk in such a short space of time,” Audrey says. “According to the World Health Organisation, female life expectancy in Zimbabwe is now the lowest in the world.”
Gaughran visited the country recently to see the consequences of ‘Operation Murambatsvina’, a brutal programme of slum clearances launched by the Mugabe regime in 2005. “Operation Murambatsvina was a programme of mass forced evictions,” she explains. “The government basically went to most of the major urban areas across Zimbabwe and evicted people in the poorer areas. They said they were evicting people because their homes were illegal, but under Zimbabwean law, that’s not the case. It was a very swift, military style-operation.”
700,000 are estimated to have lost their homes or their livelihoods as a result. As well as destroying homes, the security forces demolished vendor stalls. This has had a severe impact on living standards in a country where formal employment is below 20% and countless people depend on the informal economy. “If you talk to women’s groups, people who were involved in vending, they’re desperate. They can’t go back and sell, so there’s nothing for them to do,” Gaughran recounts. “If the police catch them, they just take their goods.”
The motivation behind the clearances is not certain, but the fear of social unrest is believed by many to be a factor. “Some people suspect that it was because the security services fear that there will be an uprising because the conditions are so bad, and that this uprising will happen in the high density urban areas,” she notes. “They may have been trying to disperse these people to prevent this from happening.”
The government has recently launched ‘Operation Garikai’, which has been presented as a programme of social construction that will replace the homes destroyed last year. Gaughran believes that this claim is dishonest. “The government itself admits that only 3,225 houses were built, but 92,000 homes were destroyed, so obviously that’s only a drop in the ocean,” she says. “It has no reality in terms of a solution.” According to the government’s own figures, 20% of all the new homes will go to police officers and civil servants.
A few years ago, it seemed as if the fall of Mugabe was imminent, with strong pressure from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and predictions that Mugabe might encounter the same grisly fate at the Romanian tyrant Ceauscescu. But Gaughran reckons it was all a bit premature. “A lot of people dramatically underestimated President Mugabe,” she argues. “He’s a very smart man, and his government has been very smart in its propaganda. It’s played on legitimate concerns about land and colonialism. People in western countries underestimate the impact of colonialism in Africa. Mugabe’s rhetoric makes a powerful impression.”
This has been crucial, since the Mugabe regime has relied heavily on the benign stance of its neighbours. “The reason, in Amnesty’s view, that the Zimbabwean government is able to ignore everything that’s said by the UN, by the African Commission of Human Rights, by Amnesty and every other NGO, by the churches that are lobbying, by everybody, is that African governments are silent,” says Gaughran. “They’re acquiescing in what’s happening in Zimbabwe. Particularly its neighbours in southern Africa – they bring no pressure and they defend Zimbabwe internationally.”
Rhetoric alone couldn’t save Mugabe, of course. “It doesn’t have so much resonance with the people of Zimbabwe, because they don’t get the rhetoric, they get the reality,” Gaughran notes. But splits and divisions within the MDC have undermined its capacity to oppose the regime effectively.
With pressure from the opposition slackening, faction fighting within the ruling Zanu-PF party has emerged into the open. But Gaughran believes these conflicts are based on power, not principles. Any honest elements within Zanu-PF have been silenced by a combination of terror and bribery: “If you speak out, you risk losing everything. If you stay silent, there’s an awful lot to be gained.”
The best hope, she believes, is that the people of Africa will rack up the pressure on Mugabe. “There was a protest recently outside the Zimbabwean embassy in Botswana,” she recalls. “President Mugabe got very upset about that. As you can imagine, he doesn’t often get upset about anything, but he was badly rattled when he saw ordinary people in Botswana protesting against him.”