Mugabe tidies up as UN envoy lands Correspondents in Harare June 28, 2005 From: A UN envoy has arrived in Zimbabwe to assess the humanitarian fallout from a brutal demolition blitz that has left up to one million people homeless, amid warnings that Zimbabweans repatriated by Britain are being tortured in Harare.
UN envoy Anna Tibaijuka's arrival in Zimbabwe came as reports said a "hidden famine" was killing tens of thousands of people driven into destitute rural areas from the cities by President Robert Mugabe's campaign to destroy urban shanty towns. The Independent newspaper in London said victims of the forced expulsion from the cities - which has been compared to the devastating policies of Pol Pot in Cambodia - were arriving in the famine-stricken countryside, where, jobless and homeless, they were waiting to die.
Advertisement: Unofficial estimates obtained by The Independent suggest the death rate is already outstripping the birth rate nationwide by 4000 a week.
Ms Tibaijuka, executive director of the Nairobi-based UN Habitat program, said after her arrival in Harare that she wanted to discuss ways of helping Zimbabweans hit by the five-week blitz.
Zimbabwean police have been carrying out the two-pronged Operation Restore Order and Operation Murambatsvina (which means "drive out the rubbish"), flattening backyard shacks and shop stalls in cities and towns across the country.
The UN official is expected to be taken on a carefully organised visit to urban areas where evidence of the program has been hastily cleared.
But Spanish doctor Pedro Porrino, who has been working at a remote outpost south of Bulawayo for three years, told The Independent the regime was driving the urban poor into drought-affected areas where people were already starving.
"For the first time I am seeing people who are literally starving to death," he said.
"There are so many people here who have never been into town. The only thing they know is to eat and to survive and now they can't even do that."
The catastrophe has put pressure on the British Government and its policy of deporting Zimbabwean asylum-seekers. A hunger strike by Zimbabwean detainees in Britain entered its sixth day as church leaders and human rights groups prepared a dossier for Prime Minister Tony Blair alleging deported Zimbabweans were being tortured or "disappeared" by the regime.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change in Harare said it was compiling a list of recent deportees detained, beaten and interrogated on their return.
A source close to the British Home Secretary said the Government would be guided by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on whether it had become too dangerous to continue with deportations planned for this week.
But Downing Street insiders said Mr Blair would resist pressure to suspend the deportation of all asylum-seekers from Zimbabwe.
They said Mr Blair believed there to be plenty of other countries in the world whose regimes were abhorrent, but that not everyone from those nations seeking asylum was genuinely at risk if they returned home. One official said Mr Blair thought "it would be wrong to have a special moratorium for Zimbabwe".
