An in-depth Study on the impacts of Operation Murambatsvina When there was no apparent response from the Government, ZADHR issued a second statement making plain their concerns about the health issues: ZADHR’s particular concern for health leads us to emphasise the manifest and predictable effects of Murambatsvina in terms of (1) the likelihood of further deaths due to arbitrary physical trauma, as incurred this week in Porta Farm, as a result of the thoughtless violence of the demolition methods, (2) deaths due to exposure and hypothermia among already vulnerable children, chronically ill adults and the elderly, forced to live through nights in the open at the coldest time of the year, (3) The spread of infectious disease due to the lack of proper sanitation or water supply for hundreds of thousands of people, (4) The generation of ideal conditions for the spread of epidemic disease (eg cholera and typhoid) from those directly affected into the general population, (5) the increase in incidence of malnutrition due to the breakdown of food supplies as family income generation methods are destroyed, in a context in which basic foodstuffs are already at a premium, (6) The exacerbation of the HIV epidemic as community structures are fractured and dispersed and the vulnerability of women, adolescents and children to sexual exploitation is magnified, (7) The inevitable emergence of widespread drug-resistant HIV as treatment programmes are disrupted. Noting the government’s claims that Operation Murambatsvina was part of a long-planned strategy, ZADHR further commented: The speciousness of the government claim is further evidenced by the total lack of preparedness of the key Ministries of Health, Social Welfare and Education to respond to the ensuing humanitarian and health crisis. It is clear that these ministries were not even consulted let alone involved in any planning process. Of particular concern are the effects on persons with HIV or AIDS, as indicated in the ZADHR statement, both in terms of the possible spread of the disease and the consequences to those people with the disease. Here there two issues. The first is to do with the compromising of patients’ health care through the disruption of their drug treatment, whilst the second is to do with the emergence of drug-resistant forms of the disease. These were not issues covered in any depth in the two previous surveys, and clearly it is of major concern to the public interest that the effects here of Operation Murambatsvina are wellunderstood. 2.3 Legal issues There has been considerable acrimony over issues of legality; both the issues related to whether the Government was operating within the law during the operation, and also the issues related to the rights of persons whose goods were confiscated, or property destroyed. Many of these matters have been covered in other reports, and we will not deal with these except in passing referencexxviii. 9