Introduction This report is a follow up to the previous Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum preliminary report entitled Order out of Chaos, or Chaos out of Order? A Preliminary Report on Operation ―Murambatsvina‖ issued in June 2005. This latest report traces developments that have taken place since our June report and gives an overview of the main consequences of Operation Murambatsvina since it commenced on 19 May 2005. It also locates the Operation in the context of events that have happened in Zimbabwe over several years. This Operation continued to take place despite pleas by a whole succession of local and international church bodies and non-governmental organisations for government to halt it. The Operation continued after the arrival, on 27 June 2005, of the Special Envoy sent by the United Nations to investigate what was happening, despite a public announcement at that time that the Operation had ended. It also did not stop after the public release of the highly critical Report of the Special Envoy on 22 July 2005, in which one of the main recommendations was that the Operation should immediately be halted. On 27 July 2005, the Acting President Joyce Mujuru announced at a meeting that Operation Murambatsvina was now over. It remains to be seen whether it has indeed ended, as, on the very day that the Acting President made this statement, bulldozers knocked down the Kwekwe offices of the main opposition party, the MDC, with a large number of police and Council officials looking on. 1 This new report takes its title from UN Special Envoy‘s apt description of Operation Murambatsvina as ―a disastrous venture.‖ Mention should be at the outset of the blocking by the Zimbabwean Government of another probe into the Operation by the African Union Commission’s Representative. In early July 2005, the African Union Commission designated a Special Rappoteur of the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights to visit Zimbabwe to investigate the impact of the Operation on its behalf. The Zimbabwean authorities refused to allow him to carry out his investigations, saying that they were too busy dealing with the visit by the UN investigator. They also claimed that the African Union Commission had breached protocol by sending the official without first notifying the Zimbabwean Government. It is quite clear that the main reason why the Government blocked this investigation was simply because it feared that the AU investigator would give an adverse report. 2 Impact of Operation Murambatsvina In our previous report, the Forum looked at the human impact of Operation Murambatsvina, the Operation that commenced on 19 May 2005. That report described the humanitarian disaster that the Operation had created by devastating the lives of large numbers of urban people and rendering completely destitute already poor and highly vulnerable people.