Zimbabwe: No justice for the victims of forced evictions 3 Murambatsvina context of significantly reduced availability of rental accommodation. One mother with a disabled child described how, following the destruction of her two-roomed backyard cottage, the landlord refused to allow her to rent rooms in the main house because one of her children was disabled. She now lives in a one-roomed structure with five children. A woman living with HIV/AIDS who lost her rental accommodation during Operation Murambatsvina was found living under plastic at the back of her parents’ home, as the family refused to allow her or her four children into the main house due to her evident illness. While the majority of victims have found some form of shelter in the housing stock that was not demolished during Operation Murambatsvina, a sizable minority, numbering several thousand people5, remain living in the open under makeshift shelters. This includes several hundred households at Hopley camp in Harare. Hopley camp is run by the Ministry of Social Welfare and is effectively a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs). It was established by the government of Zimbabwe in late July 2005, when it forcibly displaced victims of Operation Murambatsvina to the site and left them there on bare land without shelter or access to adequate water, food or sanitation.6 Since the start of Operation Murambatsvina the government has repeatedly denied the UN and humanitarian organisations permission to provide temporary shelters, particularly tents, to desperate homeless people. A pilot shelter project established by the UN in August 2005, which provided tents to just 123 families in Headlands in eastern Zimbabwe, was terminated less than a month later and the tents were taken down by police.7 The 123 families were subsequently moved by the government, and Amnesty International has not been able to establish their location. A second effort by the UN to provide temporary shelters in the form of log cabins was also rejected by the government in December 2005.8 Finally in March 2006, nine months after the mass evictions started, the UN was given permission to erect some temporary shelters. By August 2006, more than one year after the mass evictions, less than 2,000 shelters had been erected. This compares with UN targets for the provision of emergency shelter, based on need, of 40,000 households in August 2005,9 reduced to 23,000 households in the UN Consolidated Appeal document for 2006.10 So far the temporary shelter is limited to two sites in Harare – Hatcliffe and Hopley camp. At Hopley camp, which is home to approximately 2,000 IDP households and where some 700 temporary shelters have been constructed, Amnesty International has received 5 This figure is based on reports by humanitarian groups on populations around the country who continue to live under makeshift shelter. 6 See Amnesty International video footage of Hopley Farm taken on 4 August 2005 at: http://news.amnesty.org/pages/zweavarchives-eng. 7 Reported to Amnesty International by NGO source, 9 September 2005. 8 The Zimbabwe Independent, “UN rep slams Chombo over houses”, 1 January 2006; IRIN, “UN "puzzled" by govt response to model house”, 21 December 2005. See: http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50813 (accessed 25 August 2006). 9 IRIN, “Zimbabwe: Pilot project provides shelter to cleanup victims”, 17 August 2005. 10 United Nations (UN), Consolidated Appeals Process, Zimbabwe 2006. See: http://ochaonline.un.org/cap/webpage.asp?Page=1332 (accessed 18 August 2006). Amnesty International 8 September 2006 AI Index: AFR 46/005/2006