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Past Issues | About
the Report
Geospatial Technologies Project Turns its Eyes to Zimbabwe
Sarah Olmstead
Consultant
"These people knew that the structures were illegal - we always told them
not to build them. They did not think the government would take any action."
-- Jerome Macdonald Gumbo, Zanu-PF chief whip
"In no time the cottage I had called home for three years
was gone. Then it dawned on me that I was now homeless, you try and pinch yourself
and wake up but this was no dream. My life had been shattered before my very
own eyes." -- Harare Resident, as reported by BBC
"These satellite images are irrefutable evidence... that
the Zimbabwean government has obliterated entire communities, completely erased
them from the map, as if they never existed." --AI's Africa Programme director
Kolawole Olaniyan
In May 2005, the government of Zimbabwe began a campaign it called Operation
Murambatsvina (translated alternately as Operation Restore Order or Drive Out
Trash). Government forces have been demolishing homes and businesses in what
it claims to be illegal settlements and black market areas, many of which have
been in place for decades. Opposition forces and human rights organizations
say that President Robert Mugabe and the ruling Zanu-PF party's real aim is
to retaliate against residents of urban areas, which have been voting for the
opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), in recent elections.
According to U.N. estimates, the homes of around 700,000 people were demolished,
and further, the demolitions have affected at least 2.4 million people across
Zimbabwe through deprivation of housing, work, food, water, or education.
Amnesty International (AI) came to the Science and Human Rights Program looking
for before and after images of four particular communities in Zimbabwe that
were effected by the destruction. Those images will be used for reporting purposes
and for lawsuits being filed by the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR),
based in Harare. The images on page 4 showing the destruction of the Porta Farm
settlement were published Wednesday 31 May as central evidence in a report,
"Shattered Lives: The Case of Porta Farm." According to the report, Porta Farm
was razed in late June 2005, as part of Operation Murambatsvina.
Otto Saki, an attorney with the ZLHR, said the images collected under the Geospatial
Technologies and Human Rights (GaTHR) Project would be important in pending
legal action on behalf of those who lost their homes. "The pictures epitomize
the apex of a man-made disaster, and they can be of a phenomenal impact in redressing
such absurdities, now and in the future," Saki said.
QuickBird images of Porta Farm, acquired by GaTHR, showed the destruction of
the entire settlement, about 870 structures. Visual analysis of the images was
undertaken by loading the images in in ArcView GIS and counting individual visible
structures. Additionally, GaTHR looked at three other settlements using the
same method: Killarney, Chitungwiza,and Hatcliffe.
In Hatcliffe, approximately 700 larger homes appear to have been removed. In
Chitungwiza, around 2470 buildings were destroyed, many of them backyard structures
that home owners rented out to others, as well as at least one marketplace.
Finally, in Killarney, 486 homes were destroyed. Those demolitions denied former
residents not just places to live, but their access to food, water, work, education,
health, and the whole gamut of economic, social, and cultural rights.
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