AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

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Report on Science and Human Rights

Summer 2006 Vol XXVI, No. 1

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.