There have been reports of unrest and also of people whose homes have been destroyed, informal dwellings, street traders whose goods have been confiscated, of many people being arrested, in Harare alone over 10,000, what is the current situation of this crackdown of street traders and people living in informal dwellings?
Well the crackdown against traders, who by the way are not street [traders], but are people who are operating from legally licensed places, has intensified and spread to a crackdown on people living in so-called informal housing or illegal houses, and late last night water tanks of the police drove into an area called Harare South and razed down their houses.
Most of these people are living, who have been organized or set up under cooperatives, and most of them ironically were given stands by the ruling party before the elections, as a way of vote buying and so last night, the police using tanks - water tanks - and armoured military vehicles moved in and razed them down to the ground.
As you have said, yes, more than 10,000 people have been arrested under the current crackdown but ironically enough I have just been driving around and I have just seen a formation of police vehicles heading toward White Cliff Camp, which is an informal or illegal settlement by members of the police, the army and the war veterans.
So what we may see today is a clash between members of the police, the army and the war veterans who stay there, with the police on other hand who have been razing down the houses because some of the houses that have been built there are very beautiful and modern houses.
So it's not only informal dwellings that have been destroyed but also homes that people have built with bricks and mortar?
Yes, and the authorities explanation for that is, the houses may have been built with bricks and mortar, but as long as they are built on undesignated areas then that makes them illegal structures and the minister of local government national housing was on TV just now, and he was saying that the cleanup campaign was meant to return Harare to its former image of one of the world's cleanest cities, formally known as sunshine city.
But a lot of skeptics are saying that this is an operation that has spun out of control. Initially they wanted to look for foreign currency only, the informal trade only, among informal traders, but then quickly they were criticized for attacking people who were earning an honest living, and attracting labels like that this was being done in order to punish urban dwellers because they had voted for the opposition MDC, and now I think as an afterthought the government has said well, we are also going into informal settlements and they know that among those informal settlements most of them were parceled out under ZANU-PF housing schemes.
So maybe this is a way out for the ruling party or for the government in order to appear as if they are impartial and that they are pursuing a genuine attempt to clean up the capital and not punish residents for having voted for the opposition, in the March 31 election.
Apart from people who have been arrested, how many people affecting throughout the country - I understand similar actions are taking place in Gweru and other towns - is there any indication of how many people are being left homeless by this?
Well to start with I had a chat with the chairman of the Combined Harare Residents Association, and he says more than half the people that living in Harare live either in these illegal shacks, or as lodgers in other people's houses. So what this is going to have in terms of effect, is to push up the prices of accommodation and leave a lot of people homeless.
But then on the other hand in rural areas, where some sort half-hearted attempts have been made to crack down on people, it's not going to have much of an effect. I think that the crackdown in rural areas was part of the attempt to appear impartial because the ruling party or the government enjoys most of its support in rural areas, and so I think this was just a way of building up a defense - in order to say that you say we have attacked urban areas because they have voted for the MDC, we are also attacking the rural areas but they voted for the government.
What is the reaction of Zimbabweans in general and particularly those who are affected by this?
Well Zimbabwean people are a crushed lot. They are, their spirits have been broken by years of persistent, consistent harassment, abuse, torture, the use of military to crack down on demonstrations, and so for the first few days of this, they allowed themselves to be pushed around, beaten up and so on.