The Zimbabwean government has built only 3,300 houses for the estimated 700,000 people made homeless by its forced housing demolitions over a year ago, an Amnesty International report said yesterday. It adds to criticism from Zimbabwean groups, which say the demolitions were an abuse of human rights.President Robert Mugabe's government bulldozed dwellings in Harare, Bulawayo and other cities. Mr Mugabe claimed the destruction was an urban clean-up programme and said his government would be providing new homes for those forced to sleep rough. But Amnesty dismissed the homes constructed as "a wholly inadequate response". It said many were of such poor quality that they were uninhabitable. "Hundreds of thousands of people evicted ... have been left to find their own solutions to their homelessness," said Amnesty's Africa programme director, Kolawole Olaniyan. "The Zimbabwean government has attempted to cover up mass human rights violations with a public relations exercise."
A Zimbabwean-based group, the Solidarity Peace Trust, said the residences destroyed were not slums but "valuable living spaces". The trust, headed by Bulawayo's Catholic archbishop, Pius Ncube, said the government's policies had created a large segment of the population that was "severely impoverished and highly stressed by continual movement. All have lost possessions and many have lost their health. A distressing number have died."