ZIMBABWE: Units of the Zimbabwean army were deployed across Harare over the weekend to support police involved in the ongoing destruction of the city's informal settlements, following repeated attacks by angry residents.
Up to 3,000 paramilitary police have spent the last week knocking down or setting fire to "illegal structures" - which are effectively makeshift homes and shops erected by the poor - across the capital as part of the government's campaign to "clean up" the city. But the government's aggressive campaign, which involved the use of bulldozers and sledgehammers to destroy the informal settlements leaving tens of thousands homeless, has led to numerous riots.
Residents from Harare's townships of Glen View and Budiriro, key opposition strongholds to president Robert Mugabe's ruling, Zanu-PF party, said army armoured vehicles had been deployed in the townships late on Friday night and uniformed soldiers were ordering people not to confront the police. "It's like we are in another Kosovo or in the Palestinian territories," Amos Runda, a Glen View businessman told South Africa's Sunday Independent newspaper.
"I lived through Ian Smith's brutality but I must say it never reached these proportions in our black townships."
Residents of Budiriro said soldiers were not directly attacking people but providing cover for police while they set fire to backyard shacks and pulled down shacks housing home industries.
They destroyed makeshift backyard shacks built and erected by homeowners to rent out to desperate home-seekers and raise cash for survival in a collapsing economy.
Mr Mugabe justified the campaign by saying the informal settlements had become "havens for crime" that were allowing the black market to flourish.
The authorities initially began the recent campaign, which has been dubbed Operation Restore Order, by raiding premises across Harare suspected of housing people involved in black market currencies and essential goods trading.
However, critics of the government claim the president is carrying out a personnel vendetta against the urban poor - who mainly voted for the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the recent general election - rather than trying to clean up the city.
Dozens of people have been reported injured in the clashes that have occurred since last Wednesday, but there are no confirmed fatalities. Nearly 20,000 hawkers have also been arrested nationwide and state television has said that people left homeless as a result of the campaign will be taken to a holding farm on the outskirts of the capital.