BIG MAN.(Robert Mugabe)

One recent morning, accompanied by an employee of a local residents'-rights group, I drove my Opel Astra rental car about six miles south from the center of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, to a squatter camp that had sprung up last year: a cluster of shanties made of road signs, radiator grilles, and other scrap. A dozen people were standing or sitting in front of the hovels, cooking over small fires, beating laundry against rocks; a tall young woman, who introduced herself as Nancy Mugova, was kneeling in the dirt with a baby tied to her back, hammering rivets into the handle of a frying pan. She invited us to sit with her in her dwelling--four feet tall, twelve feet long, and made of corrugated tin, with a flat tin roof held down by rocks. There was just enough room in the airless interior for a double mattress (on which all five members of the family slept), a cheap cabinet filled with ceramic plates and cups, a box of clothes, three pairs of men's shoes, and two sacks of sadsa, or mealy meal, the Zimbabwean staple, which cooks into a thick porridge. Just in front of the structure, the Mugovas had propped up an iron grate over two stones; this served as their kitchen.

Mugova, who was wearing the white robe and white head scarf of a local evangelical church, told us what had happened. Early one morning in mid-June, 2005, hundreds of armed officers of the Zimbabwe Republican Police and the city police notified the Mugovas and their neighbors that their houses were "illegal," and gave them thirty minutes to remove what they could. Nancy Mugova, her husband, Israel, and their children stood in the cold and watched a bulldozer demolish the five-room brick cottage that had served as both their home and their workplace, a metalworking shop. By the end of the day, bulldozers had knocked down every structure in the area, destroying the homes and the livelihoods of a thousand people. Most eventually found shelter with relatives, or in rural areas, but about a hundred and fifty people, I was told, had nowhere to go, and had built shanties on or near the ruins of their homes.

The project that forced out Mugova and her neighbors was called Operation Murambatsvina, or "Clean Out the Trash." It began without warning on May 19, 2005, when police swept through street markets in downtown Harare, ripping down stalls and beating and arresting hundreds of venders. The next day, the chair of the city's governing commission declared that all "unauthorized" structures in the city would be destroyed, claiming that they had become eyesores and centers of criminal activity. The project, though, was a pretext for remaking Zimbabwe's political map. Two months before Operation Murambatsvina, the circle of security advisers who surround Zimbabwe's President, Robert Mugabe, had warned him that the United States and the European Union were planning to rally slum dwellers and small traders, the backbone of the pro-democracy opposition, into a "Ukrainian-style revolution." Operation Murambatsvina spread through Harare's slums, then to other cities; as many as seven hundred thousand people were made homeless in three months. The United Nations Special Envoy, in a report last August, rebuked the regime for destroying homes and businesses. The operation unfolded with such brutal speed that it became known simply as "the tsunami."

Then, just before the release of the U.N. report, the regime announced a scheme to build thirty-one thousand houses and small factories and shops for those uprooted by Operation Murambatsvina. The plan, called Operation Garikai, or "Stay Well," quickly collapsed, amid allegations of favoritism and corruption. A parliamentary investigation revealed that fewer than five hundred houses had been completed in Harare, where nearly half a million of the displaced live. In the most notorious case, senior military officials and civil servants loyal to Mugabe's party were given dozens of the houses which were supposed to have gone to those who had been forced out. In May, days before the first anniversary of Operation Murambatsvina, according to the Herald, a state-owned newspaper, the police in Harare arrested another 10,244 "vagrants, street kids and other disorderly elements." A police spokesperson said that they would be "relocated" to "homes" in rural areas.

Robert Mugabe came to power in April, 1980, after waging a thirteen-year-long guerrilla war against the white-supremacist regime of what was then Rhodesia. For his first ten years in office, despite a pattern of repression and the creation of a de-facto one-party state, Mugabe was widely praised as one of the post-colonial era's most progressive leaders. He guaranteed educational opportunities for Zimbabwe's blacks, who had no access to most secondary schools and universities. High-school enrollment, which had been about two per cent at the time of independence, grew to seventy per cent by 1990, and Zimbabwe's literacy rate rose from forty-five per cent to nearly eighty per cent in the same period. Mugabe also tried to persuade the country's ...