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Harare (dpa) - Five women including a 75-year-old grandmother were arrested Wednesday in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe as they protested their imminent eviction from their homes, a women's rights group said.
The five were among a group of 60 women protesting the actions of a local housing officer, whom they accuse of evicting people from their homes in Bulawayo's Mpopoma suburb, said Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) in a statement.
Thirty-six residents are to be evicted from the homes they have been leasing, the group says. WOZA alleges the homes are to be reallocated to cronies of the superintendent of Mpopoma's housing office.
Housing has become a contentious problem in Zimbabwe following last year's widescale destruction of homes under President Robert Mugabe's much-criticized Operation Restore Order, which was condemned by governments and human rights groups around the world.
The United Nations says that the shack demolitions left up to 700,000 Zimbabweans homeless and jobless. Since then, housing has been in short supply, and rents have shot up nationwide.
An ambitious housing construction launched in the wake of Restore Order has failed to live up to its promise, with the few new houses that have been built seized not by homeless Zimbabweans but by civil servants and officials, critics say.
According to a separate report Wednesday in the official Herald daily, a Harare provincial administrator is to go on trial for alleged corruption in the allocation of 300 new houses and 115 plots to undeserving people.
The five women arrested Wednesday were taken to Bulawayo Central Police station, WOZA said in a later statement. The rights group alleged the women were being severely harassed by police.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
