UNTIL a few days ago, Mbare on the outskirts of Harare was Zimbabwe’s largest market, recommended in guidebooks for a lively afternoon visit, and also one of the capital’s oldest townships. Yesterday, along with much of the country, it looked like a place flattened by war.

Street after street had been turned into a battleground of twisted wreckage, torn wood and piles of broken bricks. Sirens wailed and plumes of smoke rose from the smouldering ground, in the midst of which stood the occasional wardrobe or iron bed-frame, all that remained of family homes.

A few figures picked among the debris like vultures, while others huddled in small dazed groups at the sides. Every so often, one of Zimbabwe’s new Chinese warplanes roared across the sky. All along the main road to the bus station were lines of people with their remaining belongings bundled on their heads, like refugees escaping from battle.

The perpetrator was not some enemy invader or even a rival ethnic group, but the embattled citizens’ own government.

Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian regime has chosen to consolidate its recent election victory by bulldozing homes and demolishing markets, leaving vast swathes of the capital and other cities in ruins and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees with neither shelter nor livelihood. Locals are calling it the Zimbabwean tsunami.

“This is Pol Pot style depopulation of cities,” said David Coltart, legal affairs spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). “It’s a sinister pre- emptive strike designed to remove the maximum possible number of people from urban areas to rural areas where they are easier to control.”

Operation Murambatsvina or “Clean Up the Filth” began with no warning two weeks ago when trucks of police and youth militia clad in brand new riot-protection gear arrived at Hatcliff, a shanty town. Stunned residents were ordered to leave and go back to the rural areas from which they came, as police began smashing their dwellings and a large local orphanage.

Others swept through the centre of Harare, rounding up the many thousands of traders who survive by selling everything from chewing gum to second-hand clothes and even the colourful women flower sellers who have operated in Africa Unity Square for decades. Flowers and wooden curios were thrown onto bonfires as their owners watched in disbelief.

It was the start of what has since become a nationwide scorched earth campaign. In cities from Mutare in the east to Bulawayo in the south, police have torched homes, demolished market stalls, detaining more than 20,000 traders, and bulldozed shanty towns.

Even the woodcarvers at the tourist resort of Victoria Falls were attacked, their stalls smashed and hundreds of carved hippos and giraffes thrown on fires. The MDC estimate that more than 1m people have been left homeless and left sleeping in the open in winter temperatures dropping to near freezing.

The opposition believe it is no coincidence that the targets have been the cities which voted overwhelmingly against Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party in the March 31 elections.

“It’s retribution against those who voted MDC,” said Nelson Chamisa, National Youth Chairman for the MDC and an MP whose own constituency in Harare is one of the most affected areas.

One MDC member said he believed that the government had intelligence that they had been holding meetings of grassroots cells looking at organising an popular uprising — modelled on the successful “Orange revolution” in Ukraine late last year that brought a pro-western government to power. A police spokesman described the action as designed “to wipe out pockets of resistance”.

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