Flickering light from scores of small fires illuminates the jumbled piles of furniture, roofing sheets and bundles filling the darkened grounds of a church in a Harare township. Around the flames, small groups of people sit in silence or talk in undertones. Occasionally a child cries. There are about 300 people in all - mothers nursing babies, pregnant women, the elderly, children, the sick - their belongings scattered around them. All have been rendered homeless by President Mugabe’s campaign to demolish the country’s shantytowns and drive away the urban poor who resolutely support the opposition. All are distraught. “No job, no money, no food and nothing in the shops. Our brains are going cockeye,” says Crispen Musanhi, warming himself by the embers against the midwinter cold. Next to him is all he owns - a wardrobe, a few sacks of maize for a bed, blankets and two suitcases. “My friend, this is a tsunami disaster.” Now in its fourth week, Operation Murambatsvina (“throw out the rubbish”) has indeed created misery and devastation on the scale of a natural disaster.

The ruthless “clean-up” operation in Zimbabwe’s urban areas has driven possibly a million people from their homes. In nearly every poor township of the country it has left thousands of acres of grey concrete rubble where homes and small businesses stood, and created a vast tide of refugees seeking shelter and food. In Hatcliffe, a squatter camp in north Harare, the police destroyed not only a Catholic refuge for Aids orphans, a secondary school and a World Bank-funded public lavatory, but on Wednesday, under the grim eye of two local imams, they completed the destruction a Sunni mosque. Mussa Mukwinda, 81, the secretary of the Hatcliffe Islamic Organisation, is sleeping in the nearby bush. “The police said, ‘we do what we want to do’. Sick people, children have no blankets, no food.” The Mugabe regime has provided no temporary accommodation or assistance to the victims of the mass demolitions. Everyone has been told to go to the rural areas that are now enduring their third year of famine. Charities and Western donor organisations have been threatened, harried and intimidated against helping the homeless, or even doing surveys of the dispossessed. This particular church is one of the few institutions in Zimbabwe that has dared to provide sanctuary to the refugees and cannot be named lest the police drive them out.

By night the streets of Zimbabwe’s townships are alive with small fires as people cluster in the ashes of their homes or anywhere that provides shelter. By day they dodge policemen armed with automatic rifles and batons who return repeatedly to drive them out. Others have managed to find shelter with relatives in houses that escaped demolition because they were built with officially approved plans, but rents have more than trebled since the operation began. Most are joining the stream of overloaded buses and lorries taking refugees and their possessions to the rural areas. Fuel is in desperately short supply and transport charges have soared. At the township church the priest, carrying a single candle, was supervising the loading of a large lorry to prevent fights breaking out between people desperate to fit their possessions on board. But there is scant prospect of a welcome in the tribal areas. Rural poverty has deepened dramatically in the past five years and the sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of destitute city dwellers is certain to intensify the crisis. Church and charity officials cite reports of families being ordered back to cities by village headmen, many of whom are loyal to Mr Mugabe and hostile to urban dwellers who are seen as opposition supporters. George Mashayamombe, 56, had his jaw broken in 2000 when Mugabe supporters near his home in northeast Zimbabwe discovered that his wife was an opposition supporter. They fled to Mbare. “Now we are going back there. We will be lucky if they do not throw us out. But there is nothing else to do,” he said.

At St Peter Claver’s Catholic Church in the Mbare township of Harare about 100 people were pleading yesterday for bus fares to the countryside. “We have been sleeping in the open for three weeks,” said Rindai Chekesese, cradling her limp three-year-old daughter who has a severe cough. “At 1am you hear the babies start to cry. They go on the whole night because of hunger and cold. We have to beg for food and for water,” she said. Father Oskar Wermter, the parish priest, said: “These are the lucky ones. They have relatives in the communal areas to take them in. There are thousands who are city born-and-bred, or have foreign parents. They have nowhere to go.” Last week Father Wermter found a young women with tuberculosis, probably HIV positive, on the verge of death after spending the night in the open. “This is infinitely cruder and more brutal than anything the (white minority) Rhodesian administration did,” he said. Augustine Chihuri, the Police Commissioner, said yesterday that Operation Murambatsvina was meant to “clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the economy”. He thanked the people who had their homes destroyed “for not going wild during the exercise”.