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Mugabe's road to ruin takes a bizarre new twist

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Jen Redshaw

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To get to Caledonia Transit Camp you have to drive past fields of blackened grass and the dingy staff buildings of Harare's maximum security prison. On your left near the suburb of Mabvuku are the dusty silos of a cement factory.

Take the narrow tarred road on your right past the cemetery. There are hardly any pedestrians on this road apart from a couple of schoolboys in khaki uniforms and green sweaters.

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Every day, open police trucks bearing scores of the newly homeless trundle down this road on their way to the camp. At least 5,000 people are housed in tents there, a tiny portion of the 1 million Zimbabweans believed to have lost their homes under Operation Drive Out Trash, President Robert Mugabe's devastating blitz on shanty towns and flea market stalls.

Mai Douglas was on one of the trucks two weeks ago. But she did not make it to the camp alive.

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She fell off the back of the truck she had been pushed onto when police stormed Porta Farm, a squatter camp on the outskirts of Harare.

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