With sluice gates and spillways open, it would have taken at least five years for the dam to fill up to capacity, but in this case they were deliberately closed because villagers in Tokwe-Mukorsi had resisted relocation.” 
 
 Tiseke Kasambala, director of southern Africa for Human Rights Watch, charges that “these 3,000 families have been displaced under questionable circumstances and dumped in a place where their only alternative is to be cheap labor for Zimbabwe’s ruling party.” 
 
 The Human Rights Watch charges were vociferously denied by local Zimbabwe officials and members of the ruling Zanu (PF) party, which won reelection last July in a vote that was highly contested. The sugar cane and ethanol project is jointly owned by Mr. Mugabe’s political party, Zanu (PF), and a controversial Zimbabwe businessman named Billy Rautenbach, sometimes called “Africa’s Napoleon.” 
 
 From the moment the 3,000 families were relocated, they were told that their new employment was filling a sugarcane farming labor shortage. “These 3,000 families have been displaced under questionable circumstances and dumped in a place where their only alternative is to be cheap labor for Zimbabwe’s ruling party,” said Tiseke Kasambala, southern Africa director at Human Rights Watch.“These families have a right to compensation for their property and to voluntary resettlement elsewhere in the country, to earn a living as they see fit.” 
 
 
 
 The families were moved to the Chingwizi transit camp in Mwenezi district, Masvingo province, about 150 kilometers away from where they had lived. In an operation conducted partly by the military, the displaced and destitute families -- about 20,000 people -- were quickly whisked off and resettled in a “transit camp” of tents 80 miles away, on something called the Nuanetsi Ranch. Thousands of children have had their schooling disrupted or no longer have access to education in the tent city refugee camp, according to a visitor there. A makeshift school set up near the camp is not adequately equipped and staffed to meet the children’s needs. There were also widespread allegations that Masvingo police and provincial officials responsible for distributing food, blankets, and clothing have diverted some of the aid to the neighboring towns of Triangle and Chiredzi, where they are sold for profit, allegations HRW monitors witnessed to be true. “The Zimbabwean government has an obligation to ensure that displaced people have food, clothing, and shelter, but when food aid is turning up in local markets instead of in the tents of the displaced, then the responsible local officials need to be investigated,” said Kasambala. Background 
 
 Construction of the Tokwe-Mukorsi dam, the largest inland dam in Zimbabwe to provide hydro-electricity and irrigation for surrounding districts, began in 1998 but was stopped several times before an Italian contracting company, Salini Impregilo JVC, took over the project in 2011. Rautenbach was among those on US, UK, and EU targeted sanctions lists alongside President Robert Mugabe and his inner circle between 2002 and 2013. Many people who spoke to Human Rights Watch said they believed that the Tokwe-Mukorsi floods were artificially induced to forcibly evict them without compensation so they could be taken to Nuanetsi Ranch to be a source of cheap labor in sugar cane plantations. The closed flood gates caused high waters to back up and flood out the villagers. “What the media reported – that the dam wall collapsed leading to floods – is false information,” said one of the senior Salini officers, all three of whom requested anonymity. “The dam wall did not collapse and was never in danger of collapsing. With sluice gates and spillways open, it would have taken at least five years for the dam to fill up to capacity, but in this case they were deliberately closed because villagers in Tokwe-Mukorsi had resisted relocation without compensation for several years since construction began in 1998. One of the Italian corporate officers that leaked information to HRW summed up the situation by saying, “’Floods’ enabled [the] government to swiftly remove some 20,000 people without compensation under the guise of a national disaster while at the same time attracting international sympathy and aid from the donor community."
– Robert Mugabe isn't known for his human rights record, but is the Zimbabwean leader villainous enough to flood whole villages to create a source of cheap labor? Some 20,000 villagers were displaced from a region in southern Zimbabwe earlier this year and resettled on a ranch that just happened to be jointly owned by Mugabe's party and a businessman ally, the Christian Science Monitor reports. A Human Rights Watch investigation finds that the villagers are being forced to grow sugar cane for an ethanol project—and the flood was deliberately created to get them off their land without paying compensation. The flood was declared a "national disaster" and media reports claimed a dam wall collapse had caused the floods, but that "is false information," says a senior employee at the Italian firm that helped build the dam. "The dam wall did not collapse and was never in danger of collapsing. With sluice gates and spillways open, it would have taken at least five years for the dam to fill up to capacity, but in this case they were deliberately closed." The international community donated food aid after the flood, but villagers have been told food aid distribution depends on their work, and provincial officials have been accused of selling off some of the aid for profit.