A bid by Zimbabwe’s churches to start negotiations between President Robert Mugabe and the opposition was in jeopardy on Thursday after a top government minister denounced some of the religious leaders as opposition ”activists” under the control of ”foreign masters”.
Less than a week after Mugabe met three Christian leaders, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa was quoted as saying Anglican Bishop Sebastian Bakare, the head of the Protestant Zimbabwe Council of Churches, and Bishop Trevor Manhanga, the president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe, a church umbrella body, were ”not honest brokers”.
”Their interest is out of self-interest,” Chinamasa told the daily Herald. ”They are MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) activists wearing religious collars.”
Manhanga, the spokesperson for the mediation group, could not be reached for comment.
The third member of the group was Bishop Patrick Mutume, of the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference.
The mediation effort comes against the backdrop of growing international pressure for the two sides to begin talks to end the country’s crisis. The move followed a meeting earlier in July between South African President Thabo Mbeki and United States President George Bush at which both urged for ”urgent action” on Zimbabwe.
The religious leaders met Mugabe last Friday for two hours, and on Monday held talks with MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Both sides were asked to submit written outlines of their positions on the proposed talks in the next few days.
The trio said this week they would travel to South Africa and Nigeria to brief Mbeki and Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo on their initiative.
Both presidents have spearheaded efforts to get the two sides to the negotiating table.
Chinamasa told the Herald that the fact that the bishops were ”going to engage other outside players proved they were carrying [the] mediation on behalf of their foreign masters”.
He said Bakare and Manhanga could not be expected to be impartial because they were ”MDC members who had in the past used different platforms to denounce the government and the ruling party”.
It was unclear why Chinamasa did not include Mutume in his denunciation. In April, the Catholic bishops’ conference warned that the government’s ”frightening abuses” would ”surely destroy our society”. – Sapa