Roman Catholic bishops marked Easter Sunday with an unprecedented message to President Robert Mugabe to end oppression and leave office through democratic reform or face a mass revolt.
”The confrontation in our country has now reached a flashpoint,” said the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference in a pastoral message pinned up at churches throughout the country.
”As the suffering population becomes more insistent, generating more and more pressure through boycotts, strikes, demonstrations and uprisings, the state responds with ever harsher oppression through arrests, detentions, banning orders, beatings and torture,” the nine bishops said.
The majority of Zimbabwe’s Christians — including Mugabe — are Roman Catholics. Several thousand worshippers who packed the cathedral in Harare clustered around the notice boards to read the message after morning Mass on Sunday.
Although the Catholic bishops — especially Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of the second city of Bulawayo, have criticised the government in the past, the tone of this year’s pastoral message was the most strident since independence from Britain in 1980.
In his traditional Easter address from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI singled out Zimbabwe among other troubled countries. ”Zimbabwe is in the grip of a grievous crisis,” he said.
‘Cries of the oppressed’
The bishops’ letter, entitled ”God hears the cries of the oppressed”, likened human and democratic rights abuses under Mugabe to the oppression of biblical pharaohs and Egyptian slave masters. ”Oppression is sin and cannot be compromised with,” it said.
As in the colonial era, the current conflict in Zimbabwe pits those determined to maintain their privileges of power and wealth at any cost, even at the cost of bloodshed, against those demanding democratic rights, it said.
The conflict is ”between those who only know the language of violence and intimidation, and those who feel they have nothing more to lose because their constitutional rights have been abrogated and their votes rigged,” it continued.
”Many people in Zimbabwe are angry, and their anger is now erupting into open revolt in one township after another,” said the bishops. ”In order to avoid further bloodshed and avert a mass uprising, the nation needs a new people-driven constitution that will guide a democratic leadership chosen in free and fair elections.”
A similar letter in the nearby nation of Malawi pressured long-time dictator Hastings Banda into holding a referendum on reform in 1992 and calling democratic elections, which he lost, ending 30 years of brutal rule.
The Zimbabwe bishops’ letter was also reminiscent of the role of Catholic churches in the eventual ouster of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
Deeply rooted Catholicism embraced the majority of the population in the Philippines, and churches in Malawi triggered resistance to Banda, said Father Oskar Wermter, of the Catholic communications secretariat in Harare.
”We cannot yet say what the response of our congregations [in Zimbabwe] will be, but basic biblical teachings apply. Oppression is not negotiable. It must stop before there can be any dialogue,” he said.
Widely distributed
Wermter said the bishops wanted the contents of the letter to receive the widest possible distribution. The letter was delivered to the traditional rural strongholds of Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party across the country, where priests showed what Wermter called a very strong interest in it.
The bishops called for a day of prayer and fasting for Zimbabwe on April 14 and said there will be a prayer service for Zimbabwe every week after that.
The Anglican Church has been more muted, with its leaders generally toeing the ruling-party line.
Police violently broke up a multi-denominational prayer meeting on March 11, describing it as a banned demonstration. Two pro-democracy activists died and Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and a dozen senior colleagues were hospitalised after beatings.
Mugabe subsequently headed off a challenge to his leadership to win party support to stand for another presidential term in national elections in 2008. There was no response from the government on Sunday to the pastoral letter and Mugabe was out of the country.
The once-prosperous nation is reeling under hyperinflation of more than 1 700%, 80% unemployment, shortages of food and other basic goods and one of the world’s lowest life expectancies.
”The suffering people of Zimbabwe are groaning in agony,” said the bishops. ”A tiny minority of the people have become very rich overnight, while the majority are languishing in poverty … Our country is in deep crisis.”
But the letter said it also wants to convey a message of hope. ”God is on your side. he always hears the cry of the poor and oppressed and saves them.” — Sapa-AP