Famine Plagues Zimbabwe

“BREAD is as scarce as gold in this country”. That was the talk in Zimbabwe during the last few months of 2007. Shelves have been empty of staple foods in small shops and supermarkets alike. Zimbabweans were once blessed with a surplus of food, but now they have to rely on aid agencies. Petrol is so hard to come by that regular bus services have virtually stopped altogether. But just how are ordinary people managing with an annual inflation of more than 8,000 percent – the highest in the world – and with four out of every five adults without a job?

Well, of course, the majority of the population hasn’t been managing. People have been starving. The evidence is in the hospitals where shrivelled babies lie dying in their cots while their mothers look on helplessly. An estimated three million Zimbabweans are thought to have fled to South Africa since the year 2000. And, according to the World Health Organisation, life expectancy for Zimbabweans is 37 years for men and 34 years for women, the lowest such figures for any nation.

But how has it come to this in just seven years. And what role has the Church played in the situation?

Lust for power

President Robert Mugabe played a key role in ending white rule in Rhodesia in 1980, and he and his Zanu-PF party have dominated Zimbabwe’s politics since then. His two decades of power were first seriously challenged in 1999 when the opposition Movement for Democratic Change was formed, led by Morgan Tsvangirai. With a presidential election looming in 2002, Mugabe feared the presidency might slip from his grasp. Politically motivated violence rose sharply, and self-styled ‘war veterans’ began invading white-owned farms. Mugabe’s government turned a blind eye, hoping to bolster support from the black population.

Yet, in March 2001, Zimbabwe’s religious Orders used newspaper advertisements to condemn the forcible occupation of land. Violent attacks on whites by government-backed gangs had become widespread. “We agree that our people should possess more productive land, and that the land should be shared among our people in a more equitable way,” they said, “yet we are concerned that the fast-track land distribution inflicts untold misery on the farm labourers and their families who are made redundant”. Thousands of farms fell into ruins. They also deplored the suffering they had witnessed over recent months in the course of their work: Aids patients without access to medical treatment, young people denied a chance to work, children dropping out of school, people beaten and tortured, women raped and abused, and families in mourning for relatives who were killed or missing.

A prominent critic

In the months before the presidential election, Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo emerged as one of Mugabe’s most prominent critics. Bills were being pushed through the Zimbabwean Parliament giving police sweeping powers of arrest and seizure ahead of the elections. One of Zimbabwe’s nine Catholic bishops, Ncube felt some of his colleagues were “far too close to the government,” and had spoken out “too little, too infrequently” against the outrages committed. Archbishop Patrick Chakaipa of Harare, for example, was a childhood friend of Mugabe, and they were both from the Shona ethnic group. They had worked together in the struggle against colonialism, and he favoured quiet diplomacy over confrontation. When Mugabe was re-elected for a fifth six-year term as President, Archbishop Ncube was among those who condemned the tainted election, and said he was “not interested” in attending Mugabe’s hasty inauguration ceremony. Two of Zimbabwe’s Catholic bishops did attend – Bishop Alexio Muchabaiwa of Mutare, president of Zimbabwe’s Catholic Bishops’ Conference, and Bishop Patrick Mutume, auxiliary in Mutare and president of the Commission for Justice and Peace. The Nuncio, Archbishop Peter Paul Prabhu, was also there, along with the Anglican Bishop of Harare, Nolbert Kunonga.

Immediately after the election, a mission of ecumenical peace observers concluded that the elections were neither “universal, transparent, fair nor free,” and laid the blame for political violence on Zanu-PF. The 60 observers, mostly from other African countries, represented such groups as the World Council of Churches, and the All African Conference of Churches. Bishop Mutume was concerned at the intimidation, but said people were adopting a “wait-and-see attitude to Mugabe’s government to see if it will curb violence now that the election is over”. The re-election did not mark the end of human rights abuses, and the Church in South Africa, Zimbabwe’s powerful neighbour, became involved. Later that year, an interdenominational service in Bulawayo commemorating victims of torture in Zimbabwe was attended by Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenberg in South Africa, offering solidarity to the people of Zimbabwe.

Young lives destroyed

During 2003 the newly-formed ecumenical Solidarity Peace Trust reported that the youth of Zimbabwe were being sacrificed to keep President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party in power. The ecumenical trust, comprising four bishops from Zimbabwe and two from South Africa, reported that up to 50,000 youths had been trained by the regime in the use of weapons and torture, and had been ordered to use violence against supporters of the opposition party. At a media conference in Johannesburg on September 5, 2003, to launch the document, led by Archbishop Ncube and Bishop Dowling, the militia was described as “a paramilitary training programme for Zimbabwe’s youth with the clear aim of inculcating blatantly anti-democratic, racist and xenophobic attitudes”. The church leaders appealed for disbandment of the militia and its training camps, the surrender of weapons, investigation of crimes committed, and a programme of rehabilitation and reintegration into society.

The bishops also pointed out that many young people have themselves become victims of human rights abuses in the course of training, particularly girls raped by boys undergoing training with them, and by their military instructors. “The resulting pregnancies and infections with sexually transmitted diseases not only devastate the lives of the youth concerned, but are creating a terrible legacy for the nation,” they said. Bishop Dowling said he found it “absolutely shameful that our South African government leaders will in the name of quiet diplomacy turn a blind eye to this affront against human dignity”. The bishops warned that undoing the harm would be difficult. “Our youths have been turned into vandals and have become a lost generation in the process”, they said.

Three former youth militia members who had escaped to South Africa spoke at the media conference. Talking in low voices, their gaze fixed on the floor, their stories were broken by sobs. Thabo, 22, said he was involved in the killing of Halaza Sibindi, the chairman of the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) opposition party in Tsholotsho, north of Bulawayo, during the election campaign in January 2003. He was part of a gang of 70 who beat him to death with crowbars, iron bars and sjamboks (whips) in front of his sons and daughters. Eighteen-year-old Wesley was taken from school to join the militia when he was 15. He admitted petrol-bombing white farmers and committing rape. Archbishop Ncube noted that the young people under 18 can be classed as child soldiers. “This is a crime against humanity and the perpetrators must be charged by the international courts”, he said.

Brutal methods

By 2004, Zimbabwe’s Catholic leaders were tackling the African Union and the South African government for failing to tackle Mugabe. Archbishop Ncube suggested that Mugabe would use food aid as a political tool to win elections in 2005, and this did happen. New appointments within the country’s Catholic hierarchy made the Catholic Church bolder in speaking out on human rights violations. After Archbishop Chakaipa died in 2003, his successor, Robert Ndlovu, was an Ndebele from Matabeleland, and less allied to the establishment.

The Church in South Africa increased pressure on President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa to act on Zimbabwe. Cardinal Wilfred Napier of Durban, president of the Southern Africa Catholic Bishops’ Conference, said, in a radio interview in July 2004, that international sanctions had hastened the end of the apartheid era in South Africa, and similar pressure could be applied to Mugabe’s Government in Zimbabwe. Cardinal Napier felt that the people of Zimbabwe needed “practical and moral support” from outside to strengthen forces for change inside the country.

In June 2005, all of Zimbabwe’s Catholic bishops condemned their Government’s campaign to destroy slums and informal markets. The government campaign demolished houses and businesses in Harare and around the country, making an estimated 200,000 people homeless. “We, the members of the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference, hereby register our dismay at the current ‘clean up’ operation, dubbed Operation Restore Order,” they said in a statement. It continued, “We are surprised that this operation is being carried out without enough warning and without Government offering alternative accommodation and sources of income to the affected huge number of people”. The bishops said they found it “difficult to understand how the Government could unleash such violence on the population”. In their view, “a grave crime has been committed against poor and helpless people who are already facing many hardships in the country,” and they urged that the brutal police clampdown be stopped immediately.

In addition, the plight of the millions of Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa was alarming the Church in South Africa. After swimming crocodile-infested rivers to flee Zimbabwe, many faced ill treatment by South African government officials and police, according to the South Africa Catholic Bishops’ Conference Justice and Peace Department. Zimbabweans living in South Africa illegally were in a Catch-22 situation, because if they made official complaints about conditions and treatment they exposed themselves to deportation.

Adultery charge

2007 has been another violent and depressing year for Zimbabwe. Zanu-PF violently suppressed a prayer rally in Harare in March 2007 and even threw tear-gas canisters into a Catholic church where Mass was being said. The ecumenical Save Zimbabwe Campaign prayer rally had to be abandoned. Morgan Tsvangirai of the opposition MDC was among scores of people arrested and then beaten up in custody.

Then, in July, Archbishop Ncube resigned after being sued for adultery by the husband of a church employee. The scandal, according to Zimbabwe human rights organisations, was “well-crafted to divert the people’s attention from the real crisis facing Zimbabwe”. Zimbabwe’s other Catholic bishops have supported Archbishop Ncube, denouncing attacks on him by the government and state media as “outrageous and utterly deplorable”. He himself will be fighting the case through the courts, while working in pastoral ministry in Bulawayo Archdiocese, and has said, “I have not been silenced by the crude machinations of a wicked regime”. Bishop Kevin Dowling felt the humiliations heaped upon Ncube “is a shocking indictment of the lengths to which so-called political leaders like Mugabe are willing to go”. Bishop Dowling has warning that political violence in Zimbabwe will intensify in the run up to the next presidential election, scheduled for March 2008.

A country destroyed

Zimbabweans have a lower material standard of living now than they have had since the 1940s. Up to one quarter of the population has fled the country, due either to political harassment and torture, or to inability to survive and feed their families. Tens of thousands of Zimbabweans are dying of treatable diseases because the health system has collapsed. Teachers earn less than the cost of their transport to work. Mugabe’s government has destroyed an already troubled economy for the purpose of staying in power, and the social crisis has been devastating for the poor.

On 1 November, Mugabe – now 83 years old – signed into law an amendment to the constitution that allows him to choose a successor if he decides to retire mid-term. His choice will then be voted in by parliament which is dominated by his Zanu-PF party. He has confirmed that he will be seeking another term in next year’s elections.