| AFRICAN church leaders, and heads of government at the G8 summit in Japan, endeavoured to keep up the pressure on President Mugabe, this week. Political leaders, including Gordon Brown and President George Bush, backed the introduction of sanctions against individual members of the Zimbabwean government (see here).
The G8 leaders also supported the idea of sending a UN envoy to Harare — a signal that they have lost patience with the attempts by President Mbeki of South Africa, to mediate between President Mugabe and the opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangerai.
At the summit, Mr Brown showed photos of the charred body of Joshua Bakacheza, a murdered MDC member, to highlight the brutality of the Mugabe regime.
In a statement, the G8 leaders rejected the legitimacy of President Mugabe’s government. “We deplore the fact that the Zimbabwean authorities pressed ahead with the presidential election, despite the absence of appropriate conditions for free and fair voting, as a result of their systematic violence, obstruction and intimidation.”
The Archbishop of Cape Town, the Rt Revd Thabo Makgoba, called on the Southern African Development Community to establish mechanisms to “bring about a climate free of political violence”, and urged President Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party to recognise the legitimacy of the MDC. He welcomed the resolution by the African Union (AU), calling for negotiations to settle the political crisis.
The Zimbabwe Christian Alliance (ZCA), a Christian Aid partner organisation, criticised the part of the AU’s resolution that proposed a government of national unity for the country. Useni Sibanda of the ZCA said the AU should have taken a harsher stance, and called for a transitional authority to draw up a new constitution.
“This country’s most urgent need is a truth- recovery process. We need healing — we have been living with such violence, and people are living in such fear that we will never be able to move forward without healing these wounds.”
The ZCA also called for humanitarian agencies to be given immediate access to the hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans facing severe food shortages.
The Methodist Conference this week condemned the British Government for continuing to send back failed asylum-seekers to Zimbabwe.
The former Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, the Most Revd Pius Ncube, a longstanding critic of President Mugabe’s regime, who has lived in the UK since June 2007, has intimated that he may soon return to Zimbabwe. “A shepherd must be with his flock, even if it means death,” he said.
The Archbishop of York was planning to join Zimbabwean exiles today in a demonstration in Westminster, calling for them to be granted the right to work in the UK. |
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