Posted on 03/31/2002 1:41:02 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
United Methodist pastors throughout Zimbabwe took to their pulpits to call their nation to peace following a fiercely contested presidential election in early March.
While business pretty much continued as usual in urban areas, such as Harare, the nation's capital, and Mutare, the eastern urban center near Africa University, rural communities reported widespread incidents of violence, intimidation and retribution before and after the election.
District superintendents and pastors called for peace in the days after the election, according to the Rev. Gift Machinga, superintendent of the Mutare Central District. Most superintendents visited troubled rural communities to be with pastors and congregations experiencing election-related stress.
In the rural congregation where he attended worship on March 17, the Sunday after the election, Machinga said one person rose during the service to confess his participation in violence during the election. The congregation responded to the man's confession and request for forgiveness with "great rejoicing," he said.
Election observers from the World Council of Churches and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches said, in a March 13 report, that the campaign preceding the election included "many incidents of harassment, rape, malicious damage to property, and general breakdown in the rule of law."
The opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, that disputes the validity of the polling, has charged that its leaders have been subjected to violent retribution in rural communities following the election.
The ruling party, ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front) has been accused of deploying men, designated as veterans of the liberation war that won Zimbabwe its freedom in 1980, to intimidate voters in rural areas. ZANU-PF also organizes youth brigades, trained at the infamous Border Gezi youth training center in Mt Darwin in central Zimbabwe, to intimidate rural communities through violence, according to one United Methodist church leader.
In a rural community in eastern Zimbabwe's low veldt, a United Methodist layman told visitors from the United States that his truck had been surrounded by dozens of youth in a ZANU-PF brigade on the Sunday afternoon following the election. The youths lifted the truck, containing himself, his wife and young daughter, off the ground and compelled him to chant ZANU-PF slogans. When he did not do so, because he did not know the words to the slogans, they began rocking the truck so fiercely that he expected it to be overturned or worse. He said that a young woman in the group persuaded the youth to drop the truck and let them go.
Local political leaders agreed to discuss with visitors the community's need for international help in its continuing efforts to recover from massive damage caused to the buildings, bridges and farmland in the area by Cyclone Ellene in 2000.
On the way to this meeting, the visitors met a man whose face was cut and bruised and whose legs contained numerous welts and sores. The man said that, while he was driving in his car with his father after the election, ZANU-PF war veterans had forced him to stop, by shooting out the tires of his car, and then had beaten him. The attack was motivated by a belief that he had been one of the local leaders of the opposition party, he said.
The local church member driving the visitors reported that two schoolteachers in the same town, suspected of supporting the Movement for Democratic Change, had had their arms broken by ZANU-PF supporters following the election.
Zimbabwe United Methodist church leaders and the U.S. visitors met March 19 with the local tribal chief, who is also regional head of the ZANU-PF party, and two ZANU-PF leaders who identified themselves as war veterans.
Speaking through a translator, the chief expressed appreciation for past help in recovery efforts from Christian Care, the relief arm of the Zimbabwe Council of Churches that is affiliated with the UK-based Christian Aid, and international relief agencies such as the United Methodist Committee on Relief. He asked churches not to abandon Zimbabwe's people.
The war veterans asked U.S. visitors not to be afraid of them, despite reports of violence. "We are all poor people," one of the veterans said. "We need the help of the United States."
Because it occurred primarily in rural communities, much of the violence that surrounded Zimbabwe's election was not obvious to international election observers who watched the voting but did not talk freely with community leaders and other residents, said one Zimbabwe church leader. Upset by the South African government's delegation's endorsement of the election as fair and free, the leader said that outside observers should either listen to the experiences of local leaders who have experienced the violence or "just keep quiet" rather than endorse the status quo.
(((HOWEVER)))------------------ Bishop Christopher Jokomo, head of the Zimbabwe Area of the United Methodist Church, expressed appreciation that the nation preserved peace throughout the election period despite the deep political disagreements. He said that the ruling party and opposition leaders need to work together on behalf of the welfare of Zimbabwe's people.
He said he was concerned about the questions he has been receiving from churches and groups, such as Volunteer In Mission, from the United States about whether it is safe to visit Zimbabwe. Visitors to Zimbabwe's urban communities, including Africa University, are in no danger, he emphasized.
"Zimbabwe is as safe to travel to as it was 20 years ago, I believe," he said.
Dean Snyder is the director of communications for the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church. Jane Malone, a United Methodist laywoman and Snyder's spouse, is an advocate for affordable housing. They visited Zimbabwe on a mission trip.
Was He?
Or did He believe, Absolutely, in FReedom?
……….. It is all unbearably sad. Despite its run-down center and its endlessly potholed roads Harare is a beautiful city: tall trees, wonderful vegetation, large gardens. Walking in the center one is endlessly accosted by curio sellers who have hardly seen a tourist in months. When you tell them you don't want to buy their wares they switch immediately to telling you how many hungry children they have. In part this terrible sadness stems from the fact that so many believed -- briefly -- that Mugabe might be beaten. But this disappointment and anti-climax is greatly added to by a conviction that only external forces will be effective in getting Mugabe out... and that the rest of the world doesn't seem to care.
"The news that the Commonwealth has suspended Zimbabwe is good," one Movement for Democratic Change (opposition) supporter told me, "but we need real help now, not gestures. The President is a torturer and murderer and his supporters are taking revenge all round the country on those who voted against him. Even people like me, who have fought with all I've got against him have now to think of my wife and kids. Should we run? If so where to? Surely it would be easier and cheaper for the world to help now than have to pick this country up from the dead later on?" [End Excerpts]
Don't we love the black and brown Peoples, too?
All I see are people trying to do the right thing and being denied by might over right.
I also see terrorists running unchecked and being the only super power,
we need to give assistance to those who want freedom from them.
Please, Dear Lord!!?
For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.
Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know. [End Excerpt]
It is high time that Christians and congregations chase away pastors, reverends and priests who bless and speak well of the state-sponsored evil being encouraged by Zimbabwe's ruling class. Men of God who grace ZANU PF occasions for their own selfish ends should be chased away from the churches.
These are indeed abnormal times when so-called men of God turn out to be supporters of such devilish acts as being perpetrated by the state today. It is time that right-thinking Zimbabwean Christians say "to hell with these fake men of God who preach the word according to ZANU PF".***
(Under the Guise of Religion) ..United Methodists Working for Peace in Zimbabwe
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