Church leaders urge action to stop the violence

By Tichaona Sibanda
22 April 2008

Zimbabwe’s respected church leaders have called for urgent international intervention following reports that MDC activists are being systematically tortured and murdered by the Zanu-PF led regime.

The leaders of all church denominations issued a joint statement that on Tuesday describing the ‘vicious attacks’ as a deliberate campaign that could reach ‘genocidal’ proportions.

The leaders also called upon the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to immediately announce results for the March 29 presidential election that Mugabe is widely believed to have lost.

A statement from the church leaders said: ‘The nation is in a crisis. People are being abducted, tortured, humiliated by being asked to repeat slogans of the political party they are alleged not to support. In some cases, people are murdered.’

MDC secretary general Tendai Biti said the country was now ‘in a war situation’ following the disputed polls. The party disclosed that at least 10 people had been killed, hundreds injured and thousands displaced in post-election violence in the last two weeks.

Biti, who is also the MDC MP for Harare East, reiterated in Johannesburg on Monday that African leaders and the United Nations should intervene in the crisis, to prevent the violence from escalating further.
In addition to the violence, the security forces have also arrested a dozen workers from the MDC’s secretariat.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch on Tuesday accused Zanu-PF of ‘using a network of informal detention centres to beat, torture, and intimidate opposition activists and ordinary Zimbabweans’.

An analyst observed that alarm bells are getting louder, but so far they show little sign of making any difference in a country that has been brought to it’s knees by a handful of military generals, who still back Mugabe despite his electoral defeat to the MDC.