Church official: Rural Zimbabweans fear for their lives amid violence

Published: 2008-05-27

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (CNS) -- Zimbabweans in rural areas "fear for their lives," a church official said after a report warned that Zimbabwe is headed toward civil war. Postelection attacks have been "most severe" in rural areas, and many Zimbabweans in these areas may be too afraid to vote for the opposition in the runoff presidential election June 27, said Alouis Chaumba, head of Zimbabwe's Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace. However, many people in the country's towns and cities "are motivated to vote again to ensure an end to the present system," he told Catholic News Service in a May 26 telephone interview from the capital, Harare. "Many communities feel that voting will be an act of solidarity with their friends who have been killed or wounded in the violence, so that they did not die in vain," Chaumba said. A report on postelection violence in Zimbabwe by the Solidarity Peace Trust, an ecumenical group of church organizations from Zimbabwe and South Africa, said, "There needs to be a general recognition that Zimbabwe is sinking fast into the conditions of a civil war, propelled largely by the increasing reliance on violence by the ruling party to stay in power, and the rapidly shrinking spaces for any form of peaceful political intervention." The report, released in Johannesburg, South Africa, May 21, contained about 50 eyewitness accounts of orchestrated beatings, torture and the destruction of homes and shops.

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