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 towards civil war. Post-election 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.
The results of the March 29 parliamentary and presidential elections are "a clear message that, despite the extremely harsh and repressive political environment in which elections have been conducted in Zimbabwe, the people of the country found the ‘resources of hope’ required to say no to continued authoritarian rule," it said.
In early May, election officials announced that Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, took 47.9 percent of the vote while President Robert Mugabe, 84, who has led Zimbabwe since independence from Britain in 1980, took 43.2 percent.
The official results of the parliamentary vote confirmed that the opposition held a majority of seats for the first time in 28 years.
The report said that the ruling party’s violence "has demonstrated the hollowness of Mugabe’s anti-colonial message, with the real targets of his party’s onslaught being the impoverished and battered citizens of the country." The party’s conduct since the March elections "has encapsulated the degeneracy of the Mugabe legacy, and the security threat that this regime now poses to Zimbabweans and the region," it added.
The report noted that the violence "was carefully planned by a combination of army, police" and government intelligence operatives at an April meeting in the village of Nkayi, Zimbabwe.
In their late May newsletter, Zimbabwe’s Jesuits said there has been "vicious, premeditated violence" on an unprecedented scale in the country since the elections.
They urged opposition supporters who have been attacked by government agents to resist the temptation to retaliate.
"This would be civil war. It would also destroy the moral foundation of the struggle of the opposition for freedom and the restoration of human dignity in this country," they said.
In Harare, Anglican Bishop Sebastian Bakare said people attending services in Anglican churches are assaulted by police with increasing brutality. In a statement, he expressed shock and dismay at the "continuous police interference with Sunday services."
Police officers "beat, harass and arrest us, having declared our church premises no-go areas," his May 23 statement said. Bishop Bakare replaced a pro-Mugabe bishop.
Jesuit Father Oscar Wermter said in the May newsletter that "a church congregation that is praying for peace is now deemed to be in support of the opposition — with a certain logic, one has to admit, since the ruling party is definitely engaged in war against the common people and is against peace."
"It is a great shame and very sad that members of the church supporting different parties may be fighting each other," Father Wermter said.