The Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has been accused of deliberately starving opposition supporters to strengthen his grip on power.
One of Zimbabwe's Catholic leaders, Pius Ncube Archbishop of Zimbabwe's second city of Bulawayo, told church leaders at a conference in the South African port city of Durban that he believed 160 people in his home province of Matabeleland had already starved to death, and thousands more would die next year.
"Men, women and children were, and still are, being deliberately starved," he said, adding that Mugabe had embarked on a programme of retribution against his opponents after his plans to change the country's constitution were defeated in 2000.
"Mugabe is using the food crisis in Zimbabwe to force people to vote for his party," Ncube said, adding that only those with ZANU-PF ruling party cards were able to buy food. The European Union yesterday stated that Mugabe was using food as a political weapon.
Half of Zimbabwe's 14 million people are threatened with starvation, according to the United Nations World Food Programme. However the WFP says it has not heard any reports of people starving to death in Matabeleland. ZANU-PF denies that it has politicised food distribution, and in turn accuses some aid agencies of sending more food relief to opposition strongholds.
Since Mugabe won re-election to a fifth term in power in March this year, Zimbabwe has spiralled deeper into its worst economic and political crisis in 22 years of independence. Mugabe has held the reins of power for all that time.
"He (Mugabe) is clinging to power at the expense of people's lives," Ncube told Reuters in a telephone interview after his breakfast speech. "It is causing a lot of upset because there is no foreseeable end to people's suffering." "All this is being done to destroy the opposition and cling onto power, the arrests, the arson, torture and selective distribution of food all serve to keep the population under control."
Ncube has spoken out against Mugabe before, most notably since a 1980s army crackdown in Matabeleland which human rights groups say left tens of thousands of civilians dead. Mugabe's ZANU-PF says the Archbishop sympathises with the opposition MDC and should quit the clergy.