Archbishop Pius Ncube, of the Catholic diocese of Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, yesterday described as "very evil" what President Robert Mugabe is doing there.
A country of 12 million, with a further four million displaced abroad, Zimbabwe is 10 per cent Catholic. Among these is President Mugabe, who attends Mass regularly. Bulawayo is the second-largest city in Zimbabwe, with a population of about a million, 140,000 of them Catholic.
Speaking in Dublin yesterday Archbishop Ncube, who is one of the most outspoken critics of the current regime in Zimbabwe and chairman of the Solidarity Peace Trust group, which has focused primarily on the situation in Zimbabwe, said that for the past 4½ to five years, as Mr Mugabe has attempted to consolidate power, 85 per cent of the people have sunk to levels of abject poverty, with school enrollment down from 95 per cent to 65 per cent and two-thirds of girls no longer attending at all.
Of 11 million hectares of land President Mugabe had confiscated, just 3 per cent had been allocated to the people, with the rest divided between Mr Mugabe's ministers and his and their friends. One in 50 Zimbabweans was a spy, paid a total of $170 million in the 2003 budget, or three times what was allocated for the health services.
Hospitals had collapsed. There were no drugs, and so many doctors had left there was now just one per 12,000 of the population. Nothing was being done about the AIDS crisis in the country, which led to the deaths of 200,000 last year alone.
Half the country's children were malnourished, while only one-third of the food needs were being met.
Meanwhile President Mugabe had told the UN that Zimbabwe didn't need 270,000 tons of food aid that had been offered.
He was importing 300,000 tons, but there was a need for two million tons, the Archbishop said. He believed Mr Mugabe planned to use the food as he had land, to extend and consolidate support. "He is going to beat the people into submission by starving them," he said.
President Mugabe had also introduced a youth militia which theatened and intimidated people. There were no independent media in the country, and those that existed, whether print or broadcasting, were State controlled. One hundred journalists had been arrested and tortured last year.
Non-governmental organisations and charities were being intimidated, whereas the churches were divided in their opinion of the President. He favoured some in church leadership with rewards. The country's judiciary imposed sentence as President Mugabe requested it, which meant, literally, that some of his supporters had got away with murder, the Archbishop said.
Meawhile 800,000 names on the country's voters' register belonged to the dead, while another 600,000 were duplicated in different parts of the country.
Under a public order act no meeting can take place without permission, while prisoners have been tortured, raped and subjected to electrodes applied to their genitals, with one man even forced to drink his own urine.
As far as the Archbishop is concerned, what President Mugabe is doing is contrary to the church's social teaching.
"What will be will be, but I believe God is mightier. I will continue to stand up to him (Mugabe)," he said.