Zimbabwe a sacred duty

While Robert Mugabe was waging his war of liberation against the Rhodesian Government of Ian Smith in the mid-Seventies, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were busy taking Cambodia back to "Year Zero". They emptied the cities and destroyed all independent social institutions, with the aim of creating an agrarian, Communist, atheist state ruled absolutely by Pol Pot. In the genocidal pursuit of this aim, between one million and two million people were slaughtered or tortured or starved to death. Thirty years later, Mugabe is embarked on a project in Zimbabwe that is now being compared by some, including the Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, with the programme that took much of Cambodia back to the Stone Age.

In the name that he gave his Government's latest operation against the Zimbabwean people - Murambatsvina, literally Drive Out Trash - Mugabe's rhetoric is possibly more reminiscent of Hitler's than Pol Pot's. Tsvina is the Shona word for trash, and this is the word Mugabe uses to describe the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children he recently drove out of the shanty towns around Harare - slums that his own policies have created - into the Zimbabwean wilderness. Hitler, of course, had many similar words for Jewish people.

Ever since he came to power, in 1980, when he was feted by the international community and seen by many as the great hope for Africa, Mugabe has talked about human beings in this way. Between 1983 and 1985, he conducted a campaign he called Gukurahundi to crush dissent in Matabeleland, home of the minority Ndebele people. The Shona word means "the rain that drives away the chaff". In that campaign, 12,000 Ndebele "chaff" were slaughtered.

A highly detailed report on Gukurahundi, called "Breaking the Silence", was compiled by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and the Legal Resources Foundation and published in 1997. Mugabe was presented with a copy but never responded to it. Despite this careful and precise documentation of the Government's campaign of terror, Mugabe has been held to account neither inside nor outside Zimbabwe for the atrocities that have characterised his rule.

This failure to act on the part of the international community, and his ability to eradicate the rule of law and most independent voices within Zimbabwe, allowed him to believe he had carte blanche a couple of years later to seize the best agricultural land, and fix national elections, bringing the country to economic ruin and the edge of starvation.

To finance his own continuing munificent spending, he is reported to be selling off vital national resources to China, but his international contacts are diminishing. Once, before Nelson Mandela was released from jail in South Africa, Mugabe strutted the international stage and presented himself as the major political voice of Africa. Today, his stage is confined pretty much by the borders of Zimbabwe. In this, his regime has again come to resemble the inward-looking one of the Khmer Rouge, and his extra-territorial adventures have been confined to using the Zimbabwe National Army to grab the spoils of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As so often happens in the face of tyranny, other African governments have refused to criticise Mugabe. The one man who could do most to help the Zimbabwean people, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, continues to lend his support to the tyrant rather than the tyrannised. In a familiar spectacle, African leaders are standing together in solidarity against African people, and the African Union (AU) is equivocal or silent on Mugabe's annihilation of Zimbabweans. Countries outside Africa - Britain, the United States, the nations of the EU - are unwilling to take diplomatic risks, let alone intervene on the ground to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and so they pass by on the other side.

And yet, there is still one major difference between Zimbabwe today and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The country is far from being one where religion has been destroyed. The Churches, and the Catholic Church in particular, continue to speak when they can, and work as they can, to counter or mitigate the effects of Mugabe's rule.

Archbishop Ncube, and now the Archbishop of Harare, Robert Ndlovu, have been trenchant and untiring in their condemnation of what is happening in their dioceses and, in Archbishop Ncube's case, in his efforts to tell the outside world about it. Robbed, disenfranchised, tortured and murdered by their own Government, the people of Zimbabwe have been abandoned by world leaders, the politicians of the international community. The Churches cannot follow suit. They must take action on behalf of the injured, the raped, the starved. They must work to relieve their