Christian Agency Slams Zimbabwe Head's 'Illegitimate' Regime

By Maria Mackay, Christian Today Reporter Wednesday, July 11, 2007

A South Africa-based Christian group has released a report warning on the growing state repression against opponents to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's regime.

In Tuesday's report, church leaders of faith-based Solidarity Peace Trust said that the ruling party had lost much of its political legitimacy, according to SW Radio Africa, an independent Zimbabwean radio station based in England.

Selvan Chetty, the Deputy Director of the Solidarity Peace Trust, said the report documents the "systematic" attacks of the state on the leadership and members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Chance (MDC) as well as the civic movement.

The leader of the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai, was arrested at a political rally earlier in the year and emerged from a police station days later with visible bruising and injuries.

Chetty claimed that there was a "dual motive" behind the state violence to "seriously disable the structures of the MDC before the 2008 elections" and to "criminalize" the MDC by re-branding it as a terrorist organization, according to SW Radio Africa.

The new report was launched at a meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, chaired by Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenberg, who said that the Solidarity Peace Trust had analyzed more than 400 incidents of violence and human rights abuses in Zimbabwe since March.

Based on these incidents, those gathered drew the conclusion that Mugabe's regime was pursuing a deliberate strategy to repress the MDC faction led by Tsvangirai while maintaining friendlier relations with the Arthur Mutambara-led MDC faction in order to exploit existing tensions between the two sides.

Dowling added that their investigations had found that around 90 percent of attacks were perpetrated by law enforcement officers.

"We believe more and more people are beginning to see that this is an illegitimate regime which uses torture and all kinds of horrible human rights abuses to cow the population, to crush people's spirit and to prevent legitimate dissent," he said, as reported by SW Radio Africa.

The Solidarity Peace Trust report concludes that state violence is not a sporadic response to dissension in Zimbabwe. Rather its systematic use forms the cornerstone of the Mugabe regime's relations with the people of Zimbabwe.