By Edmund Doogue
Harare, 8 December (ENI)--Dr Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president and a hero of the liberation struggle in southern Africa, today challenged the world's churches to decide whether they stood with the "oppressed" or "oppressors" in the argument over his government's plans for land reform, which entails the forced acquisition of 841 farms, most of them owned by whites.

The Harare government has yet to announce what compensation will be paid to the farmers, but is coming under international pressure, particularly from the British government and the International Monetary Fund, to make reasonable payments to all those affected.

President Mugabe, who assured the British government on a visit to London early this month that the land reform plans would be carried out with due respect for the law, today told more than 900 delegates at the World Council of Churches assembly, in Harare, that British newspapers had accused him of "larceny, tyranny, brutality and racism" over the issue.

But, he added: "Who should really accuse who on this question of land? How possibly can the church stand as one in a society with such disparities? What sermon fits the landlord; what sermon is for the landless? Who between the two social types does the church and its priest choose and identify with?"

He urged all the delegates, particularly those from churches in the West, to visit Zimbabwe's rural areas "to see how the colonial legacy divides our flock".

Mugabe, who is a Roman Catholic, said that 4000 whites owned half of Zimbabwe's arable land, while the other half was shared between 11 million people.

In many cases, he added, "one white can own five or six farms, about 4000 hectares". Many of these people, he said, were absentee landlords - Britons or white South Africans - who had been given the land under the colonial system. On the other hand, he said, many Zimbabweans owned only five hectares of land.

In his 45-minute speech, President Mugabe, who has led Zimbabwe since independence in 1980, provided a sharp analysis of the history of the churches in Zimbabwe and described some of the problems facing his country. He blamed the country's problems on colonialism, and did not mention criticisms that Zimbabwe is virtually a one-party state with no effective opposition. Nor did he mention increasing unrest in the country over steep price rises and his government's recent ban on strikes by workers who claim they are not paid enough to support their families.

In his analysis of the "ambiguous" history of the churches in his country and across southern Africa, President Mugabe said that churches had played midwife to colonialism, "succumbing or voluntarily surrendering God to the racism of colonial structures".

"It [the church] followed where it should have led, and confused evangelisation with Westernisation," he told the WCC assembly. In the early years of British colonisation of what was then known as Rhodesia, people had been massacred "so that the missionaries can go on with their work", Dr Mugabe said, quoting a church document from 1893.

The president mentioned church clergy who had vigorously supported colonialism and had predicted that majority rule would bring the end of civilisation in the country. But he also mentioned clergy, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, who had declared that racism and elitism were unchristian.

He singled out for praise one of the World Council of Churches' most controversial initiatives, the Programme to Combat Racism, which in the 1970s "extended humanitarian assistance to various national and international civil rights organisations, including our two main liberation wings, ZANU and ZAPU. This was a momentous and courageous gesture by which the [WCC] expressed its preference for the lowly and poor, by throwing its weight behind our struggle against racial settler colonialism. It marked a big shift from the traditional acquiescence and even complicity which characterised church-colonial state relations in almost all colonial settings.

"Apart from blazing a new path for world churches, the decision jolted the local church by dramatising the spiritual limitations of the largely collaborative and acquiescing Rhodesia church which had, all along, in effect sold its soul to the colonial Caesar," President Mugabe said.

He told the WCC assembly that the lives of many African people had been saved "by the great decision and commitment you made in the 70s. Many are now grown-ups, but their memories of this critical intervention by the WCC are fresh and indelible."

Among those local churchmen who had spoken out against racism in the 1970s as the liberation struggle gathered momentum, Dr Mugabe gave special mention to a clergyman well known to the ecumenical movement, Dr Canaan Banana, who left the Bulawayo Council of Churches following an argument over the WCC's action. (In 1980, when Zimbabwe gained independence, Dr Banana was appointed the nation's first president, while Dr Mugabe held real power as prime minister. However, last month Dr Banana was found guilty on 11 charges, including homosexual assault, committed while he was president. Dr Banana fled Zimbabwe before judgement was handed down, according to the Harare press.)

In a response to President Mugabe's speech, one of the WCC's seven presidents, Bishop Vinton Anderson, of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (USA), said: "I pray that those nations that have profited from this land would share in returning resources for all of Zimbabwe." [856 words]

Photographs of the assembly are available from Photo Oikoumene

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