By Edmund Doogue
Harare, 10 December (ENI)--Several hundred people including lawyers, feminists, Christians, trade unionists and representatives of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) held a public march through the streets of central Harare on 10 December to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to urge greater respect for the rights of all residents of this southern African country.

A handful of delegates and visitors from the World Council of Churches' eighth assembly, which began on 3 December in Harare, also joined the "Human Rights March", which attracted the attention of about 50 of the journalists and photographers who are here to cover the WCC assembly. Many of those in the march, both Zimbabweans and foreigners, wore rainbow ribbons, the international symbol of the gay-rights movement.

The march brought traffic to a halt as it progressed through the centre of city, with marchers holding signs declaring: "Human rights for all in Zimbabwe" and "Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ): Out and proud".

Mike Auret, national director of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe (CCJP), told ENI that his organisation had supported the march because "Zimbabwe has a number of people who have been denied rights for a long time, and such a march gets a lot of publicity. We also have a seriously deficient democracy - and that includes rights. We want to bring a focus on that." Auret singled out prison conditions and police brutality as reasons for particular concern.

Asked if protests were common in Harare, Auret said that often police disrupted demonstrations. Asked why the 10 December march was allowed to take place, Auret said: "The president [Robert Mugabe] and his government get a lot of publicity internationally." He said that people abroad seeing the march on television would think that "we have freedom of speech. But that disguises the situation."

He added that because of the participation of GALZ, the police had decided not to provide a police escort to help the marchers and protect them from the traffic.

Asked if CCJP supported GALZ, Auret said: "We support the fact that they [homosexuals and lesbians] have the same rights as others. What the president said three or four years ago [when he denounced homosexuality] is wrong. We are against the discrimination and against the attacks on GALZ. But the moral teaching of the church also applies to GALZ as it does to everyone else - sex outside marriage is wrong."

Professor Marius Van Leeuwen, a delegate to the WCC assembly from the Remonstrant Brotherhood, a small liberal Calvinist church in The Netherlands, told ENI that he and several others were representing, in the march, the Dutch delegation at the assembly. "When people are making such a courageous demonstration for their rights, we should be there." He said the Dutch delegation to the assembly was reluctant to attend as a whole because "as foreigners we go [home] in a week, but other people have to stay here". He said the second reason for his participation in the march was to support GALZ. "We in Holland sympathise with this issue [homosexuality]." He said he realised that the WCC as a whole could not support GALZ, but he added that the Dutch churches intended to put a proposal to the WCC calling for a study of personal morality, including sexuality.

Keith Goddard, programmes manager for GALZ, told ENI after the march that there was a "campaign of vilification against homosexuals" by the Zimbabwean government. It was "unfortunate", he said, that the WCC had made "no comment" on the matter.

"I understand there are certain divisions in the WCC, but everybody is entitled to fair treatment under the law," Goddard said. He said that "privately" WCC officials recognised this, but they would not publicly speak out on behalf of GALZ.

Another member of GALZ who took part in the march told ENI: "We want the churches to sympathise with us. We are not bad people. The WCC has to convince the local churches, particularly the Zimbabwe Council of Churches [the nation's main ecumenical organisation] which is absolutely negative, that gay rights are human rights as well."

A spokesman for the Amnesty International Penal Reform committee, which also took part in the march, told ENI that the group was campaigning to end capital punishment in Zimbabwe. The executions generally took place secretly, and the public was informed later by the media, he said.
In Zimbabwe most of the executions were of convicted murderers, but, the spokesman said: "When you execute someone, you are taking revenge, not bringing reform. You shouldn't kill because someone has killed."

A member of a group from the Zimbabwe Women's Resource Centre who took part in the march told ENI that the NGOs were divided over the participation of GALZ in the march, but they decided it was best to march together and not try to tell one particular group what they could or could not do.

 The moderator of the WCC's Commission of the Churches on International Affairs and a member of the United Methodist Church in the USA, Janice Love, when asked whether homosexual rights were human rights, said at a press conference at the WCC assembly on 10 December: "My own personal position is that matters of sexual orientation are no basis for discrimination of any sort. That is not widely agreed across the ecumenical movement, and there are Christians who hold quite a different opinion to mine. We are in rather intensive conversations on a regular basis about this, but my personal point of view is that sexual orientation is no basis for sexual discrimination of any sort." [942 words]

Photographs of the assembly are available from Photo Oikoumene

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WCC Assembly Web Site

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