By Edmund Doogue
Harare, 12 December (ENI)--Leading representatives of international and local homosexual organisations yesterday 11 December called for the international community - in particular churches - to campaign for the rights of gays and lesbians of Zimbabwe to be respected.

Keith Goddard, programmes manager of Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), which has more than 300 members - most of them black Zimbabweans - told a press conference in Harare that Zimbabwe was "one of the most vocally homophobic countries in the world. Our president [Robert Mugabe] is world famous for his [verbal] gay-bashing." Goddard said that he had recently visited a small village in Austria where people had said to him: "We don't know much about Zimbabwe, but don't you have a president who hates homosexuals?"

Goddard said that although homosexuals in Zimbabwe did not face the dangers experienced by their counterparts in some Islamic countries, there was an "hysterical climate" about the issue in Zimbabwe, which he said was whipped up by the government and the state-owned press.

"When parents discover that one or more of their children is homosexual, they panic," Goddard said. "They think they must be harbouring a criminal or a child-molester, or that their child is engaging in satanic practices."

People had tried to take advantage of the hysteria by blackmailing homosexuals. "Some poverty-stricken people here are looking for quick money," he said. These people, he added, told homosexuals that unless they paid a large sum of money, the blackmailer would claim he had been raped. If such accusations were made, the police would often arrest the accused person, and the accusations would be published on the front page of Harare newspapers.

Representatives of Amnesty International, of the Metropolitan Community Church, which was founded by a homosexual pastor in the US and now has congregations in many countries, of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, based in New York, of the European Forum of Lesbian and Gay Christians, and of other groups attended the press conference. Most of them are in Harare to attend - as visitors rather than as official delegates - the World Council of Churches (WCC) assembly.

Richard Kirker, an Anglican priest representing the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in the United Kingdom and the European Forum of Lesbian and Gay Christians, told the press conference that he and others had come to Zimbabwe to help GALZ "negotiate its way through what has proved to be a minefield dealing with the WCC".

He said that GALZ had been "effectively excluded" from the assembly's Padare, a forum of 550 events held during the assembly. (Although GALZ was not permitted to hold a workshop at the Padare, it was allowed to participate with other Zimbabwean groups under the sponsorship of a local human rights organisation. About a dozen events about homosexuality - sponsored by churches from other countries - were included in the Padare, which ended yesterday, 11 December.)

According to Goddard, the WCC had asked GALZ to get sponsorship from a local church if it wanted to participate fully in the Padare. He said that as all local churches opposed GALZ, the requirement imposed by the WCC was like asking a black church under apartheid to get sponsorship from a pro-apartheid white church.

"Where is the church - it is supposed to support the marginalised?" Goddard said. "We have made every effort to put our case to the churches [in Zimbabwe], but we have been steadfastly refused. The [local] churches support the stereotypes that we are child molesters and criminals.

"We are bitterly disappointed by the reaction of the WCC," he said.

In response to a question from a gay Christian from Zimbabwe at the press conference, Nancy Wilson, vice-moderator of the Metropolitan Community Churches, said MCC was trying, through its church in South Africa, to find ways to set up a church in Zimbabwe. "In this country, even just saying 'we are gay Christians' is a powerful statement," she said.

Scott Long, of the Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, which is linked to more than 1000 gay rights groups around the world, told ENI after the press conference: "The WCC should open its eyes and look at what's happening in this country."

He said the WCC assembly was "segregated" from the life of Zimbabweans because the event was taking place on a university campus several kilometres from the centre of town. "It's cut off from real engagement with Zimbabwe."

 Members of South Africa's National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality protested outside Zimbabwe's consulate in Cape Town on 10 December. The demonstrators called on the Harare government to open dialogue with Zimbabwe's gay and lesbian citizens, and pointed out that South Africa's constitution protected the country's gays and lesbians from discrimination. One protester held a placard declaring: "Vorster [South African prime minister from 1966 to 78] said blacks had no rights; Mugabe says gays have no rights." [825 words]

Photographs of the assembly are available from Photo Oikoumene

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