13 June 2007 | 07-0456 |

Stephen Brown

The Rev. Mvume Dandala Photo: Peter Williams/WCC

Cologne, Germany (ENI). The leader of a major grouping of African churches has expressed outrage at human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, and has urged the world to help resolve the political crisis in the southern African country.

"What is happening in Zimbabwe is an embarrassment even to us as Africans," said the Rev. Mvume Dandala, general secretary of the Nairobi-based All Africa Conference of Churches, during a recent Protestant convention called the Kirchentag, held in Cologne in western Germany.

"We would like the world to assist us in finding a permanent resolution to the problems we have in Zimbabwe," said Dandala on 9 June at a Kirchentag podium that he shared with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "We are outraged when we see the amount of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe," Dandala told the audience.

Zimbabweans are struggling to survive in a country said currently to have an annual inflation rate of more than 2200 percent, where there is widespread unemployment and poverty, and where President Robert Mugabe, in power since independence in 1980, resists calls for political reforms and change.

Dandala said, "When our western partners look for solutions in Zimbabwe they seem to show a tendency to dismiss the injustices of land distribution that sparked off the protest in the first place."

He was referring to President Mugabe's land reform programme that was introduced ostensibly to correct land distribution imbalances created before independence in 1980.

Some political analysts say the seizure of farms from white commercial farmers under the land reform measures is partly to blame for the dramatic slump in food production in the southern African country.

ENI featured articles are taken from the full ENI Daily News Service. Subscribe online to the Daily News Service and receive around 1000 full-text articles a year. Unless otherwise stated, ENI featured articles may be re-printed, re-posted, re-produced or placed on Web sites if ENI is noted as the source and there is a link to the ENI Web site www.eni.ch

© 1994 - 2010 Ecumenical News International.

Ecumenical News International, PO Box 2100
CH - 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel: +41-22 791 6111     Fax: +41-22 788 7244   
Email: eni@eni.ch