An eyewitness from Zimbabwe, who for safety reasons must remain anonymous, has sent the following report to Aid to the Church in Need (ACN): "Two weeks ago we celebrated the opening of the Year of Saint Paul in our parish with a solemn Holy Mass -- at exactly the same time as the Holy Father was celebrating the Vespers of the vigil of the feast in the Church of Saint Paul's-Outside-the-Walls in Rome. As always in Africa, the Mass was very well attended, and despite the immense transport difficulties, the Catholic faithful had travelled from far and wide, some overnight on open trucks, in a biting cold wind. Needless to say, we also prayed for Zimbabwe. During his sermon, the priest told how shortly before, a woman had been snatched from a church during the middle of Mass. After Mass, he went looking for her and found her lying in a ditch just a few hundred yards away. She is now lying in a coma.
It almost seems to me that on such occasions, in praying and singing, the people are able to forget not only their worries but even their aching limbs and open wounds, at least for a few hours. After Mass, I met an acquaintance, a young woman somewhere in her mid-20s. Just a few days before, she had been brutally beaten up in her own home by ZANU PF thugs. Two of her fingers were broken, as she attempted to protect her head and her face from the blows of the clubs, and several of her ribs were cracked. Her back and legs were covered in black angry bruises. But despite her pain, she was determined to attend the Mass, and she did in fact come -- barefoot and limping on one foot, because her feet were so swollen that she could not even get them into her very wide, worn pair of sandals. If that is not faith... I thought to myself that evening that St. Paul himself would have been very pleased and proud if he could have seen and heard what these Christians have made of his words and how they are quite literally living out what he taught.
Yesterday they buried a young man. He had originally wanted to become a religious and a priest, but then changed his mind. He was very active in the Catholic youth movements and most recently he worked as a driver for the opposition party. Just about four weeks ago he was abducted at night time. Ten days ago they found his body, maimed and burned, on a farm belonging to an army general. He had obviously been horribly tortured before his death. They had put out both his eyes and poured burning plastic over his back. Photographs of his body were shown to Gordon Brown during the G8 summit in Japan, and he showed them to the other heads of state at the summit. If these pictures have contributed to the summit statement on Zimbabwe, then the death of this courageous young Christian will not have been entirely in vain. Despite this, the people here are very, very angry.
It is not easy to describe the situation in Zimbabwe. Alongside the unbelievable violence of the past few weeks, there are the countless absurdities of daily life which lead one to suspect that the end is near. Take the exchange rate last Friday, for example, when one Euro was worth 165 billion Zimbabwe dollars -- and in a week it will be worth three times this. The result is that commercial companies like our Internet service provider ZOL will no longer accept Zimbabwe dollars, because they are worthless. At the same time they will not accept US dollars either, because they are not allowed to, but only Old Mutual shares -- which we don't have -- or diesel coupons -- which we somehow have to find on the black market...
Still more ludicrous are the absurdities of the political situation. Now that Robert Mugabe has had himself crowned once more as president, following the second round of voting on 27 June, and with Bible in hand and the invocation of divine assistance on his lips has promised to observe the constitution and laws and to serve the people as a good president, the barbaric political cleansing campaign continues. (Mugabe himself likes to use the word "barbaric" when speaking of his terror campaign, while at the same time blaming it on the opposition). A British reporter, who tried to elicit details about the run-off election at the African Union summit in Egypt a week ago, was actually physically attacked by our president. Here, too, one can see the very dangerous side of this man, who now only breathes violence, talks violence, does violence -- so compulsively that for a brief moment he himself can forget his dignity as a head of state – for the sake of which he has after all declared war on his own people. This unpredictability, accompanied by an almost total lack of scruple, marks out almost all the decisions to which the people here are so defenselessly exposed. Since yesterday even Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, has spoken of the real possibility of a civil war. Anyone who lives here knows that the civil war has already begun, three months ago. Many people have failed to notice it merely because it is only one side that has the clubs, the knives and the guns. But for all that, and despite the madness around us, life continues -- somehow."
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