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Zimbabwean
President Mugabe meets church leaders
Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA)
October 25, 2006
Harare - President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe
Wednesday met a group of prominent local clergy who are spearheading
an initiative to mend Zimbabwe's wrecked economic and political
landscape. The churchmen from the Evangelical
Fellowship, the Catholic
Bishops Conference and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches handed
over a document during their meeting at Mugabe's official Harare
residence, state television reported.
The initiative - dubbed The
Zimbabwe We Want: Towards a National Vision for Zimbabwe - has
been shrouded in controversy since it was first touted earlier this
year.
Critics say the church pastors are being
too soft on the government, refusing to condemn Mugabe and his cronies
for alleged human-rights abuses and kowtowing to the 82-year-old
leader.
Zimbabwe is in the grip of severe economic
crisis, marked by spiralling poverty, inflation of more than 1,000
per cent and acute shortages of food, fuel and medicines.
Mugabe, who has been invited to the official
launch of the document on Friday, is deeply suspicious of some Zimbabwean
church leaders, accusing them of siding with the Movement for Democratic
Change (MDC), a seven-year-old
opposition party that is trying to oust him from power.
At the National Day of Prayer in June,
Mugabe, a former guerrilla leader, issued a warning to church leaders
he said were meddling in politics, grimly saying that he could be
vicious toward them.
The latest church initiative appears
to have found favour with the ageing president because the church
leaders claim to want nothing to do with regime change.
The members of the church delegation
reaffirmed their commitment to Zimbabwe as a sovereign country.
They expressed opposition to the politics of regime change and distanced
themselves from any attempts to cause unlawful regime change in
Zimbabwe, state television said.
The church groups behind the so-called
National Vision Document say their goal is national restoration.
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