State turns to church for land solution

Zimbabwean policy-makers this week turned to the church over the country’s deepening economic and political crisis by making overtures to the Catholic Church and leading clergymen to help broker a lasting solution to the land crisis, ‘The Financial Gazette’ said on Thursday.
Father Oskar Wermter, the social communications secretary of the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference, this week said his church was ready to help broker a solution as long as those involved were now serious. “The church is prepared to mediate but of course if there is no readiness to make a compromise among the parties involved, then the whole exercise will fail,” he told ‘The Financial Gazette’. “The church in principle is prepared to do anything it can to help mediate and therefore to promote peace because the danger of more violence and the danger of even a kind of a civil war is quite real.”

Father Fidelis Mukonori, another leading Catholic clergyman who mediated over the failed talks between independence war veterans and commercial farmers earlier this year, was quoted as saying that he had already been approached once again to help find a solution to the land crisis.

Mukonori said the National Land Task Force formed between the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association and the Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU) had requested a meeting with him this week to discuss the resumption of talks. “I would like to believe national dialogue right now is quite imperative,” he said. “People have to be mature and put political differences aside because national issues are of paramount importance.”