Bishops Assail Mugabe in Pastoral Letter

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday said President Robert Mugabe and other politicians had lost the moral right to govern by permitting violence and lawlessness for political gain.

In a pastoral letter to be read in churches across the country, the nine bishops said Mugabe--a Catholic--and other holders of power had abused their countrymen by denying them “the inherent right” to take part in political activities.

“We are telling them these things they are doing are wrong and that they hold no morality at all,” said Bishop Patrick Mutume, head of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace.

“There is no other sanction we can give them except the sanction of hell,” Mutume told reporters as he released the pastoral letter.

The letter particularly denounced the seizure by ruling party militants of white-owned farms and a resulting escalation of political violence over the last year. Violence during elections in June killed at least 32 people, mostly opposition supporters.

Mugabe, 77, has refused repeated requests over the last four years to meet with a delegation of bishops. In 1996, Mugabe received a blessing from John Paul II when he married his former secretary in a Catholic Mass.

Father Oskar Wermter, a spokesman for the Catholic Bishops Conference, said a head of state can be excommunicated only by the pope.

Catholics account for about one-fifth of Zimbabwe’s 12.5 million people.

Mugabe has ordered police not to remove the militants from more than 1,700 white-owned farms they have occupied. He has described the seizures--led by veterans of the bush war that preceded independence in 1980--as a justified protest against unfair land ownership by the descendants of British-colonial era settlers.

The government has ignored six court orders to evict the occupiers.