Zimbabwe's main church bodies have launched a project to heal victims of the politically motivated violence that has plagued the southern African nation for the past three years.
The Rev. Patson Netha, a member of the project's organizing committee, said the venture seeks to promote "national healing and reconciliation" by counseling survivors and other people traumatized by the violence.
The project is sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and supported by the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe (EFZ), Zimbabwe Council of Churches and Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops' Conference.
"We have various cases of people who have been brutalized, maimed or killed with nothing being done," Netha, a former executive secretary of the EFZ, told the independent Daily News.
"Some of the victims know the people who killed their loved ones, and they are silently seeking revenge. As church bodies, we have to start building relationships from there, and the best way forward is the national healing process," he said.
Netha said leaders of various Christian denominations had already started attending training courses in counseling and would be deployed to their respective communities to assist those who had suffered directly or indirectly as a result of politically encouraged violence.
Bishop Trevor Manhanga, the president of the EFZ, confirmed to ENI at the end of June that he had been invited to participate in the project, which he said was "still in its infancy."
Zimbabwe has been sliding towards anarchy since February 2000, when bands of veterans of the country's 1970s liberation war launched a series of farm invasions. They targeted properties of white commercial farmers whom they accused of inciting Zimbabweans to reject a proposed constitution drafted by a commission hand-picked by President Robert Mugabe.
The draft had a clause allowing the government to seize selected commercial farms without compensating the owners. From the commercial farms, the militants--whose numbers were swelled by graduates drafted from national youth service training camps--turned their violence on opposition supporters and perceived enemies of the government.
The militants have been blamed in reports by human rights and other non-governmental organizations for the deaths of at least 160 people and displacement of thousands of others since mid-2000.
