Pope celebrates return to peace

Press, 13 September 1988, Page 8

Pope celebrates return to peace

NZPA-Reuter Harare

Zimbabwe’s Matabeleland province, at peace after years of fear and violence, gives Pope John Paul a platform to preach the virtues of reconciliation when he arrives in its capital of Bulawayo today. The Pope, who will celebrate Mass at the city’s Ascot racecourse, is likely to take Zimbabwe’s achievement in ending the conflict in Matabeleland as an example to be followed elsewhere in troubled southern Africa.

In his homily to 150,000 worshippers at a mass in Zimbabwe’s capital of Harare, he paid tribute to a Roman Catholic Bishop,

Adolph Schmitt, who was killed in an ambush in Matabeleland in 1976 during Zimbabwe’s independence war.

“Your own country has known only too well the pain and suffering caused by siris such as racial discrimination and segregation, which deny the human dignity and full equality of other people simply because of the colour of their skin or because of the tribe to which they belong,” he said.

The Pope, who is on his first tour of southern Africa, will also visit Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique but not South Africa, whose

' apartheid policies he has attacked. The Pontiff said Zimbabweans “have known the horrors of hatred and violence.” “They hunger for justice and peace. They desire reconciliation and harmony among the tribes and races,” he said. More than 100 “dissidents” or rebels spread fear in rural areas of Matabeleland in the last six years, killing 60 whites and hundreds of blacks before accepting a Government amnesty in May. Their last victim was a West German Roman Catholic missionary, Brother Kilian Knoerl, who was axed to death at

Empandeni mission, near the Zimbabwe-Botswana border, in April.

The conflict had its roots in the 1970 s rivalry between the ZANU Party of Zimbabwe’s President, Robert Mugabe, and the ZAPU Party of the veteran nationalist, Joshua Nkomo, during their guerrilla war against white minority rule that led to the country’s independence in 1980.

Mr Nkomo’s party recruited guerrillas among the Ndebele people of western Zimbabwe while Mr Mugabe’s support came from the majority Shona in the east.

An uneasy post-inde-pendence alliance broke

up in 1982, when Mr Mugabe sacked Mr Nkomo from his Government. Many of Mr Nkomo’s former guerrilla fighters took to the bush and Mr Mugabe’s army crushed the rebellion, drawing charges of atrocities from the Roman Catholic Church.

Mr Nkomo, who denied any association with the rebels, agreed with Mr Mugabe last December to merge their two parties. The accord has forged a bridge between Zimbabwe’s two major tribes but Catholic priests in Matabeleland say the region will need a generation to recover.