I am a media contact, for defamation legalities, I can’t endorse them: I may get our government after me: I am a press contact of theirs, and know Father Chris in person. It is a formability for legal reasons. It is probably directed at the communist affiliated ANC leading party in SA. “Passive Genocide” certainly is not aimed at Mugabe: they have lready commented on him. Buthi: is the reason may aimed at ANC: the ANC are his favorite group to comment negatively on: they legalized abortion, pushed through gay marriage: and have a leader who is facing corruption charges, having not been convicted on previous rape charges.Marc, thank you for posting this. Because your blog states that you cannot “guarantee the views of the SACBC”, I will post a link to the relevant part of their website which confirms the press release:
sacbc.org.za/Site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=203&Itemid=100
I am afraid that I am not very familiar with southern Africa. Do you think the bishops’ statement is directed towards people inside of Zimbabwe or those outside Zimbabwe? How much influence does the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference have when they speak on such matters?
Dr. Chris Beyrer, Professor of Epidemiology and International Health at Johns Hopkins University told Religion Dispatches that the scale of human suffering and death may be worse than Pol Pot’s Cambodia in the 1970s, and that regional and international inaction is analogous to the international community’s failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. He estimates that about half of the population of Zimbabwe is either dead or has fled to neighboring countries. “I have been at this for a long time,” he said, his world-weary voice seeking to convey the urgency of the accelerating Zimbabwean disaster. “I’ve never seen so total a collapse of a health system.”
While the cholera epidemic is making news, PHR reports that at least 400 Zimbabweans die each day of HIV/AIDS. “Bodies are being stacked like logs” in the morgue in Harare, physicians told Donaghue. In the absence of power for refrigeration, there is no way to safely store any of them and with few hospitals open and medical care otherwise scarce, many are buried at home. Cholera and other deaths go unreported. The government does not want to hear about it.
Beyrer tells of meeting the rector of a mission hospital who was telling him about the problem of malnutrition at the hospital. “You mean the patients?” Beyrer asked. “No,” the rector replied, “the nurses.” Beyrer learned that food was chronically short and that at the time of his visit, the staff nurses had not eaten for two days.
religiondispatches.org/archive/humanrights/965/the_horror_mugabe_doesn%E2%80%99t_want_the_world_to_see?page=2“I saw a young boy who weighed seven pounds; skin is falling off of his body,” Donaghue said. “He lives in a region where food security has been denied for years. No support. No grain. Regional hospitals go unstaffed. I call that murder.”
physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/documents/reports/2009-zimbabwe-health-report-summary.pdfLife expectancy at birth has fallen dramatically from
62 years for both sexes in 1990 to 36 years in 2006 – 34
years for males and 37 years for females, the world’s
lowest.