[Episcopal News Service]
The Roman Catholic Church has condemned Zambia's President Levy Mwanawasa, saying the president is intimidating the opposition and downplaying the severity of the famine which threatens millions of people in Zambia and other southern African countries.
'We find it disturbing that our government finds it difficult to recognize the fact that the hunger situation in the country is so serious that people are dying,' the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace said in a statement released on October 11.
Countries in the southern Africa region are experiencing severe famine due, in part, to poor rains. The worst affected is Zimbabwe, where more than half of the population of 12 million requires food aid; Malawi with 3.5 million people in need of food aid and Zambia with 2.9 million.
Three months ago, Mwanawasa came under a barrage of criticism from the Christian Council of Zambia (CCZ), the Zambia (Catholic) Episcopal Conference (ZEC) and the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia (EFZ) for 'feeding the people with words' and failing to address the famine. The UK-based aid organization Oxfam said in an October 3 report: 'Some 2.9 million people in Zambia (26 per cent of the population) will require an estimated 224,000 metric tons of emergency cereal food aid in the period up to March 2003. The Zambian government's reluctance to allow genetically modified food into the country has meant that, for this month, no new food will be brought into Zambia.'
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