**9. CiM's Approaches to Peace and Reconciliation**

CiM organises several activities to create spaces for peace and reconciliation. These activities include workshops with pastors, in whom they have an interest because they have access to many people through their churches. They also engage the chiefs, who are expected to embody the societal values of peace and reconciliation. The majority of CiM members happen to be pastors and church people who share some values, even though they may di ffer on strategies of putting them into practice. It has also been the mission of CiM to change the perspective of other pastors that politics belongs only to politicians involved in partisan politics. To this end, CiM organises public meetings around the prayer worship idea, where di fferent churches are invited for an ecumenical prayer event.

At the height of the violence, CiM created rapid response teams to back up local churches by reacting to reports of incidents of violence. It also created race relations (considering the tensions that had developed between the war veterans and white commercial farmers), youth and research teams. It engaged in direct services such as providing comfort, food and shelter to victims of the crisis (Mkaronda 2003, p. 39). In cases of injustice, they deployed the justice and peace commissions to facilitate litigation. For the brutalised and violated, it provided medication and counselling. To advocate a change of policies, it engaged politicians and other authorities in dialogue meetings. For instance, it contacted the Governor of Manicaland province and asked her to make a statement against violence, invited the chief of police and the Electoral Commission to issue public statements on security and electoral processes, respectively. It also delivered its publications and statements to the Governor of Manicaland, political and administrative heads and Members of Parliament, and sent delegations to discuss issues with national political leaders who came from Manicaland Province. It talked to MPs after elections to outline the expectations of communities.

As an organization, CiM issues several pastoral letters and press statements such as the compendium The *Truth Will Make You Free* (2006), which addresses various issues in the political sphere. Rev D shared that they deconstruct their pastoral letters and statements and take them down to the grassroots level, discussing them with the people (see Churches in Manicaland 2006, p. ii). Cases in point include the distribution of leaflets and pamphlets with civic information during elections, at public bus termini for travellers to take with them to the remotest places of the country. Such activities have not been witnessed amongs<sup>t</sup> those undertaken by the mainstream churches. They would not be perceived as activities to be undertaken by religious leaders, but instead by political enthusiasts. But here we see a di fferent *modus operandi* that links secular and religious approaches, creating a resourceful archive that caters for Zimbabwe's population, which for the most part does not distinguish between the religious and the secular. Analysing the interviewees' responses and perusing their grey literature shows that CiM's theoretical and practical tools close the gap between being a merciful, peaceful and forgiving religious person, and demanding that perpetrators of atrocities face justice, the

truth of past atrocities be told, reparations be made and apologies be expressed. Instead of just dealing with the individual su ffering of victims, the respondents advocate systems and structures that address the perpetrators of atrocities and safeguard reconciliation. This is not to intimate that mainstream churches do not call for justice and truth. Mainstream churches' para-organizations like the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP), which were radical during the liberation struggle and the early years after independence, vigorously challenged political violence. But the situation has since changed. In a personal email communication, an attaché to the CCJP wrote to me:

The Zimbabwe Catholics Bishops Conference (ZCBC) seems to be tightening its grip on CCJPZ activities. The process (of issuing press statements) is more bureaucratic. A press statement for print media has to be approved by at least three bishops before it is allowed in the public domain. Given the tight schedules of most of the bishops, some press statements are approved late when the information on them is no longer relevant.

To be noted is that CCJP in the 1970s enjoyed relative autonomy from the Catholic Bishops' Conference and its opinion did not have to be viewed as the official position of the bishops (Gundani 2001, p. 72). It spoke with an independent voice, sometimes at odds with that of the bishops (McLaughlin 1996, p. 4), thus could afford to be nonconformist. This allowed the organisation to be quicker and more effective than it arguably is now. It possessed qualities of a religio-political nonconformist organisation, and the popularity it attained can be attributed to that.
