Even as Pope Benedict XVI said his heart could not be at peace while people were homeless, critics used his African pilgrimage to highlight the plight of thousands whom the Angolan government has violently evicted from land owned by the Roman Catholic Church.
Amnesty International appealed to Benedict during his visit to the southern Africa country to press the Angolan government for full compensation for the families who have been forced from Church land since 2004.
More than 2,000 families have been evicted since Angolan authorities began returning land to the Church that had been seized by the former Marxist state, said Muluka Miti, a researcher for Amnesty International. The London-based human rights group said people were detained and arrested arbitrarily, and subjected to torture in some cases.
Mateus Damiao and his eight family members were evicted from their land in 2007 on the outskirts of southern Luanda in Wenji Maka, where a new Catholic church was planned. In an interview on Monday, he described repeated attacks by police since 1998, sometimes with bulldozers, sometimes forcing people at gunpoint to leave.
“I hope that the pope’s message will be heard by our leaders and by the pope’s priests and bishops so that no more people are left homeless as I was,” said Damiao, who has received no compensation since authorities forced him from his land. “It’s very sad. I have lost a way of life. They destroyed our community, they destroyed our homes. Some people have been made beggars. Some people have been maimed.”
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