Questions and answers [2]

Henk van den Heuvel: My question is more a request, Frei Zeca is not only representing the Catholic Church in Angola, but he is also the director of a catholic human rights' organisation in Angola. I would like to ask the permission of the chairman to allow him to say a few words about his work.

Frei Zeca: Thank you Henk for this challenge. It is difficult to talk about my work in just one or two minutes, but I will try. You can tell from the Reverend Octávio Fernando's introduction that the churches, and the Catholic Church in particular, are playing an active role. I will go into a bit more detail and explain what we are doing in practical terms so you can understand what is going on better. There's not enough time to tell you everything, but perhaps we can talk more in the breaks.

Mosaiko is a cultural centre with two main characteristics:

1. it is a research centre that tries to focus on the real causes of problems, taking into account the inter-relationship of cause and effect;
2. the centre also promotes its own initiatives and supports and stimulates the initiatives taken by others. The centre is active in four areas: the main area is justice and human rights, but there are also pilot projects in the field of socio-economic development. In a broader way, the centre is working at grass root level on gender issues and more general issues important for humanity, such as cultural and religious issues.

In the area of human rights we've just published a manual entitled 'Human rights, a training course manual'. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy here to show to you, but there is a copy in the NiZA library (BIDOC) in Amsterdam. I hope that you will get the chance to have a look at this recently published book.

We have also been working in different parts of the country during the last two years, conducting seminars, generally full-time one-week seminars, about human rights' issues. During the seminars we try to analyse the causes of problems, to improve understanding and to strengthen the capacity of individuals and groups to intervene in the medium and long term. In Angola we generally say, and we in MOSAIKO agree with this, that is not so much a question of rebuilding, but of starting again from the foundations, especially the human foundations.

Frei José Sebastião Manuel (Frei Zeca) is director of Cultural Centre mosaiko, a Catholic human rights and civic education program under the Department of Justice and Peace of the Episcopal Conference for Angola and São Tomé (CEAST).