Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Uganda Horror: Trafficking Children For Human Sacrifice

Where to begin with this story; police in Uganda are struggling to resolve the growing number of children being abducted and murdered by witchdoctors in ritualistic acts of human sacrifice.

Back in February, the British publication The Independant carried a detailed background report on the unfathomable crime wave. From their interview with Timothy Opobo, programme coordinator with the Ugandan Chapter of the Africa Network for the Prevention and Protection Against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN):
“For a long time, sacrificing has been done in secrecy. Child sacrifice centres on witchcraft,” says Timothy Opobo. “Today, sacrificing children appears to be exposed because traditional healers and herbalists are everywhere. So witchdoctors have taken advantage of the traditional herbalists by hiding under that umbrella and have advertised in the media.”
...“Children are vulnerable and are believed to be pure – this is why they are being sacrificed”.
Opobo says that poverty is leading people come to believe they are cursed, that witchdoctors prey on that belief and convince family members to kill their children, and the children of others, in order to relieve themselves of that curse. The article lists a handful of the cases investigated in late 2008:
Shs 50,000 [$26 US, $28 CDN] was enough to tempt Patrick Makonzi to chop the head off his 12-year-old nephew, Eriya Kalule, of Namusita village in Kamuli District on Boxing Day. That same month, a boda-boda cyclist in Masajja, Wakiso district, beheaded his twin children for Shs 12 million [$6,266 US, $6,724 CDN]. In another bizarre case, Ssenoga Setubwa, 21, stole a child from Bwaise and sold him for Shs 100,000 [$52 US, $56 CDN].

The Masajja murderer told Ugandan media outlet The Observer back in August that "a rich man had asked him for his twins in exchange for Shs 50million, a deal Mugerwa agreed to; prompting him to behead the three-year olds."

In this connection, the African news site All Africa reports that Uganda's newest Police Inspector General, Major General Kale Kayihura, has reshuffled the ranks of the police force in order to achieve greater efficiencies in resolving this and other ongoing criminal problems plaguing their nation. Several hundred new cadets are replacing senior officers, in the hope that progress can be made... starting with better policing of law enforcement officers and government officials themselves:
The Minister of Internal Affairs, Kirunda Kivejinja recently said the police report into ritual murders named government workers as some of the people behind the recent spate of ritual murders.

Yet it's not just the poor that are trying to buy their way out of their penury through the ritualistic murder of children.

Throughout 2009 Uganda has witnessed the high-profile court case of "philanthropist" Kato Kajubi, an international businessman accused of organizing the beheading of a 12-year old boy lured away from his poverty-stricken village with promises of better education and a job at Kajubi's chicken farm. The court was told that the murdered boy was the first of three children Kajubi was said to have wanted for his ritual. The 12-year old child's body was later found at the construction site of one of Kajubi's newly-built properties, in fulfillment of some sick superstitution that such placement would herald good luck for the owner by dispelling bad spirits.

Human sacrifice is increasingly being seen as a worthy means to get-rich-quick ends, according to Florence Kirabira, Acting Head of Child and Family Protection Unit:
Some of those obsessed with getting rich quick are ready to do anything, including killing –if that is what the witchdoctor recommends - to reach their goal.
“It’s a difficult and complex situation where children have been sacrificed because of an urge for people to get wealthy. We have people who believe in getting rich [at all costs],” Kirabira says.
According to James Ongom, an investigating officer, 40 children have lost their lives to ritual killings this year alone. Out of these cases, 15 have so far been investigated, but no one has been convicted.

How does one imagine the pain and grief endured in such a place? My heart cries out for victims like this mother of four, who came home from the market only to find her beheaded six-month old baby boy in a plastic bag, murdered by the baby's own father, her 30-year old husband:

“I wanted my son to become an engineer,” she says amid sobs. “I cannot believe that the man I was living with, the father of my children, was the devil.”
[Thanks to Norfolk Human Rights Examiner and Liberia Past and Present for this story]

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