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Witch doctors arrested after albino woman murdered 'for potions' in Tanzania

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Author Topic: Witch doctors arrested after albino woman murdered 'for potions' in Tanzania  (Read 431 times)
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« on: May 24, 2014, 06:08:02 am »

Witch doctors arrested after albino woman murdered 'for potions' in Tanzania

Two witch doctors have been arrested after an albino woman was found murdered and mutilated in Tanzania.



Police in the Simiyu region said the 40-year-old victim was murdered overnight earlier this month and the attackers had hacked off her left leg, the index and middle fingers of her left hand and part of her left thumb.

Photographs of the murder scene outside her home were too graphic to publish.

People with albinism are often subjected to violent attacks in the country, where they are known as the “zeru zeru” or ghosts.

The condition is heavily stigmatised and families who see it as a curse have known to kick relatives out of their homes.

But sufferers are also a target for traditional healers, who harvest body parts to make potions for wealth, success and even election victories.

Albinism campaign group Under the Same Sun said the latest victim was the 73rd person with albinism to be killed in Tanzania since the year 2000 and 67 others have suffered violent attacks during the same period.

The group’s founder and chief executive, Peter Ash, said: “The life of yet another person with albinism has been snuffed out.

“[The woman] was mutilated and violated in the most barbaric way, because of the fatal discrimination people with albinism face in Tanzania.

“Her screams must rouse the international community to demand the Tanzanian authorities locate and punish her killers to the fullest extent of the law.

“Anything less is a flagrant miscarriage of justice, perpetuated on the most vulnerable.”

The two arrested witchdoctors, a 45-year-old man and 52-year-old woman, were reportedly known in the victim’s village and police are also hunting for her boyfriend.

Police said the woman had two children and had sent her eight-year-old daughter to a witch doctor on the day of her murder for herbal medicine to treat her backache.

The healer reportedly told the girl not to return home to her sick mother because it would stop the “medicine” working and instructed her to stay with her aunt.

That night, the woman was murdered and her grossly mutilated body was discovered outside of her home by her niece the next morning.

Under the Same Sun is campaigning for better protection for people with albinism in Africa and wants to see witch doctors banned as they claim current regulation is not working.

The group is concerned that attacks will increase in the run-up to elections in October, when the demand for potions made from albino body parts is expected to increase.

Killings have been less frequent in recent years and the Tanzanian government, which has one albino MP, has been trying to address the problem.


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/witch-doctors-arrested-after-albino-woman-murdered-for-potions-in-tanzania-9429023.html
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« Reply #1 on: February 16, 2016, 04:07:45 am »

Illegal Trade in Body Parts Threatens Africans with Albinism

Melissa Stanford is 14 years old and dreams of becoming a lawyer. The sixth-grade student lives at a residential school run by the Our Lady of Kilimanjaro Sisters in northern Tanzania, where she is at the top of her class and helps the sisters take care of the younger students, some of whom have physical disabilities. She is quiet and polite with strangers and compassionate with the younger children.
 
She speaks excellent English in addition to Swahili and her tribal language. She knows her pursuit of becoming a lawyer is a challenging path for any female from rural Tanzania.
 
But Melissa does not look like most Tanzanians. She was born with albinism, a genetic mutation that means the body is unable to produce pigment or melanin in the skin, hair or eyes. For unknown reasons, the condition is 20 times more prevalent in her region of Tanzania than in North America and Europe. And due to a lack of education, it is shrouded in mystery and superstition in Tanzania and surrounding countries, leaving people with albinism particularly vulnerable to attacks.
 
Local traditions in some parts of Africa hold that body parts of people with albinism have magical properties that can make people rich. Witch doctors, who use the body parts in potions, have created a gruesome trade in which albino limbs can fetch thousands on the black market. Since 2006, 164 people have been murdered and 264 maimed, according to Under the Same Sun, an advocacy organization for people with albinism based in Canada and Tanzania that tracks these cases. Many more attacks go unreported.
 
“There have been beliefs since our grandfathers’ time that people with albinism are ghosts, that people with albinism are not human beings,” said Perpetua “Perry” Senkoro, a lawyer who has albinism and works at Under the Same Sun in Tanzania. “(They think) people with albinism do not die, they disappear. If I chop off their hand or their leg and bring it to a witch doctor and he does that voodoo stuff, I can get rich.”
 
Melissa understands the horror personally. In 2008, when she was 7 years old, two men broke into her family’s house to attack her sister, Mariamu, who was 28 and also has albinism. They used a machete to chop off both of her arms. It took Mariamu seven hours to get medical attention, but she survived. Since then, both sisters have received protection and care through the Our Lady sisters and Under the Same Sun.
 
Activists and widespread media attention have shed light on the practice in a mission to change superstitious notions about people with albinism. A documentary called “The Boy From Geita,” about Adam, a young boy with albinism who survived a vicious attack at his home in the same district as Melissa, was recently nominated for five awards, including the 2015 Director’s Guild of Canada award for best documentary. The film also follows Mariamu Stanford’s story.
 
In North America and Europe, about 1 in every 20,000 people have some form of albinism. In Tanzania, about 1 in 1,400 people have the condition. Experts are not certain why the incidence is so much higher in Tanzania, especially in the northwestern part of the country near Lake Victoria, where Melissa is from and where the likelihood of albinism is 1 in 1,000.
 
Threat of witchcraft
 
People with albinism have pale white skin that burns easily in the sun. In addition to the threat of attacks, they often struggle with physical challenges such as low vision and skin cancer. In Tanzania, 90 percent of those with the condition contract skin cancer by the time they are 30, according to Under the Same Sun. Due to lack of access to medical care, many of the cases are fatal.
 
People with albinism are at risk from witchcraft in 25 countries in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Burundi, Egypt and Mozambique.
 
According to a 2009 report from the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the body of a person with albinism can command as much as $75,000 on the black market. Limbs can cost thousands of dollars. The gross national income per person in Tanzania is $920 per year.
 
Many of these grotesque crimes are reported in Tanzania, with 159 attacks and 76 killings since 2006. “It’s not just in Tanzania; it’s all over Africa. It’s just that in other countries people don’t speak about it so it’s not widely known,” said Senkoro, citing better press freedom and field research as factors in Tanzania’s higher and more accurate data.
 
After the attack on her sister, Melissa fled her family’s home and has never returned. A social worker brought her to the St. Francis School in Moshi, where Under the Same Sun sponsors her tuition. The Our Lady Sisters also housed and assisted Mariamu during part of her rehabilitation. Mariamu attended a vocational school in Moshi and learned how to knit sweaters using two prostheses. She now lives in Dar es Salaam, while Melissa stayed in Moshi.
 
“I want to become a lawyer after I finish secondary school, because I want to study security laws to protect albinos,” Melissa said. “I want to tell people not to believe in witchcraft, but it is not so easy to change their minds.”
 
‘The fence is not high enough’
 
 
The St. Francis of Assisi School for the Abled and Disabled, run by the Our Lady of Kilimanjaro Sisters, is located in a pastoral village on the highway from Arusha to Moshi, the popular tourism destination that is the jump-off point for treks to Mount Kilimanjaro or safaris in the Serengeti National Park.
 
The school has 268 students, 42 of whom have albinism and issues with low vision. Other students have disabilities, including deafness, total blindness and birth defects, and some have no disabilities but are orphans or children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The school puts an emphasis on teaching all the children together.
 
“When we are inclusive, it helps the children because there’s interaction,” said Sister Mary Benedicta Mosha, the director of St. Francis. “When they’re studying alone, they feel inferiority. They think, ‘Well, I can’t see, so I won’t work, I’ll just wait for someone to help me.’ But here, they go together, they play together, and they help each other.”
 
The residential school offers a solution to children with albinism who were not attending school. Some were the victims of attacks or had family members who were attacked. Others were kept home purposefully because the parents were ashamed or scared.
 
Even at the school, the students with albinism are still at risk for kidnapping or attacks. “Here there is a problem with security, the fence is not high enough, people can just jump over it,” said Mosha. “So we take turns — nuns, teachers, caretakers — to sleep outside to make sure that the albinos are safe.”
 
Mosha knows that it’s not really about building a better wall, which is only a short-term solution. The real mission is to change people’s perceptions.
 
Humanizing people with albinism, village by village
 
Peter Ash, a Canadian pastor and real estate entrepreneur who also has albinism, founded Under the Same Sun in 2009. The organization aims to bring the issue of attacks against people with albinism to wider attention in Tanzania and around the world. One approach is through sponsored TV commercials and radio spots in Tanzania, featuring people with albinism talking about their lives and fears.
 
But the thrust of their advocacy is done in the most remote parts of the country, going village by village to explain what causes albinism. The discrimination stems from the fact that few people understand what causes the condition, they say.
 
Albinism is a genetic mutation that happens when both parents are carriers of the albinism trait. If parents have normal pigmentation but both carry the recessive gene, the child has a 25 percent chance of having albinism.
 
Under the Same Sun visits a different region of Tanzania every three months, traveling to at least 10 villages and making presentations for 500 to 3,000 people. The seminars combat misinformation, such as the belief that if you **** a person with albinism, you’ll be cured of AIDS. The activists have also encountered situations where doctors refuse to treat patients with albinism because they’re worried about becoming infected themselves (genetic conditions are not infectious). But the biggest step toward humanizing albinism is simply introducing communities to successful, educated, confident people with albinism.
 
“The first time we went out for a seminar about albinism, we were afraid of taking people with albinism with us to remote villages,” said Vicky Ntetema, a former BBC journalist who was one of the first to investigate the phenomenon and bring the atrocities to a world stage. Ntetema won the International Women’s Media Foundation award for Courage in Journalism in 2010 for her work exposing the killings. “But when Perpetua, for example, stands there and says, ‘I have albinism, I am educated, I went to school, I faced challenges but I went to school,'” explained Ntetema, “she says, ‘Here I am, I’m a lawyer.’ And people go: ‘What?! So they’re intelligent also? So they can go to school?!'”
 
“People with albinism lack (self-esteem) because from the time they were born, fingers pointed at them — ‘There goes a ghost, there goes a curse, there goes a stupid person,'” Ntetema continued. “These people cannot do anything, they’re just a burden to their parents and their community.’ If you’re a curse then every natural disaster that’s happening in your area in your community is your fault. You are to blame.”
 
The “aha!” moment at the village training sessions, when listeners start to grasp that people with albinism do not have black magic powers, comes when the presenters bring out a poster showing how albinism occurs in every living thing. “When we say that there are animals with albinism, and plants with albinism, people are like, ‘wow,'” said Senkoro.
 

In areas where albinism is prevalent, it’s also important to educate parents and teachers about the disabilities that can come as a result of the mutation.
 
One of the characteristics is low vision. But when no one knows about that effect of albinism, the child struggles in school, unable to see the blackboard or follow along with the class. The child often ends up failing tests and needing to repeat grades. The students either run out of funds or get frustrated and drop out. Now the village workshops include a section for teachers on how to support students with albinism, ideas as simple as moving them closer to the blackboard.
 
Another serious issue is skin cancer. It is treatable with liquid nitrogen, if caught in the first stage, but a lack of education and access to medical services means it is often fatal. Many families are ignorant that children with albinism must wear long sleeves and hats to protect their skin, and sunscreen is too expensive for most Tanzanians.
 
Shining a light
 
Coverage in the local press is also helping to change people’s minds. The headlines sound too gruesome to be true: Desperately poor parents sell their children’s fingers. A child is kidnapped and sold by his uncle. But the simple fact that there are headlines in local papers is an important first step toward raising awareness, Senkoro said.
 
Mariamu Stanford, who now lives at a home sponsored by Under the Same Sun for victims of attacks, became a de facto spokeswoman for victims when she went to court against her attackers, one of the first to do so.
 
In 2014, a judge dismissed the case, claiming that, due to Mariamu’s low vision, she could not have identified the attacker at night. Mariamu said she recognized the voice of her neighbor, who had lived next door for seven years and had verified her whereabouts the day before the attack.
 
She sees the judge’s decision as another example of prejudice against people with albinism. Today, she is struggling to support herself, as the prostheses that allowed her to knit no longer fit.
 
Mariamu’s 8-year-old son, Elisha, who does not have albinism, says he wants to be a police officer when he grows up, so he can “arrest all the bad guys who hurt people with albinism,” she said.
 
“The reason why there’s a high level of stigma and discrimination is that they don’t understand about albinism. They don’t understand why we exist,” Mariamu said. “When ordinary people understand what it is, they’ll treat us like human beings.”

http://www.christianheadlines.com/news/illegal-trade-in-body-parts-threatens-africans-with-albinism.html
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« Reply #2 on: June 07, 2016, 05:50:53 pm »

Malawi albinos targeted in ‘unprecedented’ killing wave: Amnesty

 Albinos in Malawi are being targeted in an “unprecedented wave of brutal attacks”, Amnesty International said Tuesday in a report that blames police for failing to tackle a scourge fuelled by ritual practices.

At least 18 people with albinism — a hereditary condition that causes an absence of pigmentation in the skin — have been killed across Malawi since November 2014.

Five are still missing after being abducted, the London-based rights group said.

The actual number of people killed may be much higher, Amnesty noted, as many cases go unreported due to the secretive nature of ritual practices in rural areas.

The report titled “We are not animals to be hunted or sold” painted a chilling picture of killings and fear, with the body parts of victims, including children, routinely hacked for use in witchcraft.

“Malawian authorities have dismally failed them, leaving this population group at the mercy of criminal gangs who hunt them down for their body parts,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s Director for Southern Africa.

The report said their body parts were used as “charms and magical potions in the belief that they bring wealth and good luck.”

“The macabre trade is also fuelled by a belief that bones of people with albinism contain gold.”

Malawi police said they had recorded at least 69 crimes against people with albinism since November 2014, and some 39 cases of illegal exhumation of the bodies of people with the condition.

Amnesty documented several cases, including that of a 17-year-old boy, who was abducted and trafficked to Mozambique in April where he was killed.

Both his arms and legs were chopped off and his bones removed.

The attacks and discrimination have sown terror among the 7,000-10,000 Malawians living with albinism.

Amnesty called on the government of Malawi to take measures to ensure their protection, including improving policing in rural areas.

The slaughter of albinos is also prevalent in Tanzania and Mozambique.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/malawi-albinos-targeted-in-unprecedented-killing-wave-amnesty/
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