Does applying the generic label of "genocide" to violence in Darfur make it even harder to stop the killing?
In the minds of America’s opinion leaders, Africa is always in crisis, and the crisis — whether over disease, hunger, war or natural disaster — is invariably placed in a frame that Americans, and the wider world, can easily understand. When it comes to wars between people in Africa, the frame of preference is genocide, the systematic slaughter of one group by another.
Genocide is killing on a vast scale — killing so large and terrible as to seemingly render explanations irrelevant. Genocide appears to stand outside of history, of place, of rationality. The term simplifies the complicated problem of African communal violence into a story of one “tribe’s” relentless drive to erase the presence of another.
Yet by imposing the frame of genocide on African conflicts, do we obscure more than we explain? To do more than mourn Africa’s dead, shouldn’t we understand the actual sources of African conflict? Explanations of civil war are crucial, not only to settling African wars, but for imagining a better future for the world’s poorest and most troubled region.
The wider importance of “deconstructing” African genocide is well illustrated by the continent’s most vexing civil war, which is taking place in the Darfur region of western Sudan (an area roughly the size of France). Human-rights experts have declared that a new African genocide is underway there; and on the surface, the case for genocide is strong. The conflict pits light-skinned Muslim “Arabs” against black-skinned Muslim “Africans.” Arab attackers, so-called janjiweed militias, murder black Africans with impunity and, evidence has shown, at the direction of the government, with the aim of eradicating Darfur’s substantial black population. So persuasive is this evidence that the United Nations in June of 2004 agreed that Darfur’s Africans indeed qualified as victims of genocide. No matter what language is applied, the bare facts are depressing enough: as many as 300,000 dead and perhaps 2 million people displaced. Even those living in refugee camps remain subject to the violent whims of the janjiweed.
Given American fascination with genocides past, present and future, the next 10 years will likely bring a steady stream of literary and analytical works about the killing fields of Darfur, which Nicholas Kristof, from his influential perch as a New York Times columnist, has called “the first genocide of the 21st century.”
But does the conflict in Darfur, however bloody, qualify as genocide? Or does the application of the word “genocide” to Darfur make it harder to understand this conflict in its awful peculiarity? Is it possible that applying a generic label to Darfurian violence makes the task of stopping it harder? Or is questioning the label simply insensitive, implying that whatever has happened in Darfur isn’t horrible enough to justify a claim on the world’s conscience, and thus invite inaction or even the dismissal of Darfur altogether?
These questions — and the paradoxical nature of the G-word — lie at the heart of a much-needed new book by Gerard Prunier, a scholar of African affairs. In “Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide,” Prunier, a professor at the University of Paris, casts aside labels and lays bare the anatomy of the Darfur crisis, drawing on a mixture of history and journalism to produce the most important book of the year on any African subject. Clearly and concisely, he describes a complex civil war, where “Arabs” and “Africans” are often indistinguishable from one another to outsiders. Members of both groups can be dark-skinned, Muslim, poor and neglected. Indeed, this last characteristic of Darfurians, the extent of their neglect by Sudan’s central government, may be the most significant for understanding the roots of today’s conflict. (Although racism cannot be discounted; racial bias exists in Sudan with some people demonizing blacks and holding them as slaves.) Prunier emphasizes the legacy of Darfur’s isolation, which began under Britain, colonial ruler of Sudan until its independence in 1955. In 1916, the British incorporated Darfur, which had been an independent country for centuries, into colonial Sudan and then pathetically left it to crumble (as late as the 1930s there was not a single high school student in Darfur, and only four primary schools for younger kids).
Rule by an independent Sudanese government changed little. In the 1960s, and through the decades following, Darfur remained woefully ignored, a poor stepchild to the clique of Arabized Africans who ran Sudan. Yet, according to Prunier, while Darfur’s marginalization was systematic and relentless, it did not prefigure genocide. “The social and economic marginalization of Darfur was regional, not racial or cultural,” Prunier writes.
In 1984, a terrible famine struck Darfur, breaking the delicate balance between nomadic herders and pastoral peoples. Ever since, Darfurians have lived, Prunier observes with his characteristic pith and understatement, in “a state of endemic insecurity.” The ambitions of Muammar Gaddafi in the 1980s to create a mini-empire in the northern part of sub-Saharan Africa led Libya to invade, occupy and “Islamicize” Darfur for many years, with the quiet complicity of Sudan’s central government. Neighboring Chad also used Darfur’s “barren” territory to play out some of its own strange internal conflicts. When a motley collection of pastoral peoples (the “Africans”) staged a quixotic armed uprising in 2003 and 2004, the government mounted a brutal counterattack, training its rage on unarmed civilians and making the situation in Darfur, in Prunier’s blunt words, “much closer to a genuine civil war.”
This Article
“Darfur: The Ambiguous Geocide”
By Gerard Prunier
Cornell University Press
312 pages
Nonfiction
“Darfur: A Short History of a Long War”
By Julie Flint and Alex de Waal
Zed Books
176 pages
Nonfiction
While Prunier is critical of using the word “genocide” too loosely, he is careful to document the Sudanese government’s efforts to target specific population groups for decimation. Sudan’s government has organized the worst forms of violence against unarmed civilians: rapes of women, murders of children, the killings of husbands and fathers in front of their own families. These actions cannot be excused. However, they are not explained either by ignoring the precarious hold that Sudan’s government has over some of its territory and the extent to which Darfur’s “African” groups are militarized. Indeed, the surge in violence against blacks in Darfur occurred after an armed movement began mounting attacks against the government. Given the weakness of the Sudanese state, Prunier writes, “any armed movement initiated by the non-Arab tribes of Darfur was like a red rag waved before the eyes of an excited bull.”
He explains: “the parallel with Rwanda [where in 1994 the Hutu ethnic group organized the mass slaughter of minority Tutsis in 1994] is striking. When Tutsi rebels entered Rwanda in October 1990 they probably did not realize the degree of danger they were creating for the other Tutsi living inside the country. In an atmosphere charged with racism an armed rebellion by the ‘inferior’ group is fraught with enormous danger for the civilians of that group. Counter-insurgency in Darfur could perhaps only have gone wrong. This was not ‘counter-insurgency’ organized by a government trying to restore law and order; it was the answer with arms by a racially and culturally dominant group to the insurrection of a racially and culturally subject group. The hope that repression could be limited to combatants was completely unrealistic.”
In laying bare the roots of Darfur’s crisis, Prunier provides a fresh way of thinking not only about a remote patch of Africa but about the most vexing African problem of our times: What can effectively be done to halt government-sponsored violence, whether it carries the genocide label or not. As Prunier rightly concludes, “There are no big political, economic or security stakes for the developed world” in African conflicts. This means that calls for intervention — or even aid — are usually based on international law or basic moral and humanitarian grounds, not the sorts of realistic, pragmatic concerns that motivated, say, U.S. intervention in Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. Absent finding a self-interested reason (even a false one) for American military intervention in another country’s affairs, the surest way to pry open a closed killing field to concerned outsiders is to utter the G-word. But Prunier bravely complains that making legalistic distinctions about the murder of African innocents often undercuts both effective responses and sympathetic understanding.
“Unfortunately, whether the ‘big-G word’ is used or not seems to make such a difference,” Prunier writes. “It is in fact a measure of the jaded cynicism of our times that we seem to think that the killing of 250,000 people in a genocide is more serious, a greater tragedy and more deserving of our attention than that of 250,000 people in non-genocidal massacres. The reason seems to be the overriding role of the media coupled with the mass-consumption need for brands and labels. Things are not seen in their reality but in their capacity to create brand images, to warrant a ‘big story’, to mobilize TV time high in rhetoric. ‘Genocide’ is big because it carries the Nazi label, which sells well. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ is next best (though far behind) because it goes with Bosnia, which is the last big-story European massacre. But simple killing is boring, especially in Africa.”
Prunier’s formulation is daring in its critique of the orthodox view of how to draw attention to — and make sense of — African conflicts. He offers a pragmatic way of understanding them, not as iconic — even mythic in their connection with universal horrors such as the Jewish Holocaust — but as singular horrors that must be parsed and analyzed on their own terms. To be sure, understanding the peculiarities of an African conflict does not guarantee that the conflict can be ended.
Prunier is himself rather circumspect about how to fix the many failures of Sudan’s 50-year period of independence. The two British authors of “Darfur: A Short History of a Long War” are less restrained. Julie Flint, a journalist and documentary-film producer, has reported on Sudan since 1992. Alex De Waal, a fellow at Harvard University’s Global Equity Initiative and director of London-based Justice Africa, visited Darfur often in the 1980s for a book on the 1984 famine in the region, “Famine That Kills.” He remains a trenchant observer of Sudan’s ethnic politics, regionalism and fragmentation. Flint and De Waal label the leaders of Sudan’s government “war criminals” and they imply (though don’t explicitly state) that the goal of concerned outsiders should be the removal of these leaders, starting with Sudan’s President Omar al-Beshir. “For Beshir,” they write, “peace is subjugation.” That’s not a healthy starting point for people in power to begin a process of reconciliation with aggrieved minorities.
Indeed, there can be no durable peace in Sudan under the current political leadership, argue De Waal and Flint. Sudan’s leaders are too implicated in atrocities against civilians, not only in Darfur, but in southern Sudan, where black Christians, notably members of the Nubian group, suffered grossly in government terror campaigns during the 1990s. Southerners, as part of their peace deal struck earlier this year with Sudan’s government, won the right to get a vote on splitting from Sudan, as early as 2011. The Beshir government has pledged to abide by the vote, and allow its oil-rich southern provinces to depart, but many worry the government won’t allow this to happen without another war. Even now in Darfur, the inability of two different rebel groups to forge a common cause has provided Beshir with another excuse to make only “cosmetic” changes in the government’s behavior.
De Waal and Flint detail the failures of international intervention to halt the war in Darfur. The U.S. placed great hopes on the ability of the African Union, an association of African countries, to establish order there, but De Waal and Flint demolish this idea, and argue that the African Union lacks the resources, expertise and political will to impose a solution. The African Union might redeem itself, if the U.S. Congress agrees to fund a large military operation by the African Union in Sudan. But with Congress dithering on approving money, despite personal appeals by Condoleezza Rice, the African Union is likely to live up to De Waal and Flint’s dour assessment. What’s necessary, the authors insist, is “regime change” in Sudan — the Beshir government is simply irredeemable. While they don’t try to tie an evil ideology to Beshir, they argue that he is wedded to committing “atrocity by force of habit.” Once an advocate of an Islamic state, Beshir and his gang now “seek power for its own sake,” and “people they perceive to be challenging that power count for nothing,” De Waal and Flint write. “They can be subjugated, shot or starved without compunction … Mass killing has become so routine that it no longer needs conspiracy or deliberation. It is simply how the security elite does business.”
No wonder that Human Rights Watch, in a report released last month, allege that Beshir and 12 other top Sudanese government officials are responsible for much of the violence in Darfur. While merely pretending to negotiate a settlement to the Darfur conflict, “the Sudanese leadership continues to implement policies that permit continuing attacks on civilians, and perpetuate a climate of fear and intimidation through structural and institutional abuse,” Human Rights Watch said.
The renewed killing in Darfur, and the failure of the outside world to impose a peace, has raised fresh calls for the U.S., the United Nations or both to send armed forces into Sudan in order to “save” Darfurians and end the “genocide.” Calls for humanitarian intervention persist because, as Samantha Power wrote recently in the New Yorker, Darfur remains overrun with violence and banditry. Power, a professor at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, predicts that the African Union will ultimately withdraw from Sudan, leaving the U.S., Europe and the U.N. no choice but to send in their own troops. Both of these books, however, should give pause to Power and other advocates of such intervention.
This Article
“Darfur: The Ambiguous Geocide”
By Gerard Prunier
Cornell University Press
312 pages
Nonfiction
“Darfur: A Short History of a Long War”
By Julie Flint and Alex de Waal
Zed Books
176 pages
Nonfiction
To be sure, regime change is needed in Sudan and foreign military intervention may stop killing for a short time. But at what price? As we have seen in Iraq, military intervention will not end a conflict whose underlying causes go unaddressed. Those causes spring from a history of inequity between regions and peoples in Sudan. American, European and U.N. troops are unlikely to remain in Sudan for the five to 10 years required to bring about a radical reworking of power relations between these regions and peoples.
Yet only a radical power shift — perhaps one that actually splits Sudan into two or more countries, or, at a minimum, results in an authentic federal system where political power is widely dispersed — is likely to ensure lasting peace in Sudan. Proponents of military intervention clearly have good intentions — and who would not wish to stop the violence in Darfur? — but they must be honest about the consequences of what would inevitably become a foreign occupation of Sudan. Overthrowing the Beshir regime, however justified, will unleash a bloody civil war and a long post-conflict period in which foreign troops will be needed to maintain order. Sudan would become another Muslim country occupied by Westerners, and perhaps even a breeding ground for terrorists (this is a country, after all, that once harbored bin Laden himself). Given the cost of such an intervention and its risks, a more sensible approach to Darfur would draw on the lessons of history and highlight the crucial importance of a negotiated settlement that the Sudanese themselves could carry out.
Religious leaders battle African homophobia
Facing bombs and bigotry, a growing band of clerics stands up for gay rights
Ugandan bishop Christopher Senyonjo, defender of gay rights (Credit: Facebook)
When Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made a historic speech in Geneva on Dec. 8 calling for recognition of gay rights and support for those who brave hostility to defend gay rights, she might have been speaking of the Rev. MacDonald Semberka who was in the audience listening.
On the evening of Sept. 11, 2011, Sembereka, a Malawian Episcopalian, found his house reduced to unrecognizable rubble by a petrol bomb. A month later, he borrowed money for airfare so he could attend a conference at Union Theological Seminary, a Manhattan institution with a long history of social activism. He arrived wearing a clerical collar and a smile that belied the horror of seeing his home and nearly everything his family owned destroyed. At the two-day conference in New York, he would meet and strategize with other Christian leaders in the fight against Africa’s perilous and increasingly prevalent brand of homophobia.
Sembereka is one of a small but growing group of African religious leaders who have taken great personal and professional hits for supporting LGBT rights. For their efforts, they have faced violence, professional alienation and social ostricization. Yet these straight men and women, primarily Christian clergy, continue to criticize the intensifying vitriol and violence against gay Africans.
The motivation behind the bombing of the house Sembereka shared with his wife, two children and extended family has yet to be determined, and the perpetrators may never be brought to justice. But Malawian human rights organizations say Sembereka was likely a target because of his outspoken pro-gay views and his valiant defense of human rights.
Fortunately, the only ones home that fateful night were two teenage boys who managed to run out unharmed. “I’m thankful that miraculously no one was hurt,” Sembereka told me in an interview. “But what hurts me the most is to see my [7-year-old] daughter traumatized. She’s had bad nightmares since the attack.”
For the most part, African faith leaders have either fanned the flames of homophobia or stayed quiet on the issue. In some cases, they have been the key agitators of anti-gay attitudes in their countries.
In an interview last summer, Bishop Benjamin Nzimbi, the former archbishop of Kenya, told me that he could fix homosexuals by marrying off lesbians with gay men. Ugandan evangelical pastor Martin Ssempa has shown same-sex pornography to his congregation of hundreds in Kampala in order to rally up support for the Ugandan government’s anti-gay position.
Last month, after British Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to cut aid to Ghana unless it retracted its anti-gay policies, religious leaders there made sharp comments against homosexuality and warned against capitulation. Some of the criticism came from 53 LGBT African groups who wrote, “While the intention may well be to protect the rights of LGBTI people on the continent, the decision to cut aid disregards the role of the LGBTI and broader social justice movement on the continent and creates the real risk of a serious backlash.”
Last week, after Clinton announced a similar decision to tie U.S. foreign aid to a country’s record on gay rights, the backlash was evident. Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president, said of homosexuality, “It’s something anathema to Africans, and I can say that it is abhorrent in every country on the continent that I can think of.” The National Council of Churches in Kenya stated flatly, “We don’t believe in advancing the rights of gays.”
Where religion plays a significant role in the lives of many Africans, faith leaders yield great influence over politics and in setting the moral compass of most African societies. Last spring when Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki nominated Willy Mutunga, a pro-gay judge, many of the country’s religious leaders sprang into action to oppose his nomination. Making matters worse for them, Nancy Baraza, the president’s choice for the deputy chief justice, was also supportive of gay rights. For two months, substantive issues were sidelined for questions on the nominees’ sexuality.
The two nominees, both straight, were eventually confirmed as chief and deputy chief justice. Activists in Kenya and across Africa hailed this as an unparalleled victory in their struggle for equality. Longtime gay rights activist David Kuria said, “Things are changing and the most pertinent example is the nomination of the deputy and chief justice. This discredits that Africa is universally united in its opposition of homosexuals.”
Methodist Rev. John Makokah of Kenya, who’s been blasted for his pro-gay views, said, “We have a long way to go but Willy Mutunga and Nancy Baraza will help usher a new dawn for persecuted homosexuals.” But the hearings in the Kenyan parliament last summer also demonstrated the strong sway of religion on government decisions.
Generally, media reports on homosexuality in Africa have focused on the legislative push in Uganda to render certain acts of homosexuality a crime punishable by death and on the wave of lesbian “corrective” rapes in South Africa. But little attention has been given to the African activists, gay and straight, who challenge the mistreatment of gay Africans and the criminalization of homosexuality in 38 of 54 countries in Africa.
For example, Bishop Christopher Senonjo, a retired 80-year-old Anglican Bishop from Uganda, has been a beacon of support for LGBT Ugandans since 1998 when he began to counsel gay men and women. Around the same time, a group of gay men founded one of Uganda’s first gay groups and asked the bishop to chair the organization. His decision to accept the invitation would lead to years of persecution. Because of his support of homosexuals, he would be ostracized from the church, stripped of his pension and precluded from performing his religious duties.
But he says the most difficult part of his ordeal has been the backlash against his family. Recently, his daughter’s fiancé broke off the engagement because he said he didn’t want to be associated with a family who held pro-gay views. But early on, he says, even his family had their doubts. His wife, Mary, 73, did not understand or agree with what he was doing but, laughing and showing his toothy smile, he said, “God changed her heart.”
Today, Mary is a quiet force of support for her husband and the LGBT individuals she meets through his work. When a Ugandan lesbian broke down into uncontrollable tears at the conference in New York, Mary scooted her chair to where the woman was sitting and rubbed her back till she stopped sobbing and stayed by her side for the rest of the day.
Albert Ogle, president of St. Paul’s Foundation for International Reconciliation, a faith-based organization headquartered in San Diego, says that the Senonjo and Sembereka “are fueled by a moral value, which is about including all the marginalized in ministry and service. It’s not that their mission is about gay rights necessarily but to serve all humanity.”
By the end of the conference Ogle and those in attendance formed a coalition, which they dubbed “Compass to Coalition” to combat punitive laws and attitudes toward LGBT people in Africa and in the 76 countries around the world where it is illegal to be gay.
Anglican priest Michael Kimindu of Kenya says religious leaders in Africa have to be at the helm for changing attitudes toward gay people. Like many of his counterparts, he’s also been banished from the church and alienated from family members for his work with LGBT Kenyans. “We can’t let them be treated this way,” he says of gay Kenyans. “The church has to lead in bringing dignity to these people.”
When Sembereka took the stage at the conference, he also spoke of the formidable challenges that he and other LGBT-affirming faith leaders faced: “We are branded as Western puppets or gay ourselves.” He added that these attacks would not stop him or his colleagues from continuing to fight the unnecessary persecution of people of diverse sexualities. Later when asked about his destroyed home he said, “That too will be something of the past just like the plague of homophobia.”
When painting keeps tradition alive
Massai school kids illustrate a book depicting their community's uses of medicinal plants
The African Conservation Fund’s (ACF) program employs a strategy that builds local capacity for conservation by sourcing funds, providing skills, and creating geographical and cultural linkages regionally and internationally. SAPPI Ideas That Matter has provided funds for Melanie McElduff and Deborah Ross’s Watercolor Project to produce a book illustrated by the children of ll Polei Primary School describing the traditional use of plants for medicine in their Massai community of the Mukogodo region. The traditional use of plants as medicines is of great value to the Massai people.
The children of Il Polei Primary Shool have made these paintings to share their elders’ knowledge. The book will include images of the children along with their words and spaces for each child to make their own notes about plants. The books will be distributed to children and teachers in the region’s primary schools. The project will empower the region’s children with pride and investment in the biodiversity manifested in their backyards, and help forestall further environmental degradation.
The Mukogodo region of Kenya has undergone both rapid ecological and cultural degradation. A severe drought in 2009 wiped out 90 percent of the pastoralist community’s wealth — their cattle and goats. Much of the region’s indigenous knowledge is at risk of being lost as these children face a more difficult and different world than their parents knew. The need for conservation, conservation education, and local empowerment in Kenya is extreme. The Mukogodo region is a vital focus point of the ACF’s conservation work.
Copies of the Olcani booklet, featuring the photos below and more, are $10 from Deborah Ross (tokounou@mindspring.com).
Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
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Gay Africans flee persecution
As Uganda revives anti-gay legislation, gays seek haven in other countries
Anti-gay sentiment in Africa is creating a new kind of refugee (Credit: Reuters/James Akena)
I first met Fred at a prayer service for gay men in an industrial part of Nairobi where even on a Sunday morning, the noise was deafening. The service was part biblical study and part support group. The other men who were worshipping with Fred in the dingy and cavernous room that day were Kenyans, but he was not.
Fred, a lanky Ugandan, became a refugee in December 2009 after he was brutally assaulted by a mob in Kampala for being gay.
Fred, who asked that his last name not be used, bought a one-way ticket to Nairobi days after the assault with the intention of never returning. “It’s OK to kill me,” he said. “People would be happy to see me dead, even some of my family.” I asked what he meant by OK, and he explained that no one would ever have to pay a price for his murder.
Within the last decade, rancorous anti-gay rhetoric has infiltrated public discourse in many African countries. Just last week, the Ugandan parliament revived a proposal to legalize capital punishment for people who engage in homosexual acts. This is new for Africa. In the past, homosexuality was rarely brought up privately let alone in the public sphere. The new acrimonious tone against homosexuality espoused by politicians and religious leaders has percolated across all strata of African society including the media. It has also given rise to increasing homophobic and transphobic violence, which for a growing number of gay Africans has meant that life in their own countries has become untenable.
Fred’s journey from Uganda to Kenya followed the same logic as that of other Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) African refugees I spoke to. They move to urban centers in neighboring countries not necessarily because these places are any less hostile to homosexuals but for the anonymity that comes with being a newcomer in a densely populated area.
Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, went on record last May saying that anti-gay hate crimes are increasing around the world and now account for a high percentage of all reported hate crimes.
Homophobia is not necessarily a new attitude for most African societies. Being gay is a crime in 38 of the 54 countries in Africa. Many of these laws have been on the books since colonial times. But it’s a stretch to think, as some have claimed, that homophobia is simply a vestige of colonial times.
However, some pundits believe that the shift to a more sinister form of homophobia in many African countries over the last decade has its root in conservative religious indoctrination. Some reports suggest that U.S. evangelical groups have had a hand in creating the venomous anti-gay attitudes and violence that have swept over the continent and pushed gay Africans out of their countries.
“It wasn’t until the late 1990s that we saw Africans with the help of American conservative religious groups using this issue (homosexuality) as an organizing tool,” said Rev. Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia who has studied the U.S. evangelical influence on African societies.
Fred, who looks a decade or so younger than his 48 years, said that for most of his life he had guarded his sexuality with the utmost care for fear of social retribution and becoming estranged from loved ones. He lived his life relatively undisturbed until 2009 when the “Kill the Gays” bill, which sought to legalize capital punishment for homosexuality, was first introduced. Fred says it was during this time that he started to fear for his life.
His neighbors began to suspect he was gay and threatened to turn him in to authorities or to kill him themselves. On the night of his near fatal assault, he says, a large group of people from his neighborhood stood outside his bedroom quietly waiting to get the final proof they needed to confirm their suspicions. When they had heard enough, they broke his window and attacked him and his partner.
“People don’t leave their countries on a lark seeking more gay bars,” says Cary Alan Johnson, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. He adds that in places like Uganda it is because of an overwhelming sense of fear for their lives.
Kaoma says Uganda is unique only in that it has gotten more international attention. Other African countries continue to take steps to criminalize homosexuality. This, he says, will increase the flow of LGBT refugees if the international community doesn’t put pressure on these governments.
Also, because some gay African advocates have chosen to become more visible in their fight for equality, anti-gay factions have become more vehement. Some gay rights advocates have been driven into hiding.
Larry, a leading Kenyan gay rights advocate who now lives in Texas after being granted political asylum, was forced to relocate to Uganda in 2007 after he appeared on Kenyan national television as an openly gay man. “I left for Uganda because I needed to go undercover since there were multiple threats to my life.” He says he chose Uganda because of its proximity to Kenya and because he had friends there.
Neil Grungas, executive director of Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration, a San Francisco-based organization assisting LGBT refugees and asylum seekers, says that while there is no way of knowing exactly how many LGBT African refugees there are, it is a growing problem. “We know that it’s an enormous issue in Africa because the continent has the most concentrated persecution against gay people,” he said in a phone interview.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.S. State Department do not track refugees who are displaced because of their sexual orientation. But even if those numbers existed, Duncan Breen, senior associate at Human Rights First, a D.C.- and New York City-based human rights organization, says the numbers would be grossly inaccurate given how many of these refugees might be afraid to reveal their sexuality.
But those working on refugee issues believe that the flow of LGBT refugees is on the rise. They point to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees issuing guidelines for working with LGBT refugees and providing sensitivity trainings to its field staff. Also this past summer, the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services funded the very first LGBT resource center, at Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights, a Chicago-based organization that provides services to immigrants and refugees. Under the grant, the group is to come up with best practices for resettling LGBT refugees in the U.S.
Still, advocates and some U.S. politicians say the U.S. government should do more to expedite the resettlement process for refugees fleeing antigay persecution. In a February 2010 letter addressed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) urge Clinton to take decisive steps to protect LGBT refugees, who are targets of violence in the countries they have escaped from as well as the ones they’ve escaped to.
Danny Dyson, one of the first African refugees to be resettled in the United States because of the anti-gay persecution he faced in Uganda, went back and forth between Uganda and Kenya before his arrival in San Francisco. “It was a nightmare in Kenya,” he said. “At first I didn’t have any help, and I had to leave the refugee camp I went to because other refugees started harassing me for being gay.” Dyson finally found help with a U.S. nongovernmental refugee assistance group, which asked that it not be named because they feared recriminations for their work with LGBT refugees.
Dyson and Fred met in Kenya as refugees. Fred awaits a decision from the U.S. government on his application for resettlement. Having heard about Danny’s successful resettlement in America, he asked me, “Is it true there are lots of us there and I don’t have to hide?”
South Africa’s “corrective rape” epidemic
Despite enjoying comprehensive legal rights, the country's lesbians live under threat of sexual violence
Protesters during a Slut Walk that took place in Cape Town, South Africa, in August. (Credit: AP/Schalk van Zuydam)
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Just as Nono was beginning to understand her lesbian sexual identity at the age of 18, a male cousin began to rape her.
Before the first attack, he admonished, “Now I am going to teach you how to be a lady.” He threatened to kill her if she told anyone.
Nono, who has asked that her last name not be used, learned two years ago that her cousin had been shot and killed in an unrelated incident.
“In my heart I was so happy,” the 29-year-old said of her cousin’s death. “I thought, ‘Now I can live my life like I want as a lesbian.’”
Nono said she never reported her abuse to police. She belongs to a silent majority of gay South African women who have been victimized by “corrective rape,” a controversial term describing the practice of straight men raping lesbians to “correct” their sexual orientation.
This year a series of highly publicized attacks in Pretoria, Cape Town and the Johannesburg area — including the rape and murder of lesbian activist Noxolo Nogwaza in the same township where national women’s soccer team captain Eudy Simelane was killed in 2008 — have pushed “corrective rape” back into the headlines and spurred the South African government to convene an interim task force on gender-based violence and to establish another task force to draft hate crimes legislation.
And critically, an increasing number of victimized women are stepping forward and banding together to assert their right to be safe in their communities.
“We have won so many rights to love more freely, but it hasn’t protected our bodily integrity,” said Melanie Judge, a lesbian activist, social commentator and executive committee member of the Coalition for African Lesbians.
Danger in the “rainbow nation”
South Africa is at once the best places in the world — and one of the worst — to be gay. It offers comprehensive official rights rooted in the struggle to overthrow apartheid, with one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. But the ongoing threat of “corrective rape,” part of a pervasive and well-documented pattern of sexual violence against women and children, demonstrates that the reality on the ground conflicts with that progressive ideology. According to two national studies conducted in 2010, one in three women surveyed had been raped in the past year and one in four men admitted to committing rape in their lifetimes.
The statistics on “corrective rape” are extremely difficult to document, though activists and researchers agree reported cases appear to be on the rise as more lesbian women break their silence and report their attacks to police. There may also be a ‘copycat effect’ occurring, said Dipika Nath, a researcher for Human Rights Watch’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Program.
“As news of attacks spread, people may get inspired or learn to do the same in their communities,” she said.
Media outlets around the world have reported that up to 10 lesbians a week are raped in Cape Town alone. But Nath adamantly refutes the number, saying “there is no evidence anywhere” to support it. The lack of solid statistics has led to a conflating of “corrective rape” with all forms of violence against lesbians and to the reporting of sensational and unsubstantiated claims about the extent of the problem, reported the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights last June.
“Rape is rape,” said Bulelwa Panda, manager of iThemba Lam, a Christian center for reconciliation and healing that operates a safe house for LGBT people in Oliver Tambo Village outside Cape Town. “It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight. At the end of the day, you’re a woman.”
Organizations like Luleki Sizwe, a Cape Town non-profit organized to fight violence against lesbians, have focused their attention specifically on the problem of “corrective rape.” Last year the group started an online petition on Change.org that garnered 170,000 signatures from activists around the world. The petition along with protests and pressure from other gay rights groups motivated the government to partner with the organization last June to appoint an interim task force on gender-based violence.
The organization has lobbied strenuously on behalf of Noxolo Nkosana, a lesbian stabbed four times in June in Cape Town’s Crossroads township.
Luleki Sizwe championed Nkosana’s case as part of its broader campaign to raise international awareness about gender-based attacks in South Africa. Zanele Stamper, Nkosana’s sister, spoke furiously at a press conference soon after the attack.
“They deserve a second circumcision,” she said of her sister’s attackers.
Speaking about her sister’s orientation, Stamper said, “We are proud she is a lesbian…I want to say to all the lesbians and gays that I am supporting them 100 percent even though I’m straight.”
A legacy of violence
Cape Town is the site of Zoliswa Nkonyana murder case, one of at least five court cases nationwide involving the sexual and physical assaults of lesbians that Human Rights Watch is monitoring. The 19-year-old lesbian was clubbed, kicked and beaten to death in Khalyelitsha township in 2006. Last month, two of the nine men accused of killing Nkonyana were acquitted much to the outrage of LGBT activists who have championed the case; verdicts against the remaining seven men will be announced on Friday.
A week after the acquittals in the Nkonyana case were announced, the decomposed body of 21-year-old Nontsikelelo Tyatyeka was discovered in a garbage bin in Nyanga township. Missing since September 2010, one of the young lesbian’s neighbors called the motive for her violent death “nothing but homophobia,” and police suspect a 29-year-old neighbor in the killing.
The homophobic violence LGBT people face in South Africa stands in stark contrast to the comprehensive legal rights and protections accorded them in their country’s constitution, which took effect in 1997.
Those rights are rooted in the struggle to overthrow apartheid, and the violence in the legacy of apartheid. “We are terribly violent as a culture,” said the activist Melanie Judge, who co-edited To Have and To Hold: The Making of Same Sex Marriage in South Africa. “That is one of the most horrific scars of apartheid. A violent system begat a violent population.”
The successful mass movement to abolish apartheid was built on a vision of a society based on equality. South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation; in addition a host of laws were enacted forbidding discrimination in the work place, public accommodations and services. In 2006, South Africa became only the fifth country in the world, and the only country in Africa, to legalize same-sex marriage.
However, translating these rights into reality for the majority of South Africa’s gay citizens has been difficult in part because homosexuality is widely seen as alien to the religious beliefs and cultural norms of South Africa, which remains a largely conservative society.
“We are treated like we are not expected to be in this world,” said Ndumie Funda, founder of Luleki Sizwe.
Nono said that although she could be open about her sexual orientation with the family she served as a domestic worker, several of her own family members shun her because she is a lesbian. Recently she was refused a spot at the common table during the funeral of a family elder.
Yet, Nono says, she always “dresses like a lady” when she goes to see them.
A safe place
In the vast, low-lying area southeast of downtown Cape Town known as the Cape Flats, black Africans and mixed race, or “Coloured,” people were forced to live in segregated townships during apartheid. iThemba Lam works there in partnership with the Inclusive and Affirming Ministries and the Department of Social Services to establish a safe haven for gay people and to educate straight people about homosexuality.
iThemba Lam‘s Panda, who was born and raised in Guguletu township, routinely counsels young lesbians and gay men about coming out in townships. “I tell them you have to equip yourself before you come out because the minute you do there will be consequences,” she said.
Those most at risk of violence are black African “lesbian and bisexual women, effeminate gay men and transgender persons who choose to live their lives [openly] in extremely homophobic and violent communities, specifically in township and rural communities,” said Marlow Newman-Valentine, deputy director of the Triangle Project, a Cape Town non-profit serving the LGBT community in the Western Cape province.
People must learn to ignore verbal abuse and to never walk alone at night; most importantly, people must learn where it is and is not safe for them to go and to devise strategies to navigate these places. Panda says she avoids certain townships as much as possible and, when she can’t she is careful to never travel to them via the same route to avoid attracting attention.
When the house first opened in 2008, some neighbors threatened to burn it down. Now it shares its facilities with the local community, which operates a soup kitchen out of a small room at the back of the house.
Nono recently sought temporary shelter at iThembo Lam after losing her job. Like Panda, she was born and raised in Guguletu and has lived in the Cape Flats all her life. She said the only place she’s felt completely safe is in the neighborhood where the safe house is located.
Because her family was dependent on her cousin’s family to make ends meet, no one in either family interceded on her behalf until she became pregnant five months later. Her child’s father is her cousin.
She describes being “scared of my own child” whom her family sent to live with relatives when she was an infant. Now 11, the child has never been told who her parents are. The child knows Nono only as her cousin, and not as her mother. Nono said she would like to tell her daughter that she is her mother but “this would mean I must also tell her that her father rapes me and that he was my cousin.”
There have been reports of families knowingly enlisting men to rape their lesbian relatives to “correct” their sexual orientation. When asked if she believed this is what happened to her, Nono fell silent for a moment before replying: “I can’t say. My mother dies a few years ago and I never asked her. So I still have this question.”
Fresh fighting erupts between Libya rebels, regime
Gadhafi forces energized as dictator's son, rumored to be captured, reappeared, free and defiant
Moammar Gadhafi's son, Seif al-Islam gestures to troops loyal to his father in Tripoli, Libya, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2011. Seif al-Islam, who was earlier reported arrested by Libya's rebels, turned up early Tuesday morning at the hotel where foreign journalists stay in Tripoli, then took reporters in his convoy on a drive through the city. (AP Photo/Imed Lamloum, Pool) (Credit: AP)
Fresh fighting erupted in Tripoli on Tuesday hours after Moammar Gadhafi’s son turned up free to thwart Libyan rebel claims he had been captured, a move that seems to have energized forces still loyal to the embattled regime.
Rebels and pro-regime troops fought fierce street battles in several parts of the city, a day after opposition fighters swept into the capital with relative ease, claiming to have most of it under their control.
Thick clouds of gray and white smoke filled the Tripoli sky as heavy gunfire and explosions shook several districts of the city of 2 million people. Some of the heaviest fighting was around Gadhafi’s Bab al-Aziziya main compound and military barracks.
The compound, which has been heavily damaged by NATO airstrikes, has emerged as one of the centers of government resistance since tanks rolled out Monday and began firing at rebels trying to get in.
Seif al-Islam’s sudden — even surreal — arrival at a Tripoli hotel where foreign journalists are staying threw the situation in the capital into confusion. The appearance of Gadhafi’s son and former heir apparent underlined the potential for the longtime Libyan leader, whose whereabouts remain unknown, to strike back even as his grip on power seemed to be slipping fast.
Rebels say they control most of Tripoli, but they faced pockets of fierce resistance from regime loyalists firing mortars and anti-aircraft guns. Rebel spokesman Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, who was in Tripoli, said the “danger is still there” as long as the longtime Libyan leader remains on the run.
He warned that pro-Gadhafi brigades are positioned on Tripoli’s outskirts and could “be in the middle of the city in half an hour.”
The rebel leadership seemed stunned that Seif al-Islam was free. A spokesman, Sadeq al-Kabir, had no explanation and could only say, “This could be all lies.”
He could not confirm whether Seif al-Islam escaped rebel custody, but he did say that another captured Gadhafi son, Mohammed, had escaped the home arrest that rebels had placed him in a day earlier. On Monday, the rebels had said Seif al-Islam was captured, but did not give details on where he was held.
The Netherlands-based International Criminal Court — which indicted Seif al-Islam and his father — had announced his capture, but spokesman Fadi El Abdallah said Tuesday the court never received official confirmation from Libya’s rebel authorities that he had been arrested.
Seif al-Islam, with a full beard and wearing an olive-green T-shirt and camouflage trousers, turned up early Tuesday morning at the Rixos hotel, where about 30 foreign journalists are staying in Tripoli under the close watch of regime minders.
Riding in a white limousine amid a convoy of armored SUVs, he took reporters on a drive through parts of the city still under the regime’s control, saying, “We are going to hit the hottest spots in Tripoli.” Associated Press reporters were among the journalists who saw him and went on the tour.
The tour covered mainly the area that was known to still be under the regime’s control — the district around the Rixos hotel and nearby Bab al-Aziziya, Gadhafi’s residential compound and military barracks. The tour went through streets full of armed Gadhafi backers, controlled by roadblocks, and into the Gadhafi stronghold neighborhood Bu Slim.
At Bab al-Aziziya, at least a hundred men were waiting in lines for guns being distributed to volunteers to defend the regime. Seif al-Islam shook hands with supporters, beaming and flashing the “V for victory” sign.
“We are here. This is our country. This is our people, and we live here, and we die here,” he told AP Television News. “And we are going to win, because the people are with us. That’s why were are going to win. Look at them — look at them, in the streets, everywhere!”
When asked about the ICC’s claim that he was arrested by rebels, he told reporters: “The ICC can go to hell,” and added “We are going to break the backbone of the rebels.”
In Benghazi, the de facto rebel capital hundreds of miles east of Tripoli, the head of the rebel National Transitional Council said the rebels have no idea where the 69-year-old Gadhafi is or whether he is even in Tripoli.
“The real moment of victory is when Gadhafi is captured,” Mustafa Abdel-Jalil said. An Obama administration official said the U.S. had no indication that Gadhafi had left Libya.
President Barack Obama said the situation in Libya reached a tipping point in recent days after a five month NATO-led bombing campaign. However, he acknowledged that the situation remained fluid and that elements of the regime remained a threat.
The Obama administration official said the U.S. believes 90 percent of the capital is under rebel control, while regime loyalists still control Sirte and the southern city of Sebha. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.
Gadhafi’s forces remained active, firing off a short-range Scud missile Monday near Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown and one of the few remaining cities still under his control, said U.S. military officials, who declined to be identified in order to discuss military operations. It was unclear where the missile landed or if anyone was hurt.
It was only the second Scud missile fired during this year’s conflict. On Aug. 15, Libyan government forces launched one near Sirte that landed in the desert outside Brega, injuring no one.
NATO vowed to keep up its air campaign until all pro-Gadhafi forces surrender or return to their barracks. The alliance’s warplanes have hit at least 40 targets in and around Tripoli in the past two days — the highest number on a single geographic location since the bombing started in March, NATO said.
But the situation in Tripoli, a metropolis of 2 million, remained volatile and rebels appeared to be on the defensive, ducking for cover during frequent clashes with regime fighters. Stores were shuttered and large areas were lifeless, including the old gold market, in the past a draw for tourists.
The International Organization for Migration said Tuesday that a rescue mission to pluck 300 foreign nationals from the Libyan capital has been delayed by fighting. The Geneva-based group says an IOM-chartered ship will remain off the coast of Tripoli “until security conditions have improved and the safety of staff and migrants can be guaranteed.”
The rebels have sent reinforcements to the city from the north, south and southeast, and a rebel field commander said Monday that more than 4,000 fighters were part of the final push to bring down the regime. Rebels manned checkpoints on the western approaches to the city Monday, handing out candy to motorists and inquiring about their destinations.
Around midday Monday, rebel fighters took over a women’s police college near the Mediterranean and declared that they would set up their new headquarters there.
But the rebels’ optimistic mood of the morning quickly changed. By mid-afternoon, the college came under heavy fire. Snipers from nearby high-rises aimed at motorists speeding by. An anti-aircraft gun pounded the compound, creating a deafening noise. A handful of rebel fighters inside seemed jumpy and unsure what to do.
Gadhafi loyalists also launched attacks in two other areas of Tripoli, said Ashraf Hussein, a rebel fighter who sat pressed against an inner wall of the compound for safety.
Still, revelers flocked to Green Square, the symbolic heart of the fading Gadhafi regime that fell under rebel control late Sunday. They flashed the “V” for victory sign and motorists circled the plaza, honking horns and waving rebel flags.
Outside of Tripoli, almost all of eastern and western Libya is now under rebel control. The east of the country from the Egyptian border to Benghazi fell into rebel hands at the beginning of the uprising. In the weeks leading up to Sunday’s lightning advance on Tripoli, the rebels consolidated control of the western Nafusa mountain range near the border with Tunisia. It was from there they staged the run on the capital. Most of the rest of the country was quickly falling into their hands.
The city of Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown to the east of Tripoli, was the most important loyalist bastion to remain fully under his control.
On Monday, the city was without power and full of heavily guarded Gadhafi checkpoints, said Hassan al-Daroui, an official with the rebel council in Benghazi who was in touch with people there by satellite phone. Many people there were not even aware that rebels had pushed into the capital, 250 miles (400 kilometers) to the northwest, he said.
On Saturday rebels said they gained control of the oil refineries and airport at the oil terminal of Brega, on the road heading out of Benghazi west toward Tripoli.
The rebels’ startling breakthrough on Sunday, after a long deadlock in Libya’s 6-month-old civil war, was the culmination of a closely coordinated plan by rebels, NATO and anti-Gadhafi residents inside Tripoli, rebel leaders said.
Associated Press writer Mike Corder at The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.
Page 1 of 74 in Africa
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