Through Albino Eyes

Over the past two years at least 56 albino people in Burundi and Tanzania have been killed by hunters working for witchdoctors who sell their body parts as talismans for thousands of dollars.

The killings triggered a humanitarian crisis as thousands of albinos were either trapped in their villages, too frightened to move, or in the case of children abandoned in special schools for the disabled and shelters guarded by the police.


The spontaneous local humanitarian response to this emergency was coordinated by the Red Cross societies of both countries. It sharply highlighted the long-standing social and health problems of Great Lakes albinos, above all the skin cancer to which so many of them succumb. One of HDEO's intrepid friends, Alex Wynter, has just finished producing a ten-minute web documentary on this tragic story (below) as well as comprehensive advocacy report. 




A few figures

·         $75,000 - Tanzanian police estimate of the value to witch doctors of a complete set of albino body parts, including all four limbs, genitals, ears, nose, and tongue.

·         $4,000 - Amount raised by a local appeal organized by the Tanzania Red Cross in Kigoma to assist abandoned albino children – all from private contributions by Red Cross volunteers and other local humanitarian workers.

·         $246,000 - Amount the Tanzania Red Cross is appealing for now to expand humanitarian work with albinos throughout the two regions most seriously affected by the occult-based killings: Kigoma and Mwanza.

·         56 - Official number of albinos who have been killed by hunters over the past two years in Burundi and Tanzania (44 of them in Tanzania).

HDEO has featured a number of stories and photos on this issue over the last months, including:

Albino kids running and hiding out of fear;

Albinos hunted for body parts;

A tiny sanctuary for Tanzania's Albinos and,

Life under Police Protection in Burundi

/PC

Albinos: Life under Police Protection in Burundi

Last June, Head Down Eyes Open posted two reports on the plight of Albinos in Burundi and Tanzania; one which dealt with Albinos being hunted for body parts and another which described life in an albino sanctuary in Tanzania. 


Since that time there has been widespread interest in the issue and even offers of financial aid which we have diverted to the Tanzanian Red Cross. 


Alex Wynter, who wrote the original posts, has now returned  to the region where he is putting together a comprehensive advocacy paper and video reportage on this disturbing story (which is planned for release in mid-November - watch this space).


Welcome to Baby Napolean


Napoleon Ahishakiye, a healthy boy, was born on Thursday 15 October 2009 – as far as anyone knows the first albino birth in one of the shelters still scattered around the eastern Burundian province of Ruyigi, near the border with Tanzania.

After the occult-based killings began here in August last year, the Ruyigi local authorities had to resettle 60 albinos in secure locations the police could guard.

And there at least 20 remain, including Napoleon’s albino mother, Emelyne Banteyineza, 18, who sits in the shade next to her grandmother, Candide Ntawenganyira, who is black and estimates her age at “about 70”.

Emelyne has seven siblings, including one other albino. Candide, whose own parents were black, says she puzzled for a while about the sudden emergence of albinism in the family, then decided “it’s God’s will” and dismissed the issue.

Candide, whose Kirundi name translates as “I have no one to take my worries to”, is clearly too delighted with her new great-grandson to think much about the shadowy albino-hunters – working for big-money buyers in Tanzania, most Burundians believe – who have killed 12 people in Burundi and caused the displacement of many others in several provinces.

For the moment, at least, in Burundi they seem to have melted away. The last killing of a Burundian albino was on 14 March, according to Kazungu Kassim, the director of Albinos Sans Frontières Burundi, and himself an albino. The picture shows Napoleon Ahishakiye, an albino baby born on Thursday 15 October 2009 and as far as anyone knows the first albino birth in a shelter, with his 18-year-old albino mother, Emelyne Banteyineza. (Photo: Alex Wynter)

Humanitarian response

But conditions in the stifling shelters are dreadful: children sleep on foam blocks on bare concrete; they are filthy and often hungry; and, lacking proper protective clothes, many are also badly sunburnt.

The Burundi Red Cross (BRC) was instrumental in coordinating the spontaneous humanitarian response to the albino crisis last year, which included local NGOs, UN-agency staff, churches and schools.

The BRC collected food, clothes and – as in the Kigoma region of Tanzania – cash that volunteers and others had donated from their own pockets.

At Emelyne’s shelter – a derelict building most recently used as a barracks during the war – BRC volunteers continue to manage vegetable plots on behalf of the albinos; they’re now productive enough to provide a small cash-surplus.

But it isn’t enough. And in any case the long-term goal is for albinos to be reintegrated into their communities.

“We’re forming a donor partnership with the World Lutheran Federation,” says Jean-Pierre Sinzumunsi, BRC regional coordinator for Ruyigi and Cankuzo provinces.

“We want to help our volunteers better understand the problems of albinism and to promote the integration and protection of albinos.

“We also aim to sensitize the local authorities, the police, the military, priests, local NGOs and village elders.”

Lynched

In Burundi to an even greater extent than Tanzania, albinos are an unknown quantity. The lack of proper data is almost total: “We know so little,” says Kassim.

There are believed to be at least 1,000 albinos in Burundi and they suffer varying degrees of marginalization. With a mock cruelty not uncharacteristic of the very young, schoolchildren have been heard calling albino classmates marchandise or iboro in Kirundi, according to Sinzumunsi – a reference to the trade in their body parts for use as occult talismans.

But it is not their neighbours who pose the mortal danger. Quite the reverse.

The suspected albino-hunter who rode his bike straight at Marie Niyukuri’s eight-year-old albino son, Ephreim, last year was lucky: he was saved by the police from being lynched on the spot by her vigilant neighbours, who were jumpy since a small albino boy had been snatched and killed in the next colline (hill or village administrative-unit).

It seems the man had attempted to fake a road accident and make off with Ephreim’s body, but the boy was pulled away by his black friends.

In at least one other incident recorded by the BRC, police did not arrive in time to rescue an albino hunter from being lynched by his victim’s friends and neighbours.

Front row

Marie’s confidence seems, if anything, to have grown since last August. She, her husband Protais, Ephreim’s 14 year-old albino sister, Faustine, and eight black siblings live next to their plots on a hillside near Ruyigi town.

The family took refugee in a shelter in town with other albinos, but the fact that “people round here are on the alert now,” as Marie explains, is a large part of the reason why they returned home.

The children walk the three kilometres every day to school, unescorted, but Marie’s other concerns for her highly vulnerable son quickly reasserted themselves once the immediate threat to his life seemed to pass. “He’s struggling,” she says.

“He had to repeat his first year three times. While we were in the shelter and he was at school in town the teachers put him in the front row so he could see, but not here.” (This is the easily rectified problem facing so many albino schoolchildren.)

But perhaps most seriously, neither Ephreim nor Faustine, who speaks in a whisper with her head bowed, has had any medical attention for the melanomas that liberally speckle their faces and arms.

Neither child possesses a potentially life-saving wide-brimmed hat.

“We got married very young,” says Marie. “When I started having albino babies [another albino child, the first of the three, died in infancy] I was shocked and I looked for an explanation, but I gave up and just accepted them and treated them the same.”

Armed hunters

Twenty-seven-year-old Jeremie Ndayiragije’s story is very different – but thankfully far less typical.

The married albino father-of-two had just returned from a wedding reception with his albino brother Daniel when they heard noises outside. Daniel went to investigate and found himself confronting a group of armed albino-hunters.

“Daniel fought and stopped one of them,” says Jeremie, “but he had no chance – they shot him, cut off his arms and legs and left his torso.”

The awful twist in the brothers’ story is that it was a third, non-albino brother, who had betrayed them to the hunters in exchange for 300,000 Burundian francs (about US$ 250).

A number of men arrested in connection with the attack are now in jail.

Jeremie is in hiding.


/PC (note: blogger acting up - unable to post more than one photo - see more on www.ifrc.org)


This story was originally written for IFRC.

A tiny sanctuary for Tanzania’s albinos

by Alex Wynter for HDEO, Kabanga, Tanzania

One of the things that makes working for the Red Cross in the field such a privilege is that you occasionally see places you never would in a lifetime of “travel”, even as a journalist. And meet true humanitarians – local volunteers – whose main objective in life is to do something to help their communities.

 

For me one such place was the Kabanga school for the disabled and albino sanctuary on Lake Tanganyika in western Tanzania, north-east of the town of Kigoma, whose small museum testifies to one of its other claims to fame: it’s where Stanley found Livingstone in 1871.

 

Getting there is easier than it would have been then, but still not entirely straightforward – it means a long domestic flight from Dar and a drive of more than 100 kilometres on an unmade road. I had a 48-hour gap at the end of a mission to Tanzania to do it in – on the inspired suggestion of my good friend and colleague Andrei Engstrand-Neacsu.

 

For Kabanga has become a very special place indeed, as one of only two small sanctuaries in the whole of Tanzania for the country’s desperately vulnerable albino population. In remote parts of Tanzania and neighbouring Burundi, albinos are being hacked to death for their body parts – especially legs, breasts, hands and genitals – which are believed to bestow good luck and wealth when carried as charms.

 

The killers are not, for the most part, thought to be those who actually hold to this superstition, but organized criminal gangs acting as body-part “wholesalers”. So to the extent that the killing of albinos is an organized commercial pursuit on a countrywide level, it has the makings of a genocide.

 

To date, a largely silent one. Although the BBC’s Karen Allen deserves great credit for having raised the alarm on this story internationally as early as July 2008.

 

Reliable numbers are few. Only some 4,000 albinos in Tanzania are officially registered as such; the country’s albino association says there are at least 173,000 and some believe the true figure could approach 300,000. Protecting this many people in a developing country bigger than France and Germany put together isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible. 

There have been more than 40 reported killings of albinos in Tanzania in the last year and a half, but the true number is probably higher. Of one number, zero, we can be certain: this is the number of successful prosecutions of killers of albinos there have been in either Tanzania or Burundi. Although that may be about to change in both countries with new trials of people accused of albino murders.

 

I’d been told by Andrei, who’s taken the albino story very much to his heart, that Tanzania Red Cross Society (TRCS) volunteers are deeply involved in the effort to protect albinos and provide services to the Kabanga shelter, which is run by the government. They’re able to do this partly because the international Red Cros operation to support Burundian, Congolese and Rwandan refugees in camps in western Tanzania is winding down.

 

Until the TRCS provided the school with mosquito nets, beds and mattresses left over from the refugee programme, the new young albino residents – who began arriving in November after the latest killings – were sleeping huddled together on bare concrete.

 

But the TRCS commitment goes deeper still: many volunteers, so shocked and saddened are they by the albinos’ plight, are contributing out of their own pockets.

 

When I got to Kabanga I had about three hours of usable daylight left. I found myself sitting cross-legged amid a mixed group of albino and disabled non-albino children, their teachers, and the TRCS volunteers who had organized the evening picnic they were enjoying, taking their pictures and listening to their often horrific stories. Every photojournalist knows the experience of squinting through the viewfinder and fighting back tears. Never have I found that battle harder.

 

To the volunteers, the albino children – mostly unscathed by the terrible skin cancer likely to blight their adult lives in a land of tropical sun – have a beauty all their own. They are fragile, adorable things. The Tanzanian Red Crossers cannot begin to fathom how anyone can possibly wish to harm them, let alone take a panga to them.

 

For the TRCS, the albino experience in the Great Lakes region seems to offer a window onto the darkest, grimmest depths of the soul.

 

I joined one little boy who was sitting calmly next to the towering but very benign figure of the school’s deputy head, Stephen Samuel, who translated his story. Albino hunters had come to his village one day and found him and his black mother in their house. When they tried to seize him she clutched him to her chest with both hands, but one blow from a panga severed her arm and he fell to the floor; the boy got up and ran. The police eventually found him and brought him to Kabanga. 

Another albino mother and her black child had only just escaped from their village with their lives after hunters found them too. An athletic-looking 17-year-old albino had once escaped because he screamed so loudly his neighbours rushed to save him; on a second occasion he simply outran what he estimated were 15 attackers, all armed with machetes. And so it went on. Story after story, of killing, mutilation and hair’s-breadth escapes.

 

I tried to imagine what it must feel like to be the parent of an albino in a remote village in the outback, with nothing more than the goodwill and vigilance of one’s neighbours between your child and death by mutilation. Tried and failed.

 

The school itself is secure, according to Samuel, guarded by armed Tanzanian police during the hours of darkness. A more pressing problem, simply, is that it’s full. Full to the rafters. The dormitories, one male one female, are so jam-packed that the older children can barely squeeze between the beds. Yet still the police bring in new albino fugitives, effectively refugees – the most recent from about 200 kilometres away, implying a huge catchment area for this one relatively tiny place.

 

Kabanga also desperately needs a dependable supply of the high-factor sunblock that is the only thing with a chance of preventing these children from developing skin cancer. The TRCS has provided some, but not enough. As every first-world sunseeking tourist knows, it’s very expensive stuff.

 

And a kitchen: at the moment all the children’s food is cooked on an open fire in one of the yards.

 

And if they are not to turn people away, a new dormitory.

 

The Tanzanian government recently said it will fast-track murder trials involving the killing of albinos, and I didn’t meet anyone who doubts that. The TRCS, meanwhile, says it’s determined to expand its work in this area and is appealing for direct and urgent assistance from international donors.

 

Tanzania as a nation has a well-deserved reputation as a sanctuary for refugees. The people I met there were utterly dismayed that this history should now be overshadowed from within.

Check out Alex's photo gallery from Kabanga Albino sanctuary.

/PC

Albinos 'hunted' for Body Parts

Superstition has led to the recent killing of more than 60 albinos in Burundi and Tanzania. The Red Cross is backing government efforts to protect them, and defends their right to a life in dignity.

As the trial of 11 Burundians accused of involvement in the killing of albinos and the selling of their body parts continues in Ruyigi, the Red Cross has made the protection of the most vulnerable and promotion of respect for non-discrimination and respect for diversity its highest priority.

More than 60 lives were lost in a recent spate of albino killings in Eastern Africa.

“The killings of albinos must stop and their dignity restored,” says Anseleme Katyunguruza, head of the Burundi Red Cross, which is providing aid to 48 albino children and adults sheltered for their own safety in the township of Ruyigi.

At least 12 albinos have been murdered in Burundi and 50 in Tanzania during the past few months. Although some 200 people were arrested last year on suspicion of murder in Tanzania, none have been convicted. In Burundi last November, however, two men were jailed for life for killing albinos.

Greed, superstition and murder

Katyunguruza talks about a “phenomenon of albino hunting” that started in August last year. The demand came from neighbouring Tanzania and is closely linked to the economic boom in the fishing and gold mining industries along the shores of the Lake Victoria.

This has turned into a deadly business, with killers reportedly being paid between 200 and 5,000 US dollars for their crime.“In search for profit, witch doctors revived an old superstition that the limbs and genitals of an albino can bring quicker and better results to one’s enterprise. We are condemning and fighting this horrible form of discrimination,” he adds.

Red Cross volunteers have been helping the bereaved families with the burials of the mutilated bodies of family members. Things are so serious that volunteers often have to pour concrete over the tombs to prevent albino corpses from being exhumed at night by people in search of the 'magical organs'.

Family betrayal

Many volunteers have taken the risk of sheltering in their own houses people with albinism, some of whom have been threatened by members of their own families. Red Cross volunteers are driven by a firm commitment to respect human dignity and protect people from suffering and violence.

“We are two albinos in our family - my younger brother and I. One day our older brother came back from Tanzania with strangers. At nightfall, they hovered around our house as they watched us. Then they caught my brother and killed him,” one albino child, on the verge of tears, told a Burundi Red Cross volunteer.

His dead brother’s body parts were then sold off for 300,000 Burundian francs (about 250 US dollars). “We alerted the police, even though we were threatened. The authorities arrested [our older brother] but, for some reason, he was released shortly after. Now he is in hiding in Tanzania.”

The areas worst affected are the communes of Bweru, Nyabitsinda, Kinyinya, Gisuru, Butaganzwa around the town of Ruyigi, not far from the Tanzanian border. The killings occur regularly in Tanzania as well. The body parts are at high demand among miners and fisherman around the Lake Victoria regions of Mwanza, Shinyanga, Kigoma and Mara.

Protection and assistance

Authorities in both countries have offered protection to dozens of albinos in shelters safeguarded constantly by the police. In Ruyigi, there is tight security at the shelters where the Red Cross is distributing food, digging latrines and providing other essential services.

“We have collected money and take turns to visit our (albino) fellow Burundians. We bring beer and share it with them since this is a sign of acceptance and solidarity,” says one volunteer, adding that the Red Cross also encourages communities to help vulnerable albinos returning home by reconstructing houses and labouring their fields.

Activities encouraging respect for humanitarian principles and values have intensified in communities across the affected areas. Further assistance includes advocacy with local authorities in order to sensitize them to the plight of the albino. Schools have also been approached to ensure that albino children can continue their studies in the town of Ruyigi and the town’s hospital has been asked to allow free of charge medical care for albino people in need.

Across the border, the Kabanga public school for the disabled, near the town of Kigoma, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, provides refuge for some 50 Tanzanian albino children youngsters and single mothers.

Many have just escaped their villages with their lives and tell harrowing stories of killing and mutilation.

One small boy talks about how his non-albino mother’s hand was severed by albino hunters armed with machetes after she tried to prevent them seizing him.

The school has now completely run out of space, but vulnerable albinos are still being brought in by the police from as far as 200 kilometres away.

Changing minds, saving lives

While eagerly waiting to hear about the outcome of the Ruyigi trial, some displaced people with albinism are already thinking of returning to their villages. When the time is right, Red Cross volunteers will accompany them every step of the way and ensure that additional discussions aimed at stemming discrimination are being organized.

A series of training sessions focusing on the reintegration of albinos into their communities has already taken place and volunteers have tested not only the acceptance but also the readiness of communities to protect those who decide to return.

“The results were satisfactory but communities remain divided over the issue,” says Evariste Nhimirimana of the Burundi Red Cross. “We need to continue our work. We cannot expect that superstitions will be easily eradicated.”

The Red Cross plans to use cultural gatherings to explain to the most suspicious that there is nothing supernatural about albinism; that in fact it is a health condition that cannot entirely be treated. Focusing on dropping bias, critical thinking and non-violent communication will be key to influence behavioural change in the community.

Nshimirimana’s concerns are echoed by his Tanzanian colleague Julius Kejo, who says: “We need to change minds in order to save lives.”

This article was written by my colleague Andrei Engstrand-Neacsu for ifrc.org; further blogs planned on this topic, soon. It is also being coverd by BBC online.

/PC