Jeanette X
Dec 14th, 2003, 02:29 PM
Source: http://www.freep.com/news/nw/congo21_20031021.htm
Children Tortured In Congo Witch Hunt
BUKAVU, Democratic Republic of Congo -- After her mother married for a second time, Aline Kabila felt her life would be better. But in a war-ravaged nation where poverty and superstitions are plenty, her stepfamily saw her as a curse: another mouth to feed, another body to clothe.
HOW TO HELP
To help children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, contact:
UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, at www.unicef.org/
emerg/DRC/index.html.
Save the Children, whose office in Britain coordinates relief in Congo, at www.savethe
children.org.uk.
So her family branded the 11-year-old girl a witch. They starved her. They beat her. And when Aline's half-brother fell deathly ill, they said she had cast a spell on him.
That's when they decided to get rid of the demons they thought were inside her. Her step-uncle poured acid over her head, face and right arm. He almost killed her.
Across the Democratic Republic of Congo, thousands of girls and boys, as young as 4, are accused by their families of practicing witchcraft. They are abused, abandoned, and in most cases, scarred for life. It's the latest addition to a long list of atrocities committed against children during this 5-year-old civil war.
"They tried to make me swallow the acid," said Aline, now 13. She is soft-voiced and so shy she won't look you in the eyes. Moments later, she added: "I'm not a witch."
In a society where people still believe that evil spirits bring misfortune, children are easy to blame for lost jobs, failed crops and other economic and personal problems. But two factors are contributing to the growth in the problem: the disruption of traditional family life caused by the ongoing war and the surge in revivalist churches whose preachers rail against Satan and witches as the cause of all woes.
Families "can't pay for tuitions or medicines," said Sister Natalina, a Catholic nun from Italy who runs Eckabana House, a shelter for accused child witches in the eastern town of Bukavu. "So they have to look for a way to escape their responsibility and to find a justification for their predicament."
In some cases, she added, children have been branded witches simply for playfully talking to a strip of wood or for having bad dreams.
There is no tally of the number of accused child witches. The United Nations Children's Fund estimates that at least 60 percent of the children in its shelters in the capital, Kinshasa, are accused witches.
"Nearly everywhere in the country, you'll find children accused of witchcraft," said Trish Hiddleston, a UNICEF child-protection officer. "It's growing more and faster in some areas, especially urban ones."
The majority of cases rise from broken families where the mother or father remarries and takes their child into a new family setting, aid workers say.
Once accused, the children often endure painful exorcisms by fiery revivalist preachers who force them to swallow gasoline, bitter herbs or small fish to force them to vomit out evil spirits. Or they are forced from their homes onto the streets, where they are exploited, raped, or killed.
The lucky ones find their way to shelters, though some are so psychologically battered that they believe they possess magical powers. Sister Natalina recalled one case where a child said he was so powerful he could eat people.
"It makes them feel important because they are rejected so much," said the nun.
Baffled by rejection
Many accused child witches struggle to explain why relatives who they thought loved them ended up discarding them.
"Maybe I was too mischievous," said Bibishe Okenge, 15, a girl with sapling-sized arms and big round eyes welling up with tears.
Bibishe's father abandoned her. When her mother died in 1999 of tuberculosis, she went to live with her siblings. In June, one of her sisters caught typhoid and checked into the hospital. There, a revivalist preacher making the rounds prayed for her recovery.
Then he declared: "Your sister is coming after you."
The words of the preacher were enough to poison Bibishe's relatives against her. They convened a meeting of the entire extended family.
"The whole family asked me to accept that I was a witch," Bibishe said.
"I kept refusing. I was asked: 'Who is my witchcraft teacher?' "
That night, she said, she was beaten and forced to sleep in the living room. Her sisters locked their bedroom doors. Four days later, they kicked her out of the house. She went to stay at a neighbor's. Then her hospitalized sister died. The nervous neighbor kicked Bibishe out.
After a few days on Bukavu's muddy streets, she arrived on the doorsteps of Eckabana House.
That was four months ago. Not a single relative has tried to trace her. Of all her suffering, that hurts the most.
"They never came here to look for me," said Bibishe, crumbling into tears.
Earlier this month, the country's new transitional government vowed to tackle the plight of alleged child witches.
In Bukavu, Jean Muvishemba, the town's top child-protection police officer, said four people have been arrested so far this year on charges of abusing children accused of witchcraft. Thirty accused child witches have been taken away from their families and placed in shelters.
But this is just the tip of the problem, he said. Most cases are never reported. "The fact that they happen in the family means no one else can see it happening," Muvishemba said.
Aline Kabila's step-uncle never spent a day in jail. Before he could force her to drink the acid, neighbors called the police. They took her to the hospital to treat her wounds. While she was there, her half-brother died.
Aline's mother visited her. She wanted to bring her daughter home. But her stepfather threatened to kill Aline if she returned. So she joined the ranks of Bukavu's street kids until a caring woman brought her to Eckabana House.
Today, Aline is attending school and learning how to sew clothes. Once, the social workers tried to arrange a visit with her stepfamily. When Aline arrived, her mother wasn't there. Her step-aunt greeted her at the door.
"We didn't think you'd recover," Aline recalled her saying. "We thought you were dead."
Then she told the social workers to take Aline back to the shelter.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/575178.stm
Congo Witch-hunt's Child Victims
Congolese children are being accused of witchcraft and made scapegoats for the country's many ills. Jeremy Vine reports from Kinshasa on the gruesome business of exorcism.
There is something wrong with the maize grinder in the Mahonda household. Pandi, a father of two, drags the rusted motor out of his home to work on it for the umpteenth time this week.
After five minutes, having got nowhere with his screwdrivers and hammers, he shrugs and gives up.
"This grinder will simply not work," he says - bad news for Pandi and his partner, Kalumbu. Kinshasa is not the kind of place where helpful ironmongers stay open late to fix rusted motors.
We had a girl here who vomited a large prawn. When it came out, she was at peace
Prophet Onokoko
But the continuing problems with the grinder are also potentially devastating news for their two sons. Ikomba, 8, and Luwuabisa, 10, have already been identified as the cause of the problems this poor village household is experiencing.
Their mother sums up what has gone wrong.
"First the icebox in the kitchen broke, then I was ill. I just kept being sick. No doctor could tell me what the matter was.
"Then the grinder broke down, and I had an accident in the car. Also, money went missing from the home. That was when I realised."
Realised - realised what, precisely?
"Realised that Ikomba and Luwuabisa are witches."
It is no more precise than that. Kalumbu completes the sentence with the two boys sitting either side of her, not aware of how much trouble they may be in.
Bad times
More than 14,000 children have been thrown out of their homes
This story is being repeated again and again in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the moment. The country has been badly scarred by war - first by the rebel uprising which ousted the corrupt and tyrannical President Mobutu in 1997, then by a second rebel move which is now threatening his successor, President Laurent Kabila.
He was Congo's best hope for democracy, but has not yet held an election and is suspected of pocketing state money. To call the economy a basket case does not do even half its problems justice.
People are superstitious here. They want explanations when things go wrong.
Because of the increasing hardship many children end up living with members of their extended family, and a phenomenon which experts say is unique to Congo is developing. Children are being accused of sorcery and chucked onto the streets.
The unlucky ones are murdered by their own family members before they escape. Which is why Ikomba and Luwuabisa are in such danger. For now, their parents are not completely certain of their diagnosis.
'Exorcism'
So they take them to a sect to find the real truth. It is there that the story starts to get really frightening.
Prophet Onokoko has drawn more than 200 children to his sect
The sect - run by a free-thinking Congolese Bible teacher called Prophet Onokoko - has 230 children on its books. All are accused of witchcraft.
Many have been thrown out of their family homes. All will have to undergo some kind of ritual exorcism to expunge the evil spirits.
In a small room, members of the sect crowd round the two terrified Mahonda boys, praying. Eyes closed, with an air of deep concentration, Prophet Onokoko joins in with chosen words.
"Oui!" someone shouts suddenly - confirmation, it is said, that the boys are witches (or as they call them here, enfants dits sorciers).
The Prophet's eyes open and light up. He shakes Ikomba and Luwuabisa by the hand. "Yes, yes," he grins. "It is confirmed."
'Vomit up the devil'
The procedure is simple, Prophet Onokoko explains. The boys will be made to vomit up the devil. He produces other "devils" that have been sicked up by young children: a whole prawn, a shell in the shape of a horn, and even - kept in a blue bucket which he lifts with a flourish - two barbel fish.
Angella: "They wanted to kill me"
"These came out of the mouths of children who had spirits," he tells us. "We had a girl here who vomited a large prawn. When it came out, she was at peace."
The we meet the girl, Angella, who is busy hanging washing on a line. She says she is 10 years old. Then she tells how she was treated when her parents decided their bad luck was being caused by her sorcery.
"They wanted to kill me. They wanted to throw me into a big river. They put me in a sack, ready to do it. When I escaped, they gave me shocks with an eletrical power flex."
More than 14,000 children in Kinshasa are said to have been thrown out of their homes accused of witchcraft. It is tempting to think that if Prophet Onokoko manages to remove the stigma from some of them so they can return to their families, his sect is worth its weight in gold.
Abuse
A girl falls in a trance following an "exorcism"
Not so, says Save The Children. The organisation's representative here, Mahimbo Mdoe, has researched the world of enfants dit sorciers and is extremely worried by the work of the exorcism sects, and not least Prophet Onokoko's.
"As far as we're concerned, what's going in that organisation is purely and simply child abuse," he says.
"Children are made to vormit up things that have been inserted into them unnaturally.
"Two eyewitnesses have told us of objects like bars of soap being inserted into the anuses of children. It all shows just how vulnerable children in Kinshasa are, if they get thrown out their families accused of being child witches."
Bloated stomach
The Prophet denied all of this, but he was happy enough showing his Polaroid photos of items he claimed to have forced children to vomit up - and one photograph in particular was distressing to see.
A boy with a massively bloated stomach grinned at the camera. But a part of the picture, just over his right leg, had not come out. There was a white flash over his shin.
"The white is there because the spirit of the demon was inside his leg," said the Prophet.
"He had to be given several exorcisms. Now, he is fine."
Quite what "several exorcisms" would do to a boy who could not have been more than 12 is anyone's guess, but the charity thought they knew - his insides were so badly disrupted, they believed, that he died.
The "demon" in his leg was nothing more than a fault when the photo was developed.
We stood looking at that picture for a while, wondering when the suffering of Congo's children would ever end.
Children Tortured In Congo Witch Hunt
BUKAVU, Democratic Republic of Congo -- After her mother married for a second time, Aline Kabila felt her life would be better. But in a war-ravaged nation where poverty and superstitions are plenty, her stepfamily saw her as a curse: another mouth to feed, another body to clothe.
HOW TO HELP
To help children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, contact:
UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, at www.unicef.org/
emerg/DRC/index.html.
Save the Children, whose office in Britain coordinates relief in Congo, at www.savethe
children.org.uk.
So her family branded the 11-year-old girl a witch. They starved her. They beat her. And when Aline's half-brother fell deathly ill, they said she had cast a spell on him.
That's when they decided to get rid of the demons they thought were inside her. Her step-uncle poured acid over her head, face and right arm. He almost killed her.
Across the Democratic Republic of Congo, thousands of girls and boys, as young as 4, are accused by their families of practicing witchcraft. They are abused, abandoned, and in most cases, scarred for life. It's the latest addition to a long list of atrocities committed against children during this 5-year-old civil war.
"They tried to make me swallow the acid," said Aline, now 13. She is soft-voiced and so shy she won't look you in the eyes. Moments later, she added: "I'm not a witch."
In a society where people still believe that evil spirits bring misfortune, children are easy to blame for lost jobs, failed crops and other economic and personal problems. But two factors are contributing to the growth in the problem: the disruption of traditional family life caused by the ongoing war and the surge in revivalist churches whose preachers rail against Satan and witches as the cause of all woes.
Families "can't pay for tuitions or medicines," said Sister Natalina, a Catholic nun from Italy who runs Eckabana House, a shelter for accused child witches in the eastern town of Bukavu. "So they have to look for a way to escape their responsibility and to find a justification for their predicament."
In some cases, she added, children have been branded witches simply for playfully talking to a strip of wood or for having bad dreams.
There is no tally of the number of accused child witches. The United Nations Children's Fund estimates that at least 60 percent of the children in its shelters in the capital, Kinshasa, are accused witches.
"Nearly everywhere in the country, you'll find children accused of witchcraft," said Trish Hiddleston, a UNICEF child-protection officer. "It's growing more and faster in some areas, especially urban ones."
The majority of cases rise from broken families where the mother or father remarries and takes their child into a new family setting, aid workers say.
Once accused, the children often endure painful exorcisms by fiery revivalist preachers who force them to swallow gasoline, bitter herbs or small fish to force them to vomit out evil spirits. Or they are forced from their homes onto the streets, where they are exploited, raped, or killed.
The lucky ones find their way to shelters, though some are so psychologically battered that they believe they possess magical powers. Sister Natalina recalled one case where a child said he was so powerful he could eat people.
"It makes them feel important because they are rejected so much," said the nun.
Baffled by rejection
Many accused child witches struggle to explain why relatives who they thought loved them ended up discarding them.
"Maybe I was too mischievous," said Bibishe Okenge, 15, a girl with sapling-sized arms and big round eyes welling up with tears.
Bibishe's father abandoned her. When her mother died in 1999 of tuberculosis, she went to live with her siblings. In June, one of her sisters caught typhoid and checked into the hospital. There, a revivalist preacher making the rounds prayed for her recovery.
Then he declared: "Your sister is coming after you."
The words of the preacher were enough to poison Bibishe's relatives against her. They convened a meeting of the entire extended family.
"The whole family asked me to accept that I was a witch," Bibishe said.
"I kept refusing. I was asked: 'Who is my witchcraft teacher?' "
That night, she said, she was beaten and forced to sleep in the living room. Her sisters locked their bedroom doors. Four days later, they kicked her out of the house. She went to stay at a neighbor's. Then her hospitalized sister died. The nervous neighbor kicked Bibishe out.
After a few days on Bukavu's muddy streets, she arrived on the doorsteps of Eckabana House.
That was four months ago. Not a single relative has tried to trace her. Of all her suffering, that hurts the most.
"They never came here to look for me," said Bibishe, crumbling into tears.
Earlier this month, the country's new transitional government vowed to tackle the plight of alleged child witches.
In Bukavu, Jean Muvishemba, the town's top child-protection police officer, said four people have been arrested so far this year on charges of abusing children accused of witchcraft. Thirty accused child witches have been taken away from their families and placed in shelters.
But this is just the tip of the problem, he said. Most cases are never reported. "The fact that they happen in the family means no one else can see it happening," Muvishemba said.
Aline Kabila's step-uncle never spent a day in jail. Before he could force her to drink the acid, neighbors called the police. They took her to the hospital to treat her wounds. While she was there, her half-brother died.
Aline's mother visited her. She wanted to bring her daughter home. But her stepfather threatened to kill Aline if she returned. So she joined the ranks of Bukavu's street kids until a caring woman brought her to Eckabana House.
Today, Aline is attending school and learning how to sew clothes. Once, the social workers tried to arrange a visit with her stepfamily. When Aline arrived, her mother wasn't there. Her step-aunt greeted her at the door.
"We didn't think you'd recover," Aline recalled her saying. "We thought you were dead."
Then she told the social workers to take Aline back to the shelter.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/575178.stm
Congo Witch-hunt's Child Victims
Congolese children are being accused of witchcraft and made scapegoats for the country's many ills. Jeremy Vine reports from Kinshasa on the gruesome business of exorcism.
There is something wrong with the maize grinder in the Mahonda household. Pandi, a father of two, drags the rusted motor out of his home to work on it for the umpteenth time this week.
After five minutes, having got nowhere with his screwdrivers and hammers, he shrugs and gives up.
"This grinder will simply not work," he says - bad news for Pandi and his partner, Kalumbu. Kinshasa is not the kind of place where helpful ironmongers stay open late to fix rusted motors.
We had a girl here who vomited a large prawn. When it came out, she was at peace
Prophet Onokoko
But the continuing problems with the grinder are also potentially devastating news for their two sons. Ikomba, 8, and Luwuabisa, 10, have already been identified as the cause of the problems this poor village household is experiencing.
Their mother sums up what has gone wrong.
"First the icebox in the kitchen broke, then I was ill. I just kept being sick. No doctor could tell me what the matter was.
"Then the grinder broke down, and I had an accident in the car. Also, money went missing from the home. That was when I realised."
Realised - realised what, precisely?
"Realised that Ikomba and Luwuabisa are witches."
It is no more precise than that. Kalumbu completes the sentence with the two boys sitting either side of her, not aware of how much trouble they may be in.
Bad times
More than 14,000 children have been thrown out of their homes
This story is being repeated again and again in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the moment. The country has been badly scarred by war - first by the rebel uprising which ousted the corrupt and tyrannical President Mobutu in 1997, then by a second rebel move which is now threatening his successor, President Laurent Kabila.
He was Congo's best hope for democracy, but has not yet held an election and is suspected of pocketing state money. To call the economy a basket case does not do even half its problems justice.
People are superstitious here. They want explanations when things go wrong.
Because of the increasing hardship many children end up living with members of their extended family, and a phenomenon which experts say is unique to Congo is developing. Children are being accused of sorcery and chucked onto the streets.
The unlucky ones are murdered by their own family members before they escape. Which is why Ikomba and Luwuabisa are in such danger. For now, their parents are not completely certain of their diagnosis.
'Exorcism'
So they take them to a sect to find the real truth. It is there that the story starts to get really frightening.
Prophet Onokoko has drawn more than 200 children to his sect
The sect - run by a free-thinking Congolese Bible teacher called Prophet Onokoko - has 230 children on its books. All are accused of witchcraft.
Many have been thrown out of their family homes. All will have to undergo some kind of ritual exorcism to expunge the evil spirits.
In a small room, members of the sect crowd round the two terrified Mahonda boys, praying. Eyes closed, with an air of deep concentration, Prophet Onokoko joins in with chosen words.
"Oui!" someone shouts suddenly - confirmation, it is said, that the boys are witches (or as they call them here, enfants dits sorciers).
The Prophet's eyes open and light up. He shakes Ikomba and Luwuabisa by the hand. "Yes, yes," he grins. "It is confirmed."
'Vomit up the devil'
The procedure is simple, Prophet Onokoko explains. The boys will be made to vomit up the devil. He produces other "devils" that have been sicked up by young children: a whole prawn, a shell in the shape of a horn, and even - kept in a blue bucket which he lifts with a flourish - two barbel fish.
Angella: "They wanted to kill me"
"These came out of the mouths of children who had spirits," he tells us. "We had a girl here who vomited a large prawn. When it came out, she was at peace."
The we meet the girl, Angella, who is busy hanging washing on a line. She says she is 10 years old. Then she tells how she was treated when her parents decided their bad luck was being caused by her sorcery.
"They wanted to kill me. They wanted to throw me into a big river. They put me in a sack, ready to do it. When I escaped, they gave me shocks with an eletrical power flex."
More than 14,000 children in Kinshasa are said to have been thrown out of their homes accused of witchcraft. It is tempting to think that if Prophet Onokoko manages to remove the stigma from some of them so they can return to their families, his sect is worth its weight in gold.
Abuse
A girl falls in a trance following an "exorcism"
Not so, says Save The Children. The organisation's representative here, Mahimbo Mdoe, has researched the world of enfants dit sorciers and is extremely worried by the work of the exorcism sects, and not least Prophet Onokoko's.
"As far as we're concerned, what's going in that organisation is purely and simply child abuse," he says.
"Children are made to vormit up things that have been inserted into them unnaturally.
"Two eyewitnesses have told us of objects like bars of soap being inserted into the anuses of children. It all shows just how vulnerable children in Kinshasa are, if they get thrown out their families accused of being child witches."
Bloated stomach
The Prophet denied all of this, but he was happy enough showing his Polaroid photos of items he claimed to have forced children to vomit up - and one photograph in particular was distressing to see.
A boy with a massively bloated stomach grinned at the camera. But a part of the picture, just over his right leg, had not come out. There was a white flash over his shin.
"The white is there because the spirit of the demon was inside his leg," said the Prophet.
"He had to be given several exorcisms. Now, he is fine."
Quite what "several exorcisms" would do to a boy who could not have been more than 12 is anyone's guess, but the charity thought they knew - his insides were so badly disrupted, they believed, that he died.
The "demon" in his leg was nothing more than a fault when the photo was developed.
We stood looking at that picture for a while, wondering when the suffering of Congo's children would ever end.