Murder Campaign Driving Gay Men Out Of Iraq

October 09, 2009

Although it is not common knowledge to the average reader, Iraq is, and has been for a very long time, an extremely homophobic society.  Gay men who live there with their sexual orientation do so at great risk, and are in near constant fear of being tortured or murdered because of their sexual preference.

Historically, the idea of making or allowing their same-sex preference to be publicly known has typically been out of the question, and still is.  But in the past year or so, things have gotten much worse for outing gay men in Iraq, regardless of whether the disclosure was of their own doing or otherwise.  There has been a marked increase in media condemnation of gays, in which conservative Iraqis commonly refer to gay men as the third sex, and they are now being routinely condemned in mosques.  The growing problem, however, goes far beyond mere condemnation for what many homophobes there call unnatural sexual intercourse.  An unparalleled campaign of organized murder seems to have taken hold there, and is not showing any signs of diminishing according to a recent report put out by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Although murders of gay men have occurred in Iraq in the past, now they are being gunned down in the streets by a variety of militia, mercenaries, or other armed soldier types, and videos are being made of the murders which are then circulated widely throughout the country via mobile phones and other methods.  In the past, such murders did not include the making of videos, and people typically did not talk about them.  Now, the murderous campaign is intended to literally put the fear of death into gay men, and it has been very successful in that regard.

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Albinos Being Murdered in Tanzania for Body Parts

September 22, 2009

For quite some time now, members of the albino population in the East African nation of Tanzania have been being brutally murdered, literally slaughtered, by people who believe that potions and charms made from their body parts, usually created by witch doctors, will make them wealthy and cause their lives to be filled with good luck.  Albinism is a genetic condition that causes the absence of pigmentation to a person's hair, skin, and eyes.  In many parts of Africa, albinos are commonly spurned and singled out because of their condition, often because people believe their condition was caused by a curse having been placed on them by an enemy.  Many of the unfortunate victims have been children, who have been left to die after having their arms and legs crudely cut off, usually with a machete or similar cutting device.  It is a common practice for witch doctors to grind the victim's bones, one of the ingredients of the potions they sell as good luck charms for big bucks.

"They are cutting us up like chickens," one albino said.  "Our biggest fear now is the fear of living.  If you leave work at night as an albino you are unsure of reaching home safely.  When you sleep, you are unsure of waking …."

One sad case involved that of 13-year-old Elizabeth Hussein, who left her home to walk to the village to watch a film about Jesus.  However, she never made it home.  After watching the film, she was attacked along her route by a mob, wielding machetes, who literally hacked her to pieces.

Since 2007, fifty-three known albino children and adults have been murdered in a manner similar to that of Elizabeth Hussein, so that their murderers can obtain money, often thousands of dollars, for their body parts.  In one instance, a man was accused of attempting to sell his 24-year-old wife to a Congolese businessman for $2,000, and in another instance a woman was accused of selling her albino baby daughter to a group of men who butchered her and drank her blood.

"My experience working with victims suggests that the perpetrators are greedy people who want to get rich quick," said a volunteer who works with a British charity.  "In rural areas, people can sacrifice their own child.  In urban areas, educated and rich people will look for somebody else's child."

Because the Tanzanian government seems to be doing very little to stop the senseless slaughter of innocent people for what most westerners would consider ridiculous nonsense, thousands of Tanzanian albino citizens are literally living in a state of "fear and abandonment," according to Peter Ash, the founder of the British Columbia non-profit group, Under the Same Sun, which is dedicated to help bring the slaughter of albinos in Tanzania and other African nations to an end.

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China's Death-mobile Now Out in the Open

September 09, 2009

It has never been a secret that China executes approximately four times as many people as the rest of the world for committing crimes against the state, and it has never been a secret that China has regularly carried out its executions in public by firing squad or by a single bullet to the head.  In the past, as well as now, a Chinese prisoner's arms have been typically shackled behind them, and their executioner forces them to kneel down. Afterward the executioner, usually a soldier or police officer, will ask the prisoner to open his mouth so that the bullet will pass through the mouth and leave the prisoner's face intact.  The gunman then fires the bullet into the back of the condemned prisoner's head or neck.  The criminal's family usually has to pay the state for the bullet used to carry out the execution for any number of capital crimes including murder, drug trafficking, rape, pimping, publishing pornography, graft, reselling value-added tax receipts and so forth, to name only a few of the crimes on China's books that qualify a convicted person for execution.  China's statistics regarding its death penalty are a state secret, but it is known that executions are often carried out immediately following sentencing, with the convict taken to a pre-selected location away from the prison where he or she has been held due to the fact that it is considered inhumane to shoot a convict inside the prison because the other prisoners would hear the gunshot.

However, that is all changing now.  Like the portable bookmobile of years past in the U.S., or the blood donor buses and/or health screening buses that are sometimes still used here, the Chinese believe they may have improved a bit on the concept of executing its criminals by coming out with the death-mobile, a fancy vehicle that resembles a tour bus but which is used as a mobile execution chamber where convicts are put to death by lethal injection.  As they move from town-to-town, the death vehicles in China are considered a more civilized alternative to the firing squad or death by gunshot to the back of the head.  China's experts say that death by lethal injection better "promotes human rights" because it ends the life of the condemned more quickly.  One can only imagine the feelings of the townsfolk as the death bus rolls into town on any given day to take care of business, cleanly and safely, not to mention clinically.  Amnesty International has estimated that there were 1,770 executions in China in 2005 (with some estimates by the same group that there may have been as many as 8,000 executions) as opposed to about 60 in the U.S.  Of course, China's population now exceeds 1.25 billion, and the population in the U.S. currently stands at about 307,000,000, giving one cause to wonder how, statistically or proportionately, if you will, our numbers stack up against the numbers in China with regard to percentages—if one could even obtain China's actual numbers.  Not being a number-cruncher, we won't even attempt it here.

Although most of China's executions are still carried out by gunshot, the government seems determined to eventually fully implement lethal injection as the standard method, to be carried out in the fancy death vans or buses.  Proponents for making the switch or transition say that the death buses save money for the local communities, which are often very poor, because they do not have to pay to have an execution facility constructed.  They also say that the buses ensure that the executions are carried out locally—closer to where the crime was committed—and thus act as a deterrent for others not to commit crime.

The death buses function, in some ways, much like an ambulance, but with an obvious difference—instead of trying to save lives, they take them.  There is one particular feature that an official at the bus manufacturing plant seems to think its operators like, and that is the automated bed or gurney.  Instead having to struggle with the condemned prisoner to get him into the bus, the gurney is automated and slides out of the vehicle mechanically, at an incline, with the push of a button, allowing the condemned prisoner to be more easily strapped to the temporary bed and moved by machine into the bus.

"It's too brutal to haul a person aboard," said an official at the company that manufactures the buses.  "This makes it convenient for the criminal and the guards."

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