About a year ago I started to get interested in current modern human sacrifice, as I swiftly grew amazed to see how prevalent (drop-dead prevalent)
and under-reported it was.
(I know, I'm still on my first computer here, the wonders of the web, et cetera, I'm sure this is all old news to
other people...But I was surprised.)
Like I say, ritual-murder-for-magic/human sacrifice is so common, I wouldn't call it news or start a thread on it, most days...Seriously, I could
link to fifty recent/current articles on it immediately, if that were necessary...maybe a dozen from right there in Uganda, or maybe not quite so
many, I haven't counted, I don't need to overpromise...
But what got me over the inactivity threshold in this here article from The
Observer is the (putative) introduction of ORGAN TRAFFICKING to the typical scenario.
The medical-organ-business would if present be a new element, it hasn't been shown to exist in these cases before (out of all the numerous articles
I've seen on this human-sacrifice modality, I recall only one unsubstantiated rumor-level allegation connecting it with the medical-organ trade, at
the moment), and I wanted to look at the possibility and discuss it with all y'all. (And actually, my first instinct would be to doubt it...But you
know, in the last little bit, there's been a lot of organ trafficking stories in the news lately (New Jersey rabbi, IDF vs. Palestinian family, poor
Iraqi male sells a kidney to pay for his wedding, just lately, all come to mind)...If I was doing trend analysis of story topics, you know, what ideas
are occupying more mass-conceptual-space, organ trafficking is UP UP UP, this summer, seems like...hmm.)
The article was written by Annie Kelly for
The Observer.
Child sacrifice and ritual murders rise in Uganda as famine
looms: Surge in deaths and kidnaps among poor linked to witch doctors and organ trafficking
When James Katana returned from a church service to his village in the Bugiri district of eastern Uganda he was told that his three-year-old
son had been taken away by strangers.
"We were looking for my child for hours, but we couldn't find him," he said. "Someone rang me and told me my son was dead and had been left in the
forest. I ran there and saw him lying in a pool of blood. His genitals had been cut off, but he was still alive." A witch-doctor is now in police
custody, accused of the abduction and attempted murder of the boy.
Despite the mutilation and terror the child experienced, police say he was one of the lucky ones. Uganda has been shocked by a surge in ritualistic
murders and human sacrifice, with police struggling to respond and public hysteria mounting at each gruesome discovery.
In 2008 more than 300 cases of murder and disappearances linked to ritual ceremonies were reported to the police with 18 cases making it to the
courts. There were also several high-profile arrests of parents and relatives accused of selling children for human sacrifice.
In January this year the Ugandan government appointed a special police taskforce on human sacrifice and announced that 2,000 offficers were to receive
specialist training in tackling child trafficking with the support of the US government. Since the taskforce was set up there have been 15 more
murders linked to human sacrifice with another 200 disappearances, mainly of children and young adults, under investigation.
"This year we have had more occurrences of people attempting to sell their children to witch-doctors as part of ritual ceremonies to guarantee wealth
and prosperity," said Moses Binoga, acting commissioner of the anti-human-sacrifice-and-trafficking taskforce.
Both police and NGOs are attributing the surge to a new wave of commercial witch doctors using mass media to market their services and demand large
sums of money to sacrifice humans and animals for people who believe blood will bring great prosperity.
"Cases of child sacrifice have always existed, mainly in the Ugandan central region, but there is a new strain of traditional healers in Uganda and
their geographical spread is mainly attributed to increased unemployment and poverty," said Elena Lomeli ... a volunteer ... "My experience working
with victims suggests that the abusers are greedy people who want to get rich quick. In rural areas, people can sacrifice their own child. In urban
areas, educated and rich people will look for somebody else's." ...
"These are not poor people paying for these rituals, they are the wealthy elite taking advantage of the desperate poor," said Binoga. "In January a
21-year-old woman was jailed for 16 months for kidnapping a child and trying to sell him to a witch-doctor for a large sum. These cases are on the
increase."
Ugandan police are increasingly linking the sudden increase in cases to organ trafficking. The anti-human-trafficking taskforce said many of the
bodies found in the past few months were missing organs such as kidneys, hearts and livers, a detail not consistent with many traditional ritualistic
practices.
In May a report released by the US State Department said Uganda had become an international hub for human trafficking and highlighted the increased
trade of children in the east of the country for their body parts. "We are investigating the possibility that some of these murders are the work of
an international organ trafficking ring who are making these murders look like human sacrifice," said Binoga.
Please visit the link provided for the complete story.
There is other material in the article worth looking at the link for, I edited a little tight.
One point in favor of the human organ trafficking theory is that a common existing well-attested set-up, where rich people pay others to procure for
them, say, human skins for magical purposes, is easily congruent with the "order me a kidney, I'm dying" scenario...there is currently and at least
for years has been an African economic and cultural network in which organ-trafficking could easily be propagated via an already-extant set of
personnel and roles.
Two points against the organ-grabbing-transplant-vultures theory occur to me. Number one, it's hot, the organs won't keep without refrigeration, how
is it easier to dump an organ-stripped body in the hedgerow (after you've pulled the kidneys out in your air-conditioned clinic) to make it look like
a human sacrifice,
instead of just "disappearing" the body altogether, in your clinic, indoors? Seems like the vanishings of people are more
logical examples of organ stealing than the recovered bodies with the (more like medical, less like ritual) missing body parts that gave rise to the
organ-transplant-stealings hypothesis in the first place.
Number two is HIV/AIDS...if I was kidney-shopping, I don't know if I would start in Uganda, exactly...I'm sure there's pros-and-cons...But also the
surgeon might be disinclined to cut into a more highly-infected population, if he could avoid it. (I knew a vascular surgeon who moved from Brazil to
Utah for just that reason, or so he told me ..."I'm good...But your hand's going to slip, scalpel through the glove, blood in the cut...Nobody
wants that.")
[edit on 6-9-2009 by nine-eyed-eel]
[edit on 6-9-2009 by nine-eyed-eel]
[edit on 6-9-2009 by nine-eyed-eel]