Tanzania bans healers
2009-01-24 14:19
Dar Es Salaam - Tanzania has revoked
the licences of all its traditional healers in a drive to stop
killings of albinos by people who reportedly use their body
parts for witchcraft, local media said on Saturday.
The move came just days after the latest murder of an albino
man in the northwestern Mwanza region, a remote area bordering
Lake Victoria where old superstitions run deep. That brought the
national death toll to at least 40 since mid-2007.
Police and albino rights groups say the killers sell body
parts including limbs, hair, skin and genitals to witch doctors
for use in rituals.
"These witch doctors are big liars. If they were genuine
healers many diseases would have been reduced," the Citizen
newspaper quoted Prime Minister Mizengo Pinda as saying in
Shinyanga, one of the worst hit areas.
"Instead, the country has
many diseases and worse, they are fanning albino killings."
Albinos lack a pigment in their eyes, skin or hair which
renders them especially vulnerable to skin cancer and burns, and
makes life particularly difficult in sun-drenched east Africa.
The Tanzanian authorities have arrested more than 90 people
in recent months - including four police officers - who are
suspected of killing albinos or of trading in their body parts.
There are thought to be more than 200 000 albinos in the
country, which has a total population of 40 million.
The
violence has also spread to neighbouring states, with at least
one albino murder each in Burundi and Kenya last year. Police in
those countries say the killings were ordered by Tanzanians.