Ritual killings challenged

2007-02-28 16:01

Libreville - After long turning a blind eye to ritual crimes within its borders, Gabon has come under pressure to drag the morbid practice out of the shadows and do away with it for good.

And one of the main drivers is a bereaved father, who launched his battle after the mutilated bodies of his 12-year-old son and a friend washed up on a Libreville beach on March 2 2005.

Ritual "kidnappings, confinements, mutilations, assassinations and desecrations of graves are commonplace in our country," said Jean-Elvis Ebang Ondo, who heads a new Gabonese association aimed at fighting ritual crimes, whose acronym is ALCR.

The 46-year-old schoolteacher's son and the boy's friend had been dismembered, their bodies deprived of all "loose parts."

The crime was consistent with ritual killings, which usually involve the removal of the victim's body parts for a potion concocted by a witchdoctor on behalf of a client who wants, say, to win a business deal or secure good luck.

Like other devastated parents before him, Ebang Ondo immediately reported the killing to the police.

Stamp of approval

And like his predecessors, he said he quickly ran into a wall of resistance aimed at concealing the embarrassing practice and protecting the perpetrators, who are often said to be backed by people in power.

"I understood that the only way to make all of this stop was to publicly denounce these dreadful crimes and everyone who commits them," said Ebang Ondo.

Teaming up with a handful of other parents of ritual crime victims, he created ALCR, which after much difficulty finally received a stamp of approval from the interior ministry last June.

The group went public this month with an event titled "Gabonese day against ritual crimes," hosted by the US embassy here.

Upholding its pledge to challenge a gruesome taboo, ALRC and others openly and unequivocally denounced all ritual crimes that they claim remain rampant in the country.

There are no official statistics on ritual crimes in Gabon, but Ondo Ebang estimates that "several dozen" such misdeeds are committed each year in this small west African country of 1.4 million whose oil and mineral wealth have made it one of the continent's wealthier countries though many residents remain poor.

Human sacrifices

Among those backing the ALRC's effort was former Senegalese culture minister Makhily Gassama.

"In Africa, some people secretly carry out the abominable practice of human sacrifices, putting in their orders from their air-conditioned offices ... so as to promote a vulgar professional ascension," he told the conference.

"As we clamour for liberty and democracy we cannot accept that some people get away with killing another human being just so they can feel more at ease," he said.

While the practice is most prevalent in Africa, the horrors of ritual killings were brought home to Europeans when a young boy's headless, limbless torso washed up in the Thames in London in 2001. The case stunned the nation for months and triggered a massive investigation.

The boy, dubbed Adam by police and thought to be about five or six-years-old and of west African origin, was never identified.

But police said his death - his throat was cut and his head and limbs sliced off with surgical precision - bore all the signs of a ritual killing.

The US ambassador to Gabon, R Barrie Walkley, also lent his weight to ALRC's effort, lamenting that ritual "executioners ... are still on the loose."

"It is vital that the government takes the legal measures needed to severely punish the perpetrators and the backers of these crimes," he insisted at the conference.

- AFP