The “massacre of the innocents”

The number of minors who are caught every year in the net of the traffickers in “human merchandise” on the dark continent is assuming frightening proportions, to the degree that it is now more profitable than the arms trade itself. The denunciation by the religious in the Mozambique

by Giovanni Ricciardi

A group of street children, welcomed to the hospitality house run by the Combonian sisters in Nampula

The blood of missionaries was necessary to uncover the tragedy of Mozambique. Doraci Julita Edinger, a 53 year old missionary of the Lutheran Evangelical Church of Brazil, who had spent six years in the country, on 21 February last suffered a fate all too unfortunately foreseeable: she was barbarously beaten to death with a hammer. Along with the sisters of the convent of Mater Dei of the Servants of Mary, she had denounced the ever more frequent cases of children and adolescents disappearing from Nampula, in the north of Mozambique. For two years in those parts, while the international press and even the non-government organizations have remained silent, a real and proper “slaughter of the innocents” is being perpetrated.
Street children are a common phenomenon in many countries of the Third World but their exploitation in this poorest corner of Africa is assuming terrifying proportions, especially since added to prostitution and juvenile slavery, there is now the international traffic of human organs. The killing of the religious has driven the missionary network in Mozambique to pull down the wall of silence which until a few weeks ago was covering the issue.
The number of minors who are caught every year in the net of the traffickers in “human merchandise” on the dark continent is assuming frightening proportions, to the degree that it is now more profitable than the arms trade itself. And Mozambique, along with many of the more poverty-stricken countries of southern Africa, is at the center of this phenomenon. Since 2002 minors have been disappearing in increasing numbers in Nampul and in the surrounding countryside. And so has the discovery of mutilated bodies lacking internal organs. The case of Sarima Iburamo is emblematic, a girl of 12 years old who disappeared on 12 October 2002, and whose small ravaged body was found on the outskirts of the city by Rufina Omar, the queen of the tribe of the Namipoco area. But the missionaries had been denouncing the disappearances and the traffic in organs for some time. Doraci Edinger had raised the alarm as early as 2001. Besides the evidence of the assassinated missionary and the consecrated Brazilian lay sister Elilde dos Santos, the religious of the Mater Dei convent have gathered much information on kidnappings, disappearances and the macabre discoveries. Father Claudio Avallone, of the Order of the Servants of Mary, says that in the period of a year around these parts, “more than 120 children have disappeared. Mostly street children who live in the market, around the cathedral and in two other places nearby. At the Christmas dinner offered as every year by the Order of Hospitalers of Saint John of God only 15 of 95 children expected turned up”. Moisés, pastor of the Evangelical Church, reports: “Last year we looked after more than 150 street children giving them food, clothes and copy books for school: since January we have only 9 to look after”.
And Father Claudio has seen many things with his own eyes. “An old man, Pastola Cocola, led me to the pits where a woman, a man and two little girls were buried, without internal organs when they were found. The bodies had been left to rot by the perpetrators of the crime before the people buried them. The people don’t tell the police because if you report finding a body you are immediately considered suspect and interrogated for days and days: almost psychological torture. Apart from the sisters I spoke to many who had seen bodies without eyes and without organs, to parents who are still hoping to find their vanished children”.
The local police dismissed these cases, attributing them to tribal practices and to the magic of local witch-doctors. Then on 13 September 2003, the archdiocese of Nampula, over the signatures of the archbishop Monsignor Tomé Makhweliha, of the rector of the inter-diocesan seminary in the city and of the religious present in the territory, sent a denunciation to the Episcopal Conference of Mozambique, which was immediately forwarded to the president of the Republic, Joaquim Chissano. A denunciation giving details of names and surnames which greatly embarrassed the country’s authorities. This led to the suggestion that the intervention of the ecclesiastical authorities was aimed at stirring up the population against the governor of the province of Mampula, who is a Muslim.

From the left, Sister Angelina Zenti, in charge of the sixty Combonians in Mozambique, Sister Juliana, prioress of the Mater Dei convent of the Servants of Mary, and Elide dos Santos talking to a girl from Nampul

The fact is that the religious of the convent of Mater Dei openly accuse Gary O’Connor, a South African of Irish origins, with his Danish wife Tanja Skitte, of running a network of traffickers who kidnap the children and keep them segregated until the moment of execution and explantation. O’Connor, known as O Branco, the “white”, as the local people call him in fear and trembling, expelled years ago from Zimbabawe, is the owner of a fazenda of three hundred hectares bordering on the convent of the Servants of Mary. Officially it is a chicken farm but according to the nuns that is simply a cover. From a private runway on O’Connor’s fazenda planes frequently take off for South Africa, the crossroads for this kind of traffic. The South African cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg are where the transplants are carried out materially to the advantage of people from Europe and the Americas who can afford to buy an organ on “commission”. In late 2003 the South African police broke up an international network of organ traffickers whose “outlet” was a private hospital in Durban, the Saint Augustin Hospital. The organ “donors” in this case, recruited in the poorest provinces of Brazil, voluntarily underwent the explantation of a kidney for sums which hovered around three thousand dollars. The organization paid their travel and keep, but from what emerges the Mozambique “market” is nearer and less costly.
Now, after the death of the Brazilian missionary, there is fear for the future of the sisters in Nampula. To the point where the permanent Council of CIRM, the Conference of male and female religious in Mozambique, published an official document on 29 February last which included the evidence given by the nuns themselves and requesting intervention from the international community. The document bore the signatures of those in charge of the nine congregations present in Mozambique.
As for O’Connor, the wheeler-dealing South African proclaims himself innocent and the victim of a plot set afoot, according to him, by “bigwigs” of the Catholic Church and the nuns to take away his land – as said, the Mater Dei convent borders the fazenda of O’Connor – and get themselves funding.
Procurator General Madeira, who on 2 February publicly denied the existence of a traffic in minors and organs, has instead declared in recent days that the traffic does exist, that it is directed by an international network and that children who were kidnapped and held prisoner have been discovered in the cities of Nacala and Nampula. And while the news spreads in the international press, especially the Portuguese, but also the Spanish and French – el Pais reported it on March 11, the very day of the carnage in Madrid, but also Le Monde and the BBC have given coverage to the matter - in Italy the larger media seem to ignore the case. The only exceptions being the investigation by Lorenzo Sani in the Resto del Carlino and the time given by the radio program Zapping to Father Benito Fusco of the Servants of Mary, who is trying to draw attention to the issue and stir up international public opinion. The campaign is beginning to produce results. The Italian Foreign Ministry is now putting pressure on the Mozambique government to clarify the situation; funds for cooperation and development projects have been frozen. “Our ambassador”, Minister Frattini declared, “has received from me personally a clear mandate to remain in constant contact and to get up-to-the minute information on the progress of the investigations, precisely because the Italian government does not wish to leave any stone unturned in the inquiry being made”. And he added: “There is no doubt that a serious and thorough investigation is required to clarify the details of this story. We have requested it insistently, through official channels, of the government of Mozambique. On an issue of such delicacy there can be no margin of doubt. Though there are those who claim that the accusations are without proof, that up until now there has been no confirmation, we, on our part, have stressed that that response is not enough for us. And we have had this stated to the procurator general of Mozambique: the organs of justice and of the police in the African country must furnish us with convincing and certain proof that all of this is not true. It is inconceivable in a case like this that the burden of proof should lie on those who made the accusations”.
A Mozambique parliamentary commission has been dispatched to Nampula in recent days to decide whether the accusations are well-founded. And the religious of Mozambique decided to call attention once again to the issue on 24 March, the day on which the CIRM invited everyone to fast so as to highlight the “slaughter of the innocents” of Mozambique and of the whole Third World, on the anniversary of the “martyrdom”, so the document of the religious puts it, of Oscar Arnulf o Romero.