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Shock and grief gripped residents of Kalagala village in Kayunga District in central Uganda when a 26-year-old woman allegedly drowned her three children in River Nile.

The woman, who lives a stone-throw away from River Nile, reportedly drowned the children aged six, four and three-month-old. The suspect’s mother said her daughter left with the children to an unknown place on Monday at 5:30pm, East Africa Time.

She said the suspect separated with her husband a month ago. “After peeling matooke(bananas) for supper with her, she picked her three children and went with them to an unknown place. She didn’t tell me where she was going, but I thought she was going to the neighbourhood because she looked happy,” she said.

She added that after 45 minutes, an area resident came running to her home and informed her that her daughter had thrown the children into River Nile.

“After receiving the news, we rushed to the river where we found my daughter with her clothes drenched in water. She also confirmed to us that she had thrown the children into the river.”

Charged with murder

Furious residents later arrested the suspect and handed her over to Kangulumira Police Station. Fishermen tried to search for the bodies, but only managed to retrieve one which was taken to Kayunga Hospital for a post-mortem.

 

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120 Sabiny girls circumcised in Uganda
Friday, 3rd December, 2010

Sabiny girls during the Wednesday night circumcision ritual in Bukwo district.


SOME cried. Some were confused. Others still traumatized, while many were left speechless.They looked on in disbelief as a local female surgeon tried in vain thrice, probably using a very blunt knife, to cut off a girl’s clitoris.

She then asked for another, similarly blunt knife and to make it work, applied extra force, going back and forth, the way a saw cuts into timber. The girl struggled not to show fear and to contain her trembling, which is culturally unacceptable and would have attracted scorn and ridicule from the attentive crowd.

As blood gushed from her private parts, the crowd urged the girls: “Be strong! You are almost done! Remain calm!”

People stood on hills; others climbed trees and some pitched camp on roof tops of huts to catch a glimpse of the ritual.

A white lady in the crowd was so shaken, she said later that she wished she could have saved the girl from the severe pain and embarrassment.

Once cut, the girl was pushed aside, like a slaughtered chicken, her legs put together as if to stifle the pain and another descended upon.

Yet, when Saturday Vision interviewed her, she said she was happy and excited. But her facial muscles reflected the pain buried inside her, away from society. “I am happy I have become a woman by being circumcised. I will be able to do what other cut women do. I will now be able to climb into the granary or milk cows, which I was not allowed to do till now,” Alice Chemutai said.

She had a blanket wrapped around her waist.

Eight girls cut with two knives
Then seven other girls - one by one, wrapped in dirty blankets and strewn all over a compound hosting two huts, were circumcised. The circumciser would first throw fine millet flour into their private parts to reduce friction and wetness.

She used the same knife to cut each of them. The knife was not sterilized, exposing all of them to the risk of the deadly HIV.
The cuts lasted close to 50 seconds. As the mutilated girls lay helpless, an old woman, threw millet flour over them to appease the spirits and ordered them to kneel so that the blood could pour out.

Most of the girls were barely in their early twenties but someone in the crowd said they were all married. “Girls here marry by their 15th birthdays,” he said.

A few minutes later, the girls were told to march into a hut where they would spend the next three weeks healing from the mutilation. But they did not march; they staggered.
The eight are part of over 120 girls who have been mutilated in Sebei region since the Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) season kicked off in Sebei in eastern Uganda.

UN: 303 People Raped by Militia in DRC in Four Days
Selah Hennessy | London 24 September 2010
A United Nations preliminary report on recent atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo said Friday that three different militia groups raped 303 people over the course of four days. It says the militia arrived in villages pretending that they wanted to protect the population.

The U.N. preliminary report says 235 women are known to have been raped, 52 girls, 13 men, and three boys. It says many were raped numerous times.
Rupert Colville, spokesperson for the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, says the attacks took place mostly after dark. Around 200 members of three different militia groups arrived in Walikale in eastern DRC pretending they had come to protect the population.

"They took control of a key hill in the area which was really the only place where you can communicate by telephone," he said. "So once they had that then nobody could telephone out, raise the alarm via telephone. They cut the roads and they, you know, kept it up for four full days."

The reports says no one appears to have been killed in the attacks. But homes and shops were looted and over 100 people were abducted. And Colville says the full scale of the atrocities is still unknown. Attacks are continuing, he says, and many people are still hiding in the forest because they're too scared to return home.

Colville says the rebel groups may have been trying to punish the local population because they see it as pro-government.

"It seems to be a way of subjugating the villagers into their orbit, being so brutal, so humiliating and it being projected as kind of punishment for the villagers being too close, too friendly, or too cooperative with the Congolese army," he said.

The U.N. preliminary report covered 13 villages in Walikale, a region of North Kivu province in eastern DRC.
"This was rape as punishment, rape as a weapon of war - very clearly perpetrated against the civilian population by a range of different armed groups," said Anneke van Woudenberg, from the U.S.-based international body Human Rights Watch.
The U.N. report is critical both of the Congolese army and police and of the U.N. peacekeeping force in DRC for not doing enough to protect the population of Walikale.

It says the U.N. forces had not received enough training to protect civilians and suffered from operational constraints.

Anneke van Woudenberg adds:

"Again we saw here peace keepers who did not have civilian liaison officials attached to them, who did not have the right language capabilities to talk to the local communities, who did not know what questions to ask local communities," she said. "And frankly I think after 10 years of the peacekeeping mission being in a country like Congo they should have got that right by now."

The U.N. report said three rebel groups were responsible for the rapes: the Mai-Mai Cheka group, rebels from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda and a group connected to army deserter Emmanuel Nsengiyumva. The rapes took place over four days from July 30 to August 2.

An outbreak of a mysterious disease commonly known as ‘nodding disease’, has hit Acholi Districts of Kitgum, Lamwo, and Pader forcing, several school closures in the region and sending widespread panic in northern Uganda. This rare and unexplained brain disease has affected over 1200 hundred children in the region since 2005, health workers say.






The "nodding disease" causes seizures, and affected children become physically and mentally stunted. It can in most cases lead to blindness and even death.

"Nodding disease" is not unknown to medical science, but the best-known concentration of cases had previously been reported from southern Sudan. A medical NGO in the Mundri area of western Equatoria had reported an estimated 300 cases around 2003.

Local leaders Obonyo Yokoyedo told Acholi Times that 200 children in his village of Okidi alone had the illness. "We have lost three girls... one drowned in a well during a seizure; the other two went several weeks without eating," he said.

Janet Oola, Kitgum health officer, said hundreds of children had presented symptoms of the "nodding disease" in the district since 2008. "It is an early stage of epilepsy," she added.

A likely cause of the disease is a neurological effect of the parasitic worm that causes Onchocerciasis (river blindness). Recently published medical research supports a link and doctors who have studied nodding in the field say the two are connected. Many health workers believe that such diseases are usually the likely effects of war. There is a growing number of outbreak of mysterious diseases in northern Uganda.

Prof James Tumwine of Makerere University in Kampala, who participated in a WHO-sponsored investigation into the outbreak in Sudan, described the disease as a form of epilepsy linked to onchocerciasis and that he found it "incredible" that such a large number of cases were being reported in Uganda. "The infected children need immediate treatment for seizure and Onchocerciasis."

Ugandan health ministry officials confirmed the disease had been reported in northern Uganda, but deny that the war could be its causes, they say that its cause was yet to be established. "It has spread to many villages in Kitgum, and we are working with WHO [World Health Organization] to establish the cause," Paul Kagwa, ministry spokesman said. "At the moment, it is still a mysterious disease."

A medical officer in Gulu district, who preferred anonymity, told Acholi Times that cases of nodding disease had been reported in Awere village in 2008. A health ministry team visited Gulu, Kitgum and Pader and carried out tests, but todate no report has been released as to the likely cause of the disease.

Grace Lanyero, a psychiatrist at Kitgum government hospital, said food seemed to trigger off the attacks among the children she has seen. "This is a seizure which begins when the victim begins to eat," she told Acholi Times. "The child starts nodding with uncoordinated hand movements that don't reach the mouth."

The affected children, she added, were being treated with anti-convulsive drugs and medicines to relax the muscles and control nodding.

Christine Auma, 62, cannot understand what ails her two grandchildren, who have been bedridden for three weeks. The children nod endlessly whenever food is presented to them, and cannot eat properly. "I tried all means of treatment in Kitgum government hospital, but nothing [worked]," she said. "I even tried a traditional healer who slaughtered a black goat but nothing has worked."

Evelyn Aweko from Pajule village in Pader District told Acholi Times that her 14-year-old son developed the complication in mid-2005. All attempts to treat him have failed. "He started presenting unusual behaviour; whenever food is brought for him, he nods and fails to put food into his mouth," she said.

Sometimes, he would appear to have lost his memory, start nodding and eventually fall to the ground. The boy's father, developed similar symptoms and eventually lost his sight, Aweko said.
Reference: www.acholitimes.com

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