where are all the missing children?

Uganda has a trafficking problem.

August 2008: Uganda: Children in a trafficker's paradise

Some of the child trafficking is blamed on the Lord's Resistance Army.

Problems resulting from the political marginalisation of northern Uganda led to the creation of the Lords Resistance Movement (LRM), a rebel self-proclaimed Christian guerrilla army. The LRA is accused of widespread human rights violations, including mutilation, torture, rape, the abduction of civilians, the use of child soldiers and a number of massacres. In fact, according to UNICEF, in 2006 alone 20,000 children were abducted.
Ruth Visick Evans, Director, Oasis Uganda, an NGO, says, "The problem of human trafficking is rampant in eastern and central regions where many children are taken to the border and smuggled easily into neighbouring Kenya for forced labour and prostitution."
Victoria Nafula, a senior immigration officer in Kampala agrees and reveals that at least 300 children are shipped out everyday for as little as $130 per child....While LRA activities largely throw light on child abductions, young women are also at risk - being lured to the United Arab Emirates, where they end up as sex slaves. Con men also come disguised as pastors and convince gullible audiences of how they can send their children to "paradise".

Three hundred children per day.

Probably, we guess, the LRA could not manage to hide out in the jungle if it kidnapped 300 children per day. Probably, we guess, some other rings are involved in the child trafficking.

In The Western Bloody Hand of Genocide in Africa, we read that that the LRA is blamed for some things done by others.

Western regimes and their genocidal puppets in Africa always creates a slam-dog to blame for their atrocities. This has been the Case in Uganda with the Lords resistance Army.
Joseph Kony’s Lords resistance Army has not killed more than a thousand people for the last Seventeen years. However the American and British trained Uganda Army (UPDF) has killed in Somalia,Uganda,Sudan,Rwanda,DR Congo and Central Africa Republic 5 million Africans. This is a fact and not some silly or malicious accusations. i.e.there was a time when more than 1000 people where dying in Western sponsored concentration camps in Northern Uganda. This went on for (work-out the maths) more than 6years.
In spite of the Lords resistance Army’s Christian fundamentalism, there’s no evidence of mass graves or masses of people with lips and ears chopped off nor is this the case with the Al-Shabab, Somali Mujahadeens.

What explanation has been given for the failure to stop the LRA?

The failure to tackle the LRA is blamed by regional governments on the impossibility of policing remote jungle areas. Officials in southern Sudan accuse the northern leadership in Khartoum of backing Mr Kony in order to destabilise their southern flank. Some opposition figures in Uganda have questioned the commitment of President Yoweri Museveni to ending the LRA's activities – accusing him of using the threat of the militia as cover for internal repression.

"Joseph Kony, leader of the LRA, surrounded by his officers. Photograph: Reuters/STR"

Well, it's not that he's so hard to find, apparently. It's that he's a tough negotiator. Even after killing all those people. The various authorities responsible for stopping the LRA say their hands are tied, blah blah blah.

According to the author at freeuganda.wordpress.com:

Yoweri Museveni is a western client and Omar Bashir a Chinese client-The likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton are the ones that have planned,armed and sponsored the likes of Paul Kagame to commit genocide.
According to top secret intelligence documents that we have obtained, Uganda armed the invasion of Rwanda for an ambitious plan of a “regional war of liberation” which aimed to unite 7 African countries under the leadership of President Yoweri K. Museveni. Reunited, these countries would form a regional showcase called “Great Unified Region; United Great Region” and to have a “Red Army Reserve, of 2,000,000 men and willing to subject the rest of the Saharan Africa to war and terror. Museveni intended to act with the support of the United Kingdom and the United States, where they hoped to further address the influence of emerging powers like China and India and impose an Anglo-Saxon political, economic and military imperialistic shadow on the African continent.

Alison Des Forges was Senior Advisor at the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch knew about Ugandan soldiers training child soldiers and committing atrocities. Not the LRA, but Ugandan soldiers.

Des Forges was killed in the same February 2009 Buffalo plane crash that killed Beverly Eckert, a 911 widow.  (You can read more about Beverly Eckert here.)

Alison Des Forges

"Des Forges was a principal witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, held in Arusha, Tanzania. "She wasn't afraid of anybody," said Thompson. A senior adviser for the Africa division of Human Rights Watch for nearly two decades, Des Forges had been returning home from Europe when she was killed in the crash. She had been briefing diplomats on the situation in Rwanda and Africa's Great Lakes region."

Is the LRA awful? No doubt. Blaming the LRA for every atrocity is another one of those half-truths.

We also read reports of ritual sacrifice in Uganda, February 2010.

Kampala — ON January 29, The New Vision published an article highlighting an increase in the practice of human sacrifice in Uganda. The statistics provided put the figure at 29 registered cases; this is obviously an understatement of the reality, given the fact that 123 persons are recorded missing, 90 of whom are children.

Thousands of children go missing every year and not much effort is made to trace them. Sadly, many of them become forgotten cases. The fear though is that many of these innocent children are being trafficked internally and internationally, while others suffer the fate of what is termed as 'human sacrifice'.

Are 'witch doctors' to blame?

The escalation of human sacrifice has raised a lot of concern not only among Ugandans, but also on a global scale. The blame for this practice has been solely put on these so-called 'witchdoctors' and may be rightly so.

However, the narrow perspective with which this matter is being handled poses a significant problem; the danger of failing to recognise the possibility of the existence of a much more organised practice of organ trafficking that may have taken root in Uganda.

Last year, the Police paraded before the media a group of men arrested for organ trafficking. They even disclosed the prices for which these vital human organs are being sold. Unfortunately, not much attention was given to this matter.

In another report, September 2009, we learn that some international organ trafficking rings may make the murders look like traditional ritualistic practices.

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.

Gilbert Deya lives and works in the UK, despite being ordered extradited to Kenya three years ago for child trafficking.

A self-styled archbishop who claimed he could give infertile couples 'miracle babies' is still living and working in the UK despite his extradition to Kenya being ordered three years ago. The Home Office has said it is still considering representations from Gilbert Deya's solicitors that sending him to Kenya would breach his human rights. His appeal against extradition failed in October 2008 and he was refused leave to appeal to the House of Lords.
Mr Deya is wanted on child abduction charges in Kenya where the government alleges he stole five children between 1999 and 2004. And it was in 2004 that BBC Radio 4's investigative programme, Face the Facts, first looked into Gilbert Deya and the so-called miracle babies. The programme heard how women attending Gilbert Deya's church services in Peckham, South London were told they would be having babies even though, in some cases, doctors had told them they were not pregnant or they were infertile.
'Beyond human imagination'
The babies were always delivered in Kenya, in backstreet clinics away from prying eyes where poor local mothers were sometimes willing to give up a child they could not afford to feed. Interviewed for Face the Facts in 2004 and asked how he explained the births of children with DNA different to that of their alleged parents, Gilbert Deya said: "The miracle babies which are happening in our ministry are beyond human imagination". "It is not something I can say I can explain because they are of God and things of God can not be explained by a human being".

...Financial accounts for his charity, Gilbert Deya Ministries, have not been filed with the Charity Commission and are overdue. But those for the year ending December 2007 show an income of over £1.1m, almost all of it through donations. Gilbert Deya's wife Mary has served a jail sentence for child abduction in Kenya. She's now facing fresh charges. But almost a year and a half after her husband's appeal against extradition to Kenya failed, he's still on UK soil, much to the dismay of the Tottenham MP, David Lammy, whose constituents were caught up in the 'miracle baby' case.

Maybe he has a protector in the UK? You can read all about the Gilbert Deya Ministries here.

One of the babies, Baby C, was forcibly snatched from a loving home by social workers in Haringey. Baby P also lived in Haringey during the time he was tortured and murdered.

Baby P died of horrific injuries after prolonged abuse, despite the fact he was on Haringey's at-risk register.

...Child C, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, has been known to Haringey's social services staff for several years. He was taken from his natural mother in Kenya soon after he was born, smuggled into Britain and, it is alleged, trafficked to a wealthy couple desperate for a child.
When the police found out, he was placed with foster carers. He went through a succession of them before he found a stable home with Jamila. She is a middle-aged woman with a grown- up son who lives alone in her own home in north London. She has a spacious, pleasant house surrounded by plants she carefully tends. 

Reportedly, a wealthy Nigerian couple went to Kenya and got Baby C, a "miracle baby," from Gilbert Deya Ministries.

 ...When Child C was removed from the Nigerian couple after DNA tests confirmed he was not related to either of them, he was placed in the care of Haringey council's children's department. "When he came to me he had a burn on his arm," Jamila said. "I asked the social worker what had happened, but she just said, 'I don't know'. She wasn't interested." 

The social workers used the first opportunity to remove the child from a happy home. They literally snatched him from the yard in a terrifying manner.

At this point in her story she became distressed. "I still can't believe what they did," she said. "In the morning my son took him for a trip on the London Eye and in the afternoon he was out there" - she gestured through the window to a raised courtyard - "playing on his truck. Suddenly, the social worker turned up with her manager. She just lifted him bodily out of his truck and ran off with him. He started screaming 'Mama! Mama!' and I ran after him, but the manager physically held me back. The children he was playing with were terrified. It was a horrible scene. Awful."
Jamila said she wrote to Sharon Shoesmith to protest that the manner of C's removal contradicted the instructions of the judge. "I got a petition of over 200 names from people round here who were shocked at what had happened. It didn't do any good. Sharon Shoesmith wrote back to say he was happy with his adoptive parents and that was the end of it."
Jamila has not seen the boy since that day. But she heard, through contacts in Haringey, that he was not happy and neither were his new parents. It recently emerged that his adoptive mother found him difficult to manage and left him in the care of a social worker. "He is ruining my marriage," she complained.
Haringey confirmed the police were investigating allegations of abuse, but a spokesman refused to say whether Child C was still with his adoptive parents.

Sharon Shoesmith lost her job over the horrific abuse and murder of Baby P.

 

Baby P: Computer-generated images of the child's injuries that were used in the trial. Photo: PA

"Miss Shoesmith has insisted that the north London council did nothing wrong in its handling of the case, in which a 17-month-old boy died after suffering months of abuse and neglect in his home despite being visited 60 times by its social workers." 

Baby P case: Council chief under pressure to quit 'concerning' double role, 11/12/08

Gilbert Deya continues to live and work in the UK.

Where are all the children?