In answer to your first question as to what the Government of Tanzania is doing, if I had to summarize I would say a lot of talk and little action. As I said, I met the Prime Minister a few times. In Tanzania there are some very good people in society and in the government who are genuinely opposed to these killings and who regard people with albinism as contributing members of society. There are also a large number of people in society who don't view it that way.
Probably the closest analogy we would have would be the time of segregation and discrimination in the southern U.S. during the civil rights movement. There were many good white people who really believed black people were equal and should not be killed and should not be discriminated against. There was another group of white people, the Ku Klux Klan and those who stood alongside them, who believed black people were non-human and that they didn't deserve the same kind of rights, and those white people would gladly burn them on a cross. And there was a third group of people who had some level of discrimination against black people but might not kill them.
If you had asked the government in those southern states at the time for their view on black people, what do you think they would have said? They would all have said that black people were equal, that they should be treated well, and that they opposed those crimes. But that wasn't stopping black people from being burned on crosses.
We have a very similar dynamic going on in Tanzania. The official position of the Government of Tanzania, including President Kikwete and Prime Minister Pinda, is that these albino killings are wrong, that they need to stop, and that albinos should not be discriminated against. If you phone up or write to any member of the government in Tanzania, that's what they'll tell you.
What's happening in practice is an entirely different thing. To give you an example, I was speaking about our human rights activities to an outdoor assembly of 32,000 people at a church service in Tanzania. I was speaking English, and the pastor of that church, a Tanzanian man, was translating into Kiswahili. I talked about how people with albinism were equal human beings, and I said, “We are not zeru, zeru”, which is a derogatory term for persons with albinism.
Forgive my use of the term, but for people with albinism, zeru is akin to the term “nigger” for a black person. It's an unacceptable term, but it's a term that's used in Tanzania for a person with albinism. Even the pastor himself, who gave me a platform to speak on the issue, used zeru, zeru to describe me. So here's a highly educated man who has a concern for the issue but who has been so uninformed and so steeped in the discrimination in his culture around people with albinism for so long that even he uses the term.
As I say, the results speak for themselves: 58 murders have occurred, which their own police departments have documented. Only three of those cases, in over two years, have been brought to conclusion in court. So you tell me how important this is to them.
When I ask why things move so slowly, one of the answers I get is that there is a lack of resources. They have a limited number of courthouses and a limited number of judges, and Tanzania is a poor country. All of this is true. Tanzania is a poor country, and they do need more courthouses and more judges. However, in Tanzanian history there have been cases of other groups of people being murdered, ordinary black Tanzanian citizens, and the wheels of justice have spun at about 10 times the speed.
I've confronted members of the Government of Tanzania and said, “If 58 normal black Tanzanian children were murdered, with their limbs hacked apart in this fashion, over a period of a year and a half, do you think it would take two years to get three convictions?” The answer is silence, because the records speak for themselves.
The Tanzanian government is, in my opinion, throwing us a bone. They're giving us a few convictions. They're making strong pronouncements against the killings. But I believe members of the Government of Tanzania use witchcraft. Some of them publicly admit to doing so, so that's not just conjecture on my part.
The power of witchcraft is strong. You have to understand that for the Government of Tanzania to deal with this, they're going to have to expose some politicians who may be using witch doctors who are in fact using these body parts.
So the corruption is strong.