Witch-Hunting and Other Victims

The very thought that a witch, practising devilish sorcery, is among them is enough to send chills down the spines of those who believe in such conspiratorial issues that identify among the community those whose evil results in the maiming and misfortune and death among them. Someone who is disliked, who by their actions have caused enmity among their neighbours, are conspired against, with claims of witchery.

And because they are diabolically involved in shortening peoples' lives by the most gruesome of incantations whose fearfully mystical threats become the locus of tribal vengeance, their lives are forfeit. But they are not simply put away where they can do no more harm, nor are they swiftly dispatched. Rather, there are those who delegate themselves as the executioners of the community's best interests by conferring on the victim heinous suffering before death.

This suffering is the threatened community's vengeance against those among them who conspire to do them harm. They must suffer for all the grief that has been laid at their feet. Theirs is the responsibility for fear and loathing, pain and misery. And so, in a society that believes that among them live sorcerers and witches, one 20-year-old woman was identified and subjected to the people's justice.

As hundreds of spectators stood by, Kepari Leniata was striped, tortured, doused in gasoline and set afire. She was accused of the death of a six-year-old-boy who had been the subject of her morbid sorcery, ending his life. As police officers and firefighters attempted to intervene, the crowd blocked their access until the atrocity was completed.

Now, the UN Human Rights office in Geneva has issued a statement to the effect that it is 'disturbed' by the killing of this young woman in Mount Hagen, the Western Highlands provincial capital, of Papua New Guinea. It has called on the country to address this vigilante violence committed against those accused of sorcery.

This atrocity is perhaps equal in its menace to human rights and human decency to the practise of stoning a woman claimed to be a harlot because she has been gang-raped in circumstances that point, to the Islamist tribal councils in Muslim countries practising Sharia law, to her having invited the rape through her undecorous manner.

It is analogous to the odious practise of committing a young woman to death because she has been raped by an uncle, a cousin, and she is the guilty party because she was seen in the presence of a man unrelated to her by family ties. It is at least the equal of a Muslim cleric repeatedly raping his five-year old daughter because he believes her to have been immodest, his vicious violence claiming her life.

It is yet to occur that the UN Human Rights Council might conceive of the notion to recommend that the countries practising these Islamist sexist vulgarities comprising human rights abuses at the highest level cease and desist. India, on the other hand and South Africa, might rate a scolding for the prevalence of horribly violent gang-rapes.