Peaceful Societies

The Associated Press released a story last Saturday describing the religious opposition to local building codes among some conservative Amish families in New York State and Wisconsin.

The AP writer was obviously unaware of the sewer and building code violations that have roiled some Schwartzentruber Amish families in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, in recent months but the issues are quite similar. As the AP story relates, many Amish feel that regulations requiring them to follow architectural plans, install smoke detectors, and abide by onsite inspections all force the intrusive, outside, mainstream society down their throats. That violates one of their basic religious beliefs of avoiding contacts with the materialistic society surrounding them. They feel that their own beliefs do not hurt outsiders.

It may be hard for non-Amish to understand their objections, since almost everyone else erecting a building in America has to abide by the intrusiveness of the modern, inspection-laden, building-code system. But freedom of religion is a cornerstone of America, so the Amish have many supporters outside the ranks of municipal bureaucrats, local attorneys, and adjoining property owners.

The AP story describes some of the 18 legal actions conservative Amish residents in Wisconsin and New York State have faced over the past year and a half due to people building homes without following local building permit requirements. One of the Wisconsin residents cited in the story, Daniel Borntreger, may have to pay a fine of thousands of dollars for building his home without a proper permit. He feels the permitting process is too intrusive. “The permit itself might not be so bad, but to change your lifestyle to have to get one, that’s against our convictions,” he told the AP.

The article makes some important points, though it unfortunately simplifies the situation. It cites the enlightened approaches taken in Pennsylvania, where authorities are quite familiar with Amish beliefs due to the fact that they have lived there so long. In a township in Lancaster County, they are allowed to have exemptions from requirements such as one that insists lumber in their homes must be properly graded, or another that stipulates that electricity be properly installed—regulations that they couldn’t abide by. Officials are willing to work with the Amish, who are generally cooperative on their part.

“You try to work with both sides,” said one township official. “(We tell them) this is what we need you to do so everyone can go home and relax.”

The article goes a bit astray by suggesting that the problem occurs when Amish move into new states, such as New York and Wisconsin. In fact, the Amish have been residents of both states for years. Instead, conflicts occur when the Amish move into new areas where they do not know about local regulations they will be facing, and neither local officials nor attorneys understand them or their religious beliefs. As mentioned, Amish who are more recent residents of some Pennsylvania counties have had problems when local people do not really understand them. Research has suggested that people who have more extensive contacts with the Amish also have more positive attitudes toward them than people with less frequent contacts.

The Amish have their defenders, people who feel that their strongly-held religious beliefs should trump local regulations. Steve Ballan, a public defender assigned to help the Amish in an upstate New York building code case, said the Amish “should be allowed to practice their religion and their religious traditions without interference from the government,” a view that some local officials may have a hard time accepting.

But law professor Douglas Laycock at the University of Michigan feels the Amish will have a strong case if the issue is taken to federal court. Contrary to the arguments of local officials, that the regulations are designed to protect people from having their buildings fall down, Laycock says that Amish buildings are not collapsing. “People aren’t getting hurt,” he told the AP.

Until the 1970s, rural Thailand’s Suphanburi Province, located only 100 km north of Bangkok, was extremely isolated from the rest of the country. The province was the butt of jokes by other Thai people because their roads were either nonexistent or in such bad condition as to be virtually impassable.

A fable told at the time described the situation. A man from Bangkok was driving back to the city when he stopped at a coffee shop in another province. “You’ve just been to Suphanburi, right?” the shop owner said to him. The driver was astonished at what the shop keeper said and asked him how he could tell where he had just come from. “How could I not tell? Dust is all over your face, and that is red dust (p.439).” The implication of the story was that the worst roads in the region were in Suphanburi, and it was immediately obvious.

In the last couple years, Yoshinori Nishizaki has written other interesting journal articles about Suphanburi—one on the anti-meth campaigns promoted by the charismatic politician Banharn Silpa-archa, and another on the huge tower the same politician built in the major town of the province. This year he has published a piece on the way that politician has changed the self image of the Rural Thai people in his province. His technique: effective pork-barrel politics that lead to more and better roads than anywhere else in the rural part of the country.

Suphanburi was roadless due to historical circumstances and it remained without roads into the 1950s. The only way to get to the capital was via river boats, an option that was only really open during the rainy season. A road was finally completed into an adjoining province in 1956, which provided a roundabout route to Bangkok. But it was inferior—the butt of jokes.

Silpa-archa, the consummate politician, was born in Suphanburi Province in 1932. After he entered parliament in 1976, he realized that the Thai system would allow him to manipulate scarce government money and channel funds to his home province for his favorite development projects—building roads. Using his growing personal leverage, he gained more and more funding for road building in Suphanburi.

Between fiscal years 1977 and 1980, the highway construction funding available for the province jumped from 0.5 percent of the national transportation budget to 11.9 percent. Suphanburi is a medium size province, with only 1.6 percent of Thailand’s population.

Banharn went beyond just gaining funds, however. Although other provinces have only one office of the national government highway agency, by 1988 he was able to establish three in his district. Furthermore, he had the foresight to make sure that public works funded for his province were designated as continuing projects, so that the frequent changes of governments would not diminish the work in his district.

The result is that Suphanburi today has probably the best rural highway and road system in the country. The province, with 800,000 people, has a higher density of roads than all of its neighboring provinces. In 1966 it had 5 highways, only one of which had a paved surface. Thirty years later it had 59 paved highways crisscrossing the province, with many other feeder roads connecting to the hundreds of rural villages.

The thrust of Nishizaki’s article is an examination of the psychological affects of all this development on the people of Suphanburi. The author argues that there are many ramifications. Even though corruption charges against Banharn, which are probably accurate, bother some Suphanburians, they tend to overlook them in favor of all he has gained for them and their province.

The feeling of remoteness in the province has changed. People appreciate that they are connected to Bangkok and the rest of Thailand. The well-lit, excellent, smooth freeway that runs from the province directly into the capital is certainly an important part of that change. Banharn obtained 460 million baht over a five-year period from the World Bank to build that road, which was completed in 1984. A trip over the “ Banharn Highway” to Bangkok for work, entertainment, or education became much easier than before. The province felt connected to progress and modernity.

Banharn has insisted—and his power as former prime minister and the leader of one of Thailand’s major political parties gives him continuing political clout—that his highways must be very well maintained. They are wide, clean, beautiful, frequently well lighted, and without potholes. Many of the freeways have landscaped median strips. There is rarely any litter along the roads in the province, due to the armies of workers that maintain them.

The department of highways supplies over one thousand workers for maintaining the roads in the province, supplemented by workers employed by a private foundation Banharn founded for that purpose. Critics charge that it is all wasteful, pork-barrel politics, which enrich contractors who are beholden to Banharn’s purposes. But there are not many critics in Suphanburi.

There are not too many critics in other provinces either, since people recognize how much he has done for his own district—and by comparison, how little their own politicians have done for them. In other words, he is admired for his provincial favoritism, Nishizaki argues.

The critical point, though, is that Banharn is much admired in Suphanburi. The people believe that their roads are the envy of all of Thailand. Propaganda from the national highways department, picked up by the press, frequently features the roads of the province. The jokes now being told about Suphanburi reflect the pride the residents feel toward their province and its roads. There is no longer any sense of shame.

Because of the skills of the one politician, Suphanburians have replaced an imagined inferior representation of themselves with a superior vision, a dramatic change in their social identity over the course of only three decades. Nishizaki summarizes the results of extensive interviews which point out how much the road building has dramatically improved the attitudes of these people in Rural Thailand.

Nishizaki, Yoshinori. 2008. “Suphanburi in the Fast Lane: Roads, Prestige, and Domination in Provincial Thailand.” The Journal of Asian Studies 67(2): 433-467

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, a prominent writer about life in Old Nubia, died on December 2 in Austin, Texas, at the age of 81. She was an emerita professor of comparative literature and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas. She is survived by her husband, Robert Fernea, also a major figure in Nubian Studies.

She joined the faculty at the university in 1975 as a senior lecturer, shortly after Robert became the director of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. She chaired the Women’s Studies Program at the university from 1980 to 1983, and retired from her teaching position in 1999.

Her bestselling book Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village, about living in a rural community of southern Iraq, brought her international prominence. Her subsequent work, “A View of the Nile,” was widely noticed too. It is a memoir about the adventures of the young Fernea family in a Nubian village, where they lived while her husband was doing “salvage anthropology” before the Aswan Dam was finished. Some of the writings by noted Nubian author Haggag Hassan Oddoul closely parallel the descriptive materials in Fernea’s memoir.

She also wrote a memoir about her life in Morocco while Robert did some research there. Later in her career, she wrote or co-authored a number of scholarly works about Middle Eastern studies, and she was a prominent film producer. She received two National Endowment for the Humanities grants to support her work.

According to Kamran Aghaie, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University, Mrs. Fernea “helped forge an international reputation for the university’s Middle Eastern studies program.” He added, “her passion for women’s issues in the Middle East was inspiring to all who knew her, and she will be fondly remembered as a friend and colleague.”

In addition to her husband, she is survived by two daughters, a son, and several grandchildren.

According to a Reuters story last week, the Zapotec town of Juchitán just displayed its laid-back attitude toward gays and transvestites with its annual festival in their honor. The article indicates that transvestites, called muxes, a Zapotec word derived from the Spanish word for woman, mujer, are quite widely accepted in the town, a striking contrast to the macho attitude of much of the rest of Mexican society.

Dressing up in his striking blue, flowered blouse, Pedro Martinez tells the reporter with evident pride, “When I get all dressed up like this my father always says, ‘Oh Pedro! You look just like your mother when she was young.’” The 28-year old hairdresser has a lace slip under his skirt, a gold coin necklace on his head, and a flowered headdress—the traditional costume of women in Zapotec society. He has spent two hours in his hair salon preparing for the festival of the muxes.

The festival featured a church blessing at a mass by a Catholic priest, a dance, and a parade that culminated in the crowning of a transvestite queen. The festivities included a raucous party, at which the muxes wore either ball gowns and high heels or traditional local costumes. The festival, which also celebrated the culmination of the annual harvest, has been held in the town for 33 years.

Juchitán has a history of Zapotec women playing a strong role in local life. According to local theater director Sergio Santamaria, local legend holds that Zapotec women used to pray for at least one son to become a gay, so that he could take care of her when she became old.

Professor Rosemary Joyce, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Reuters reporter that among the Zapotecs, gays “were seen as … having a kind of spiritual power that comes from being more like the ancestors who are mothers and fathers at once, and more like the divinities who may be dual gendered.” Another news source, commenting on the festival, observed that the muxes, who mix traits from both genders, are considered to have wisdom and power.

Prof. Joyce explained that hundreds of years ago, colonial officials rigidly suppressed expressions of homosexuality, which drove the practice underground. Traditional pre-contact Zapotec culture included gods with ambiguous genders and cross-dressing by shamans. While homosexuality has long been accepted in Juchitán, only recently have gays felt secure enough to practice their preferences openly. The gay pride movement has evidently helped foster this openness.

According to Santamaria, “there have always been muxes, but before they would wear just a dress shirt with a feminine touch, like gold buttons. The transvestites are the new generation.” While the Juchitán festival differs in many respects from the annual beauty contest for transvestites held in Pattaya, Thailand, the spirit of toleration in this community and among the Rural Thai is certainly very similar.

The G/wi and G//ana people have appealed to Pope Benedict XVI for help in prompting the government of Botswana to allow them to return to their homes. Botswana and the Vatican have recently established diplomatic relations, a move that was initiated by the previous President of the country, Festus Mogae. A spokesman for the San people said, “we beg the Pope to help, to pray for us so that [the] government changes its attitude towards us and respects our rights as indigenous peoples of this land.”

While Mogae was president, he initiated the Botswana policy of expelling the San people from their desert homes, allegedly to help them live better, or to help restore the wildlife in the Kalahari—the official story depended on which version suited the government’s purposes. The reality was that the government was hoping for royalties from diamond exploration and mining, and it did not want to share them with the indigenous San peoples who have lived in the Kalahari for millennia.

In December 2006 the two San societies finally won a long-delayed victory in the country’s highest court, affirming that they had the right to live in their former homes. Since then, however, the government has hindered them from returning by prohibiting them from using the water or from hunting.

The Catholic Church has begun taking an active role in assisting indigenous peoples in their claims against repressive government actions, according to a press release issued by Survival International last Thursday. SI repeats a statement by a bishop of the Xingu people of Brazil, that the church is supporting indigenous societies throughout the world. On July 1, the Pope met with some Brazilian indigenous peoples and told them, “we will do everything possible to help protect your land.” The G/wi hope, that he might also support them, seems quite reasonable.

Last week, the Telegraph in Calcutta carried two different articles that featured the Birhor society of Jharkhand state. It appears as if the tragic deaths of numerous Birhor villagers early in October prompted the news organization to focus on a previously obscure group of peaceful people.

According to a news story in the paper on Monday last week, the Tribal Research Institute in the city of Ranchi opened a new museum that features all 32 tribes in the state, including the Birhor, many of which are shown as sculpted models in glass-enclosed dioramas. Ranchi is the capital and largest city of Jharkhand.

The article on the Telegraph website includes a photo of the Birhor diorama, with human models depicting a family sitting in front of their kumba, their house. The article says they are making ropes, though that is not really clear from the photo.

Dioramas in the museum evidently show other tribal societies pursuing their characteristic activities. In one village, people are depicted making iron, for instance. The model buildings and structural details shown in the displays are true to the cultures of the groups represented. Dogs, goats, hens—the dioramas include details from village life. The sculptor, Amitava Mukherjee, said he tried to capture the lives of the rural people in each display. In addition to the dioramas, the museum includes photos and artifacts from the different Jharkhand societies.

On Thursday, the Telegraph reported that in the district of Giridih, in Jharkhand State, 23 out of the 49 literate Birhor (47 percent) are women. This rate among the Birhor in the district compares quite favorably with the general rate of female literacy in rural parts of the state. Throughout rural Jharkhand, over 45 percent of the males are literate, while only 27 percent of the females can read.

The article points out that the only Birhor in the district to hold a government job is a woman, Kunti Devi. The Birhor men are envious. A local legislator opined, “The government has … done little for the education of the Birhors and women of this community have won the literacy race on their own.” He added, however, that local NGOs may have helped Birhor females learn to read.

Dorjee Tshering Lepcha sits on his floor cross-legged every morning and chants, asking the spirits to forgive him for any intrusions he might make that day against nature. He plays a tune on his flute to welcome the day and to add to the sincerity of his plea in advance for forgiveness. The room where he performs his daily ritual is spare, with only an altar, garlanded with leaves, fruits, and flowers, a small stool where he puts the manuscript for his daily prayers, and a cushion on which he sits.

Kerry Little, in a recent journal article, includes this description of the traditional animist faith of the Lepchas and their storytelling. The thrust of his article is to describe how the recent threat to build hydropower dams in the Dzongu region of Sikkim, an area that is especially sacred to the Lepcha people, galvanized some of them into forming an effective opposition.

The author, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney, traveled to Sikkim a couple times to gather materials for his study. He does not understand spoken Lepcha, but he traveled with translators who helped him gather his materials. His article is a good overview of the cultural values of the Lepcha people and their struggle to preserve the Dzongu from being destroyed by the dam builders.

He begins his story at a meeting which he attended at the Bhutia-Lepcha House, a building in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, on December 12, 2006. He was invited by Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT), the group which was trying to build support for opposition to the proposed dams.

The mood in the hall was optimistic as the hundreds of Lepchas attending expressed “hope, strength, respect and a touch of militancy (p.234).” Little continues, “They are known for their shy, quiet persona but that day 500 or more Lepchas, from the remote North of Sikkim, where they may encounter just a handful or less people each day, discover their loud voices and they holler and clap and laugh and yell their support for the group who will lead them in this fight for their ancestral land and culture (p.234).”

Even though he didn’t understand the speeches and comments, enough was translated for the author that he caught the threads of humor, drama, ideas, warnings, and combativeness that permeated the gathering. When they paused for a break, the organizers visited government offices and spoke with the Chief Minister of Sikkim, who agreed that the state would review the Dzongu hydropower projects. The Chief Minister told them that he had “deep concern” for the Lepchas of North Sikkim. A year later, the promised review had not happened.

Little mentions the official reasons for the hydropower projects, but his sympathies clearly lie with the people who are trying to preserve their land. He doesn’t minimize the fact that some of the Lepchas had already sold out their property rights to the developers, and that the approaches of ACT were not supported by everyone.

He makes it clear that ACT is not against development; it is simply opposed to the massive developments that were proposed for the sacred Dzongu area. Sherap Lepcha, one of the activists, tells him that they have no problem with micro-development—just mega-development works. “Our idea is—whatever comes—local people should be given first preference and local people should get benefits (p.237).”

One of the strengths of Little’s article is the way he emphasizes the importance to the Lepcha of human relationships with nature. Their prayers include all creatures, every blade of grass, every leaf, and all the waters from the lakes, from the rivers, and even from heaven. “Lepchas lived there peacefully, their habitat protected from strangers who found the peaks that wove their way along the ridges of Mayel Lyang [the Dzongu region] an impassable cloak of protection (p.238),” the author writes evocatively.

The natural environment, the mountainous Dzongu, and religion are closely intertwined in Lepcha thinking, linked together by their folklore. Little refers to and quotes other scholars that have made similar observations about the ways the Lepchas view their land as holy. One scholar wrote, “Here is a sacred landscape where the people are truly integrated within the landscape unit itself, in a socio-economic sense (p.245).” For more than 10 years the state government has supported, at least in general terms, the sanctity of the Dzongu.

The Lepcha sense of belonging to a sacred place explains at least part of the reason for the impressive campaign of the ACT group, and for its ultimate success, as reported in the news in June—well after Little wrote his paper. The ACT activists see the issue as the survival of the Lepcha as a distinct society. “If we have our land we can flourish as a race, as a community. Our ancient practices, our cultural heritage can be preserved for future generations. With our land gone, we will be finished as well. We will die but we will not give our land (p.250),” one said.

The author explains that one of the most important outcomes of the ACT campaign is the way the young activists have gained understanding of their own culture from their work. Because of the movement, they have assimilated the knowledge of their elders, learned stories that were in danger of being forgotten. The young people gained an appreciation for their language and culture that they did not have before. They had, of course, thought of Dzongu as a holy place, but the anti-dam campaign fostered a deeper understanding for their culture.

Little concludes the article by citing his conversation with Dawa Lepcha, one of the ACT members who had endured a lengthy fast to help save the Dzongu. “I was walking up here, looking at these mountains, the trees, the land—our land—and I thought; they can’t take this. They can’t do this thing to our land (p. 253).”

Little, Kerry. 2008 [pdf]. Lepcha Narratives of their Threatened Sacred Landscapes.” Transforming Cultures eJournal 3(1) February: 227-255

Unrest among civil service employees has broken out in both Ladakh and in Tahiti, where government employees are striking to improve their retirement pay scales. While these two developments are purely coincidental, they suggest an important question: do strikes and other forceful activities, which try to compel others into taking a desired course of action, diminish peacefulness?

In Northern India, leaders of 500,000 civil service employees of the state of Jammu and Kashmir decided to go on a one-day strike last Thursday to protest discriminatory practices by the state government. The public employees are particularly incensed about disparities in the retirement pay among different classifications of workers. The Joint Consultative Committee (JCC), an association of the different public employee unions in the state, organized the strike. All public workers except for vital hospital employees were included in the one-day work stoppage.

The strike was honored by nearly 100 percent of the state’s public employees, including the ones in the Ladakh region, except for Ladakh’s predominantly Muslim district of Kargil, where none of the civil servants participated. A JCC leader, Muhammad Khursheed Alam, blamed the state government for the failures of negotiations. The JCC has met with the governor of the state, N.N. Vohra, who has accepted their demands on principle, but nothing had happened by Thursday.

In French Polynesia, public workers are disturbed by the prospect of their pensions being cut in the future; a vote by the French Parliament in Paris removed some of the benefits in the pension system for overseas civil service employees. The legislation will scale back, over the next 20 years, an earlier provision that guarantees a retiree will have a wage scale that is 75 percent of top pay.

The Tahitian civil service employees announced last Thursday that they intended to continue their nine-day old strike despite the fact that the government in Paris is starting to make concessions. The 6,900 government employees, which include school teachers and customs workers, are considering their response to the government’s offers so far.

At the international airport near Papeete, customs officials are not working, so travelers are bringing anything they want into the islands in their suitcases. Containers at the port are not being unloaded. While many of the containers are empty, or contain non-perishable goods, the striking workers are allowing some recipients to gain access to containers with perishable supplies and medicines. Talks between the French Overseas State Secretary, Yves Jégo, and representatives from the employees in French Polynesia are continuing, with concessions being announced as the discussions progress.

The circumstance of striking public employees in societies that are, or used to be, quite peaceful is not really as important as the question of whether or not strikes can diminish the peacefulness of a society. A review of some literature about strikes and nonresistance in nonviolent societies might help sort out the ramifications of this issue.

Over the past year, the Lepchas have engaged in hunger strikes, an aggressive form of nonviolent action, in protest against power dams that threatened lands that are sacred to them. Hunger strikes are based, in principle, on Gandhi’s satyagraha, a strategy for nonviolently combating the hegemony of the British Empire. The Lepchas achieved most of their goals in June: their hunger strikes prompted the Sikkim state government to cancel most of the dams.

For many of the small-scale, peaceful societies, labor strikes would not be possible. It is hard to conceive of a strike, much less a labor union, in a small village such as a Semai, Kadar, Buid, or Piaroa community. Some larger-scale, relatively harmonious, societies also appear to discourage strikes and similar forceful actions. Douglas Fry, in his speech at a peace conference in Denmark this summer, noted that the Norwegians, who rarely experience incidents of violence, have a low rate of strikes.

In a 1939 paper on Mennonite nonresistance, Guy F. Hershberger (1) analyzed the changes that were occurring to peaceful, rural, Mennonite congregations as people moved into larger towns and took jobs in industry. The labor union movement, which involves strategies for forcing management to accept worker demands, he argued, directly contradicts the biblical ideal of nonresistance, the Mennonite understanding of the ways of the meek, humble Jesus.

According to Hershberger, strikes and boycotts can theoretically be peaceful, but they are coercive nonetheless. They challenge the principle of nonresistance, a value, incidentally, that many of the non-Christian peaceful societies also practice, though they may not use that term. Hershberger maintains that the nonviolent actions used by both sides of a labor dispute can lead, when they fail, to violence.

A more recent analysis of Mennonite thinking on this issue by Driedger and Kraybill (2) also confronts the changes in Mennonite life during the 20th century and their reactions to the forceful processes of modern societies. As the urban Mennonites made accommodations to the larger mainstream society, many accepted more aggressive types of social interactions, such as strikes. They also became more proactive in their peacemaking as they gave up their nonresistant peacefulness. But are they just as peaceful? Those authors conclude that Mennonites have tended to give up their peaceful nonresistance in order to become good citizens and fit in with the contemporary world.

The Amish and Hutterites, traditional Anabaptist societies that have not changed as much as the Mennonites, tend to take their nonresistance quite literally. As Christ commanded, they do not resist evil. Donald Kraybill writes in his outstanding book The Riddle of Amish Culture, “The nonresistant stance of Gelassenheit [yielding] forbids the use of force in human relations. Thus the Amish avoid serving in the military, holding political offices, using courts, filing lawsuits, serving on juries, working as police officers, and engaging in ruthless competition (p.26-27).”

Clearly, each society that seeks to build harmony and nonviolence must decide whether to resist domination by power groups, to nonviolently fight for rights, or to renounce all resistance as an integral aspect of building a culture of peace. The choice of resistance or nonresistance can be a crucial aspect of that balance. The presence of public employee unions in Tahiti and Ladakh does not necessarily mean that they are violent places, but it does suggest that peacefulness may be harder for them to maintain.

(1) Hershberger, Guy Franklin. 1939. “Nonresistance and Industrial Conflict.” Mennonite Quarterly Review, 13(2): 135-154

(2) Driedger, Leo and Donald B. Kraybill. 1994. Mennonite Peacemaking: From Quietism to Activism. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press

Last week a Fipa fisherman tried to sell his albino wife for 3.6 million shillings (about US $3,000) to traders from the DR Congo in the Kalungu, Tanzania, marketplace. An informer tipped off the police that the sale was about to take place, so they set up a trap for the men. The authorities failed to capture the two buyers, but they arrested the seller, who confessed to the crime.

According to Rukwa Regional Police Commander Isunto Mantage, John Josef, a 35 year old, was planning to sell his wife, Janet Mlele, 24 years old, to the Congolese men, but the buyers fled before the police could apprehend them. Janet told the police that she was unaware that her husband was planning to sell her. He had only told her he wanted her to meet some friends from the DRC, which she was willing to do.

John admitted to the police that the Congolese men had approached him with an offer to buy his wife. He accepted the offer since he had never earned so much money at one time. The police believe that the men, who entered Tanzania supposedly to buy fish, had fled back across the border into the DR Congo, and they have asked help from Interpol in tracking them down.

Commander Mantage told reporters that Janet’s parents, who live in Namanyere township, Nkasi district, have decided to take their daughter back into their home—they are very angry with their son-in-law.

Other news reports elaborate on the story by focusing on the reasons for the high prices paid for albino people. According to an AFP article about the incident, albinos are kidnapped and killed in Tanzania to provide body parts for witchdoctors, who make them into lucky charms. A 10-year old albino girl was murdered and mutilated for those purposes just last month, and 27 albinos have been killed in various parts of Tanzania in the past year.

Tanzania President Jakaya Kikwete spoke out forcefully against the practice at a rally organized by the Tanzania Albino Society (TAS). “It is utterly stupid for some people to believe that albinos have magic powers and their parts can make them rich,” the President said. He advocates education in order to get ahead, not the sale of people for their body parts. The TAS estimates that there are around 150,000 albinos in the country, a higher percentage than in other African states.

A BBC report on the incident also discussed the reasons for attacks on albinos in Tanzania. That article indicates that witchdoctors like to have the blood, hair, legs, and hands of albinos since they can make a person rich. Attacks on albinos are increasing this year all over Tanzania and to some extent in other parts of Africa due to witchcraft beliefs, according to the New York Times. It’s not just a problem with the Fipa people.

The strange, tragic deaths of numerous Birhor villagers in Jharkhand State on October 2 continue to reverberate in India, particularly since other so-called tribal peoples have also been dying of mysterious causes.

Eight people died due to unknown circumstances within a few hours of one another that evening in the village of Hindiakala, and evidently a ninth Birhor died there subsequently. During the month of October, at least 20 members of “Primitive Tribal Groups (PTGs),” died in remote Jharkhand villages due to unknown, suspicious causes. News articles up through October 16 reported conflicting statements about the causes of the Birhor deaths, and another story at the end of October only confused the situation further.

Since no autopsies were performed on any of the dead people, factions that support the state government continue to maintain that the people died after they had eaten poisonous plant materials from the forest. Blame the victims, not the government agencies. On the other hand, social and health workers support the state Supreme Court, which found that they had died due to starvation-related causes.

Two articles in Indian news magazines over the past couple weeks have added more insights into what may have happened. India Today reported on November 5 that the state government formed a Committee of Secretaries to investigate the deaths. It included the state secretaries of Health, Welfare, and Rural Development. While the Committee ruled out hunger as a possible cause of the tragedy, it did condemn the government for not accurately determining the cause of death of the victims.

The report by the Committee said that “the Birhors took rice and saag [leafy vegetables] on the night they died. The suspected poisonous saag could be bathua, gandhari and kantela.” The report continues, “starvation death cannot happen in this pattern as the age of [the] deceased varies from one-and-a-half … to 60 years.” The report admits, however, that the plant materials suspected of being poisonous have not been tested for any possible toxic content.

The Committee expressed its shock at how inadequately government services were being provided for people in the remote, tribal villages. Food distribution schemes had not been carried out for years, and the report blamed the governments of the districts within the state for the failures. The state government agencies have prepared appropriate welfare plans, but it is “the district administration which has to implement the schemes.”

In order to provide balance to its reporting, India Today also contacted Balram, the spokesperson for the Supreme Court who was quoted early in October as condemning the state government for the deaths. He is highly critical of the report by the Committee of Secretaries.

The Committee was apparently unable to reach the village of Hindiakala to investigate the issue on the ground since there is no road into the community. And perhaps more to the point, the Central Reserve Police Force was unwilling, perhaps afraid, to provide a military escort so the Committee could visit the village, which is in the heart of Naxalite territory.

The article condemns government agencies on many levels. Many animal species are protected more effectively in India than threatened PTGs; human societies such as the Birhor are declining more rapidly than some of the endangered animals. The article also points out that the literacy rates among the PTGs are very low, the extent of lands they cultivate is below that of other rural people in Jharkhand, and their average monthly income is much less than that of other villagers.

Tehelka, an Indian fortnightly magazine, carried a story about the Birhor tragedy on Friday, November 14. It appears as if the author, Gladson Dungdung, may have had the courage to visit the village—or at least have copied his first paragraph from someone who has.

The article opens dramatically: “The dilapidated houses, scattered utensils, hanging torn clothes, children, barely clad, and the hopeless faces on the men and women are more than enough to reveal the painful realities of Birhors, the tribals residing in Hindiyakala village of Pratapur block in Chatra district of Jharkhand, where nine of them, one after another starved to death just this October.”

The author is quite scornful of government claims that the deaths were due to food poisoning. He argues that since autopsies were not carried out, the state cannot possibly know what happened. Besides, the Birhor certainly ought to have known which wild foods are edible and which are not, he says. And he castigates the investigative Committee of Secretaries for not visiting the Birhor village. “The government officials have always used the [presence] of Naxalites as a major excuse for not going to the remote villages. This time, it was no different,” he writes.

He describes some of the 20 government welfare schemes for the primitive tribal groups, and argues that little of that support actually makes it to the people in the villages. He provides even more dire figures than the India Today story on the numbers of tribal people who have died due to illnesses caused by starvation over the past month in Jharkhand.

The author strongly condemns corruption in government agencies that allows people to steal food grains intended for the poor. Dying of hunger seriously violates human rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution, he argues. “The lack of awareness, rampant corruption, lack of transparency and accountability are the obvious reasons for the failure of the welfare schemes. The starvation death[s] can not be contained as long as the welfare schemes continue to be milch cows for government officials, dealers and middle men,” he concludes.

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