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Human Rights League in Mozambique Insists that Trafficking in Human Organs is Real

The Mozambican Human Rights League (LDH) has revived claims that trafficking in human organs is a reality in the country, but now says it is done, not through exporting the organs themselves, but through trafficking in human beings who are still alive. LDH chairperson Alice Mabota admitted that there is no clear evidence for trafficking in human organs in the normal sense of the term, which would imply extraction of the organs, storage and later export under carefully controlled conditions.

Instead, she claimed, this is achieved through the trafficking in children, who are taken abroad where they are used for various purposes, such as organ transplants, prostitution and child labour, among others. She was speaking at a ceremony launching the delayed 2004 issue of the LDH's annual report on Human Rights in Mozambique.

She alleged that the trafficking in children is still continuing, and this is "a very profitable business", but had no figures to back up these assertions. She said that the 2005/06 edition of the report, to be launched by mid-2007, will include data indicating how serious this problem is in Mozambique. The report declares that trafficking in people and human organs needs "special treatment" on the part of the government, including "research to determine the motivations for such practices".

But, despite the more moderate line taken by Mabota at the launch ceremony, the report itself rehashes the entirely discredited claims of trafficking in body parts made in 2003 and 2004 against a South African investor, Gary O'Connor and his Danish wife Tania Skytte, who are running a poultry project in the northern province of Nampula.

The sole source for these tales was a Brazilian fantasist, Elilda dos Santos, a catholic lay missionary, living at the time in the Mater Dei convent, which the LDH report admits is the only civil society body in Nampula that it bothered to contact. Dos Santos was exposed as a fraud by the weekly paper "Savana" in March 2004, yet the LDH report, published over two years later, still leans heavily on her unsubstantiated claims in order to make libellous allegations against O'Connor - such as the utterly fantastic suggestion that light planes landed at Nampula airport to pick up human organs from his farm.

Dishonestly, the report fails to mention that behind the assault on O'Connor's reputation lay a dispute over land. Self- styled "community leaders" had helped themselves to some of the land that lay within the concession that the government had granted to O'Connor's company, GETT, and were illegally renting the land out to peasant farmers.

Among the witnesses whom Elilda dos Santos claimed could testify to the supposedly macabre behaviour of O'Connor were four of these "community leaders" whose racket had come to an end. It is a shame the LDH did not ask certain other catholic figures in Nampula what they thought of the Brazilian - such as Mario Maloquiha, the priest at Namaita parish, where dos Santos once worked, who declared she had "no credibility whatever", or the Italian priest Guiseppe Brunelli, who dismissed the stories of organ trafficking as "missionary fiction".

Demented stories about investors trafficking in human organs will clearly detract from the rest of the LDH report, much of which looks at genuine police abuses, including cases of torture and summary execution. Among these incidents of police brutality is the case of Domingos Dausse, who was hospitalised for 48 days, after a savage beating by policmen in Nharitanda, in the western province of Tete, simply because he was not carrying an identity card. The case went to local prosecutors in August 2004, but it seems that by the time the report was printed no measures had been taken against the police officers involved.

 The LDH comments that in most cases, when members of the police force commit such abuses they "go unpunished, even after it has been concluded that they broke the law and the police code of conduct". "This impunity contributes significantly to encouraging certain offenses against innocent citizens", added the report. As for access to justice, the report says that there is no guarantee, because fine words on the matter have not been followed by measures to improve access to justice on the part of the public.

Adapted from: "Mozambique: LDH Insists That Trafficking in Human Organs is Real." Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo). 25 October 2006.