Rwandan Government seeks sexual castration of socially degenerate people: a repeat of the tragedy of the Jews and the gypsies
During World War II, the Nazis embarked on a systematic attempt at genocide of the Romanies, known as the Porajmos or gypsies. It is estimated that between 220,000 and 1,500,000 Romanies were massacred by Nazis across Europe. Accused of being mentally degenerate, they were marked for extermination and sentenced to forced labor and imprisonment in concentration camps. They were often killed on sight, especially by the Einsatzgruppen (essentially mobile killing units, also know as Operation Reinhard against the Jewish people ) on the Eastern Front.
As part of the genocide of the Jews, the Nazi Germany introduced Euthanasia Programs, known as T-4. The T-4 program involved the mass extermination of those Hitler and the Third Reich considered “unfit” or feeble-minded. The “business” of keeping the mentally retarded or mentally ill in state financed asylums and homes, and eventually euthanizing them by lethal injections or gassings, aimed at eliminating the risk of having the mentally-ill and developmentally delayed contribute negatively to the ‘bloodlines’ of Europe, and increase the burden on the state. All the Jews ran the risk of being labelled “socially degenerate”, hence candidates for the T-4 program.
After World War II, the Romanies did not have a reprieve. In several communists countries, especially in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Romania, they were labeled a “socially degraded stratum”. In Czechoslovakia, the women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. The report published in December 2005 upon an official inquiry from the Czech Republic, condemned the Communist authorities for having practiced an assimilation policy towards gypsies and Roma, which “included efforts by social services to control the birth rate in the Romani community by sexual sterilization.
One would think that the reprehensible genocidal policy would have ended with the era of Nazism or Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. One could not be so wrong! Recently the world was appalled to learn that the leaders of the tiny African country of Rwanda were pushing for a law to sterilize people deemed “socially degenerate” or “mentally unstable or ill.” In late June 2009, the Rwanda government, mostly composed of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, introduced the so called “Reproductive Health Bill” to the Rwandan Parliament. The main purpose of the bill is to legalize the forceful sterilization of people judged mentally handicapped, ill, or unstable. According to people inside Rwanda, the bill would target basically anyone deemed having behaviors not falling within the norms. Apart from the violation of basic human rights, another major problem of the bill is to determine what these norms could be.
Despite the backing of the bill by the Rwandan president General Paul Kagame, the Parliament referred the bill back to the Rwandan Parliamentarians for the Population’s Development (RPRPD) and eventually sent back to the bill’s initiators – among them former Health Minister Dr. Jean Damascene Ntawukuriryayo [pictured above], one of the very few ethnic Hutus in the Tutsi led government. The Vice Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee that analyzed the bill, Mr. Samuel Musabyimana argued that “[Rwandan] parliament found that there was language in the Bill that was not clear and seemed to be infringing on basic human rights.”
More troubling are the true intention of the bill. In Kigali, several government officials confided to an AfroAmerica Network correspondent that the bill constitutes one of the many tools used by the Rwandan government to control the birth rate of some components of the Rwandan society by sexual sterilization. The bill also targets those opposed to the Rwandan government and their relatives. The Rwandan officials argued that anyone may be labelled mentally degenerate by the government; especially those accused of genocide ideology or anyone under stress due to torture, wrongful imprisonment or persecution by the government Gacaca courts. Hutu ethnic group members are particularly targeted by the bill and several may already be candidates for legal sterilization if and whenever the bill passes.
During World War II, many Germans and others were outraged by the Nazi policies: Catholic Bishop Galen sent out one of the first “White Rose” pamphlets to protest against such practices. In the case of Rwanda, several human rights organizations have already been alarmed and shocked by such a bill aiming at reintroducing the methods and policies used by Nazis and totalitarian communist regimes of Eastern Europe to target both the Jewish and Romano people. The US-based Human Rights Watch has condemned the bill as “deeply flawed and violates the government’s obligations to uphold and protect human rights”. As of this writing, there was no official comment from Western governments, the United Nations, the Jewish organizations, or the Catholic Church about the bill.
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