News From Namibia

It's been a pretty big month for news in Namibia. Fidel Castro's brother arrived in the country this weekend to work on strengthening ties in Southern Africa, and these two big stories have been all the talk among both volunteers and villagers.

(Here they are, in case you missed them.)

African Women with HIV Coerced into Sterilisation

Women in Africa are being sterilised without their consent after being told the procedure is a routine treatment for Aids, a lawsuit will claim.

Forty HIV-positive women in Namibia have been made infertile against their will, according to the International Community of Women Living with HIV/Aids (ICW). The group is preparing to sue the Namibian government over at least 15 cases.

Campaigners also report coerced sterilisation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and South Africa, where according to one report a 14-year-old girl was told she could have an abortion only on condition that she agreed to sacrifice her reproductive rights.

The ICW has documented cases in Namibia where HIV-positive women minutes from giving birth were encouraged to sign consent forms to prevent them from having more children. Jennifer Gatsi-Mallet, its co-ordinator in the country, said: "They were in pain, they were told to sign, they didn't know what it was. They thought that it was part of their HIV treatment. None of them knew what sterilisation was, including those from urban areas, because it was never explained to them.

"After six weeks they went to the family planning centre for birth control pills and were told that it's not necessary: they're sterile. Most of them were very upset. When they went back to the hospital and asked, 'Why did you do this to us?' the answer was: 'You've got HIV'."

Gatsi-Mallet said that some women were now afraid to go to hospital in case they are sterilised, and infertile women were often rejected by their husbands and communities: "In African culture, if you are not able to have children, you are ostracised. It's worse than having HIV."

African women aged between 20 and 34 have a higher prevalence of HIV than any other social group; in South Africa one in three is infected.

On average an HIV-positive mother has a one in four risk of transmitting the virus to her child. With the latest antiretroviral drugs, the probability can be cut to less than one in 50. But such medical interventions are underfunded and inaccessible to millions of women across the continent.

The ICW accuses the Namibian government of encouraging state doctors to sterilise HIV-positive women as a means of preventing the spread of the virus. Its request to see the government's official guidelines has been refused. It hopes to bring 15 or more cases to court later this year.

A media report from Namibia last week highlighted the plight of Hilma Nendongo. A few weeks after giving birth, she was asked by a nurse: "Oh, did they tell you that you had been sterilised?"

Nendongo, 30, who is HIV-positive, suddenly remembered that hospital staff had told her to sign some papers as she entered the operating room for a caesarean section.

"It was a very big shock," she told Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper. "I was very emotional … I wanted a sister for my three boys, and now I can't have one."

In South Africa, cases are being referred to the Women's Legal Centre with a view to a possible action. Promise Mthembu, a researcher at Witwatersrand University, said coerced sterilisations were happening in "very large areas" of the country.

Many patients were forced to undergo the operation as the only means of gaining access to medical services, Mthembu told the Mail & Guardian newspaper.

Namibia to Club 90,000 Seals

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Namibia's annual commercial seal hunt will go on
despite objections by animal welfare groups, a government official said
Monday.

Frans Tsheehama of the Namibian fisheries and marine resources ministry
said that the season started on July 1 and will run until Nov. 15.

Hunters are expected to club over 90,000 seals, including 85,000 pups.
The hunt was expected to begin last week, but there was confusion over
whether the killings had begun after numerous media reports that a South
African-based animal rights activist was in negotiations to halt them.

Namibia is one of only a few remaining countries with a commercial seal
harvest. The government argues that the seal population needs to be
controlled to protect fish stocks. However, animal rights activists say
the practice is inhumane and outdated.

Seals are hunted for skins, fur and meat, and seal genitals are sold as
traditional medicines and aphrodisiacs in Asia.

Activist Francois Hugo of Seal Alert South Africa said last week that he
had made a bid to buy out the company that purchases the Namibian seal
pelts, effectively halting the hunt. Hugo said that clubbing an animal
to death is cruel, criminal and in defiance of international animal
protection laws. He also challenged the Namibian government's claim that
the hunt maintained healthy seal populations, saying that in the past
whole colonies had been devastated.

Namibia's seals number about 850,000 and live on a dozen remote, rocky
islands off the coast of the sparsely populated southern African country.

The hunt takes place under clandestine circumstances to avoid the glare
of publicity — and to avoid upsetting tourists. The government has said
seals consume 900,000 tons of fish each year, more than a third of the
fishing industry's catch, and that the cull is needed to protect
fisheries. Animal welfare groups counter that most of the seals killed
are still-nursing pups.

AJ Cady of the International Fund for Animal Welfare said that the
industry is "collapsing" worldwide, citing a recent European Union ban
on the import of seal products combined with the global economic
downturn. In this year's Canadian harvest, sealers killed less than a
third of their quota on weak demand.

Namibia: 2 Journalists Convicted

Two foreign journalists arrested in Namibia while filming the clubbing of seals were convicted Friday of entering a protected marine area without a permit. A British journalist, Jim Wickens, and his South African cameraman, Bart Smithers, were given a choice of 12 months in jail or a fine of about $1,200 with a six-month suspended sentence, a police spokesman said. The journalists were making a documentary for the British agency Ecostorm on the annual seal hunt, in which more than 90,000 seals will be clubbed to death. A spokesman for Ecostorm said the pair was filming near Cape Cross Colony on Thursday morning when sealers attacked them with clubs. When the police arrived, they arrested the journalists. The attackers remain at large.