Ghana rights groups warn of anti-gay hate campaign

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1029152--ghana-rights-groups-warn-of-anti-gay-hate-campaign

Paul Carlucci & William Yaw Owusu
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

ACCRA—Hillary Afful has been openly gay his entire life. That’s no small feat for a 26-year-old man in Ghana, where a deep observance of religionand a vague clause in the criminal code drives most gay people underground.

Human rights activists warned Friday that homosexuals are the target of a vicious hate campaign that has religious leaders in the country calling for legislators to jail gays. Media outlets are carrying all manner of invective and one politician is ordering arrests.

“My father didn’t seem to understand that his only boy is behaving like a gay,” says Afful, a neatly dressed native of Ghana’s capital, Accra. “My father would always say, ‘He’s not my blood.’”

When he was seven, Afful’s father abandoned him. To save her marriage, Afful’s mother placed him with his grandmother. But, aside from her, the family ostracized him. He was bullied at school and beaten by his uncles.

Then his grandmother died. Alone and depressed, 15-year-old Afful became a prostitute.

“I contracted a lot of infections, genital warts, gonorrhea and all that,” he says. “That was how I was living until a friend introduced me to an HIV peer group.”

Ghana’s President John Evans Atta Mills has not taken an official position on homosexuality, despite numerous calls for tougher laws. Currently, the law forbids “unnatural carnal knowledge.”

In Ghana’s oil-producing Western Region, Minister Paul Evans Aidoo heightened the debate when he ordered the arrest of homosexuals. Last Wednesday, the minister was quoted on radio ordering the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) to make the arrests.

“We want to get rid of these people from the society,” he said. “We want to get them so that we can test the strength of our laws.”

Meanwhile, Christian leaders are threatening to mobilize their congregations against politicians who defend homosexuality and lesbianism.

Muslim leaders have also been swift to condemn homosexuality. Sheikh Osmanu Nuhu Sharubutu, Chief Imam of Ghana, said homosexuality “is not even practiced by animals in the jungle.”

Afful watches all of this with horror.

“Now that all this noise is going on, we are in hell. We are going through hell,” he says.

On most issues, Ghana has a fairly vocal human rights activist community. Not so in this instance. Amnesty International Ghana Director Laurence Amesu says the rights of all people, including homosexuals, should be respected. But he will not take a position on the “unnatural carnal knowledge” law.

Richard Quason, deputy commissioner of the Ghana Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, strikes a similar note.

“The commission is not taking a stance on the law,” he says. “As far as the commission is concerned, all persons are entitled to protection under the laws of our country.”

Mob justice, he continued, is unacceptable.

Daniel Asare Korang, however, will take a position, both on the law and the issue in general.

“I believe,” says the programs manager of Human Rights Advocacy Centre, “in Ghana it’s quite difficult to get civil society to organize to come out and say, ‘We support homosexuals,’ because the fear is they will be associated with them.”

But he says his organization has been very active on the issue. While they have yet to hold a press conference to counter those held by religious entities, Korang says the group has taken a number of gay men, including Afful, to a Constitutional Review Committee, where they succeeded in pressing for a recommendation to include sexual orientation in the forthcoming re-draft of the country’s highest law.

They’ve also brought gay men to the Register General, showing them how to sign on and get legal sanction to form non-governmental organizations. In addition, he says, they’ve sent a memo to the Bureau of National Investigations outlining practices of fair treatment.

“I believe that Ghana is a secular state,” he says. “Ghana is not ruled by the Bible or the Koran. Ghana is ruled by the Constitution.”