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By Andualem Sisay - Capital
13 February 2007
Last week a four year old girl passed away, in the middle of a rape attempt by a street vagabond in Nazareth. That morning, just before the incident, Wude Derege and her four year old daughter were selling gum, cigarettes and candy on the street in front of a hospital. All of a sudden, they heard a loud scream from the hospital and the mother went in to check what was going on, leaving her child and her goods on the street. But when the mother got back, her child was not there.
She searched all around but couldn’t find her daughter. The father came home from work in the afternoon and the search continued. Approximately fourteen hours had passed and still, the lost girl had not been found. The family and the neighbors had no choice other than spending a sleepless night in their home and to await the dawn to continue their search in other areas of the city.
The mother and father woke up on the first day ever with out their child by their bed side. Even though he wanted to continue searching for his beloved girl, the father had to go to another region for work to feed his family. Now it was up to the mother and the neighbors, along with the Police of Nazareth to look for the child. Areas of the city such as Menaheria, Egzear Ab, Bole, Silasewoch and Medhanialem were all scoured to no avail.
Late in the afternoon, when the tired mother approached her village hoping for good news about her child, she saw a big gathering. As the crowd began to look at her with pity, she realized that something terrible had happened to her little daughter. She penetrated the crowd and couldn’t believe what she saw. The dead body of her child was lying by the side of the railway. The police were trying to pull a stone out of the child’s mouth but were unable to do so. Finally, the stone was taken out by physicians after the body was taken to a nearby hospital.
Later on when the police tried to find out the cause of death, they discovered that the child was killed in the middle of a rape attempt by a street vagabond. The suspect, as he later confirmed, was for a long time a cigarette customer of the child’s mother. As his face was familiar to the child, he had no problem to take the child far away from the mother for his mad sexual act. He put the stone in to the girl’s mouth to keep her silent. But before he had even unzipped his trousers, the child had choked on the stone.
The suspect claims another cause for her death. “The child was dead because I hit her with a stone,” he said in his statement to police investigators. But, according to the investigation of the police as well as the physician’s, the cause for the kid’s death was the attempted rape.
“People who commit such acts on children are pedophiles, sick people who are satisfied with causing kids pain,” says Mekonen Belete, a psychologist and consultant at the Forum on Street Children, Ethiopia. “We classify them in the category of abnormal sex practitioners, including homosexuals and lesbians.” He describes spiritual and mental weakness or poverty as the main causes for the formation of such immoral people. Further more, he emphasized the passive nature of the people who don’t respond to the crime that is committed to another person until it directly knocks their door.
Junior Inspector Abebe Debele, on his part describes the weak statements by physicians who evaluate and report such cases and the statements of witnesses as some of the obstacles that hinder the judges to pass heavy sentences against these criminals.
According to the Ethiopian Criminal code, the highest sentence for rape can reach rigorous imprisonment of 15 years.
These days, rape is becoming more common in Ethiopia and ranges throughout society. It was this week that we heard about a Member of Parliament who lost his immunity due to alleged rape charges. Also this week, the Christian Science Monitor newspaper’s, Scot Baldauf, on his return to the US from Ethiopia, came up with a story of girls who are raped and beaten by forest guards while they gather fire wood from the eucalyptus forests of Entoto in Addis Ababa.