Recruiting Orphans For al Qaeda

by Susan Page August 11, 2005 MidWeek Magazine

My recent Dream for Africa’s Never Ending Garden mission trip to Swaziland has inspired me in recent columns to share my perspective on the HIV/AIDS and orphan crisis, and ways we can all help. This week’s focus is on the international security ramifications of a predicted 43 million African orphans by 2010.

Africa’s “in” right now with the media. Nothing beats the face of a celebrity like Oprah, Brad Pitt, U2’s Bono or Angelina Jolie to catapult a decade-long crisis into “breaking” news.
But what those high-profile news pieces miss is how African street orphans, their parents dead from AIDS, hungry, afraid and needing to belong, are vulnerable to certain other dangerous influences — dangerous to the free world — terrorist recruiters.

In Out of the Black Shadows, Christian evangelist Steven Lungu, orphaned at age 7, writes about how in 1962 communist factions in Rhodesia co-opted him and his gang to their cause by promising unlimited prosperity.

“The left-wing groups recruited from the tens of thousands of poor black youths … If you were homeless, jobless, hungry, dressed in rags — and desperate — wouldn’t you be tempted? I was,” says Lungu. “When the local political agitators found me I was a teenager living on my own under a bridge. My bed was a sandy grave I dug at night, my blanket an old burlap sack. I could not read or write. I could not find a job. The whites had helped me, true — by leaving their rubbish bins unguarded. I wore their cast-off shirts and trousers, and tied their wornout slippers to my feet with twine. My food came from their rubbish bins as well — slimy porridge, rotting fruit, leftover meat, stale bread. Our instructions were to cause the maximum amount of public terror and civil unrest that we could.”

Today’s Africa is a fertile breeding ground for al Qaeda. Consider the following:
• “The language of jihad is growing louder among some of the [African] continent’s 300 million Muslim faithful,” says veteran journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave. “The Muslim clerics get stipends from the Saudi Arabian Wahhabi clergy and train youngsters to become jihadis (holy warriors).”

• Western intelligence experts believe al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates are looking for havens in many parts of Africa, to recruit and plan future operations.

• Al-Ittihad al-Islami, which operates as a religious organization in southern Somalia, has 17 mobile military training camps there and is listed by the U.S. as linked to al Qaeda.

• Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British citizen of Indian descent, was arrested three weeks ago in Zambia, linked to the July 7 London terrorist attack that killed 52 people.

• Twelve of the FBI’s 22 most wanted terrorists in the world come from African nations.
Do you have a son? I do. He’s now 30, but I clearly remember him at 12 — a boy, trying to be a man, resisting authority, yet needing love and hugs and guidance — and food, lots of food. When I hear of the plight of the homeless street boys of Kenya, Zambia, Mozambique, Swaziland and other African nations, I think of him and literally sob out loud. Children digging through garbage, using plastic bags for warmth, stealing for the older boys and being raped by them as thanks.
Many people have become desensitized by years of seeing images of starving, holloweyed African children, faces covered with flies and mucus, like those now seen in Niger. But we must look, and feel, and not give up on them. Steven Lungu believes in hope. Because one godly man cared, Lungu turned his life around.

Money isn’t the total answer, though the Saudis are pouring millions into building mosques and influencing governments. While I was in Swaziland, King Mswati III, after meeting with leaders of Arab Muslim nations, in return for an undisclosed financial arrangement, struck from Swaziland’s constitution the centuries-old clause pronouncing Christianity the official religion. (Hundreds of pastors protested to no avail.)

And the answer is sure not the United Nations, a largely corrupt body of nations with billions in aid money that never seems to anticipate a crisis in Africa. I favor hands-on efforts that focus on education, building orphanages and helping people feed themselves, like Dream for Africa (dreamforafrica. org). And I believe it’s a job too daunting for mere mortals. We need God’s help.

Recommended reading: “Al Qaeda Into Africa” by Arnaud de Borchgrave, “Washington Times,” March 22, 2004, and the book, “Out of the Black Shadows” by Stephen Lungu.

The Tsunami Of Poverty In Africa

by Susan Page August 3, 2005 MidWeek Magazine

This is the second column in a series on Africa. Having just been in Swaziland, a small kingdom landlocked by neighboring South Africa and Mozambique, I am impassioned to share what I witnessed.

Why? What bearing does a continent literally half a world away have on us here in Hawaii? We have our own poor and victimized — and our own family needs, too.
Well, besides a Supreme calling to go out in the world and help the most helpless, there are devastating geo-political ramifications of ignoring the woeful plight of Africans today.
First, let me tell you about an orphanage our Hawaii Dream for Africa (dreamforafrica.org) group visited on a day we weren’t planting vegetable gardens in the remote tribal regions of Swaziland.

My mind envisioned an institutional sort of building with bunkstyle beds and a communal kitchen serving up hot meals. So dead wrong. Our van drove up to a small sloping field of red dirt and rock. There was one tree (like a small kiawe). Under this tree, I was told, a “gogo,” or grandmother, had been caring for an ever expanding number of homeless toddlers and children for months through wind, rain, cold and heat, until just recently when someone donated two small log rooms. Anywhere there are orphans and an adult in charge is an orphanage, shelter or no shelter.

An old iron pot on an open wood fire was the “kitchen.” The children, 20 or so, threadbare and filthy, sat on tattered mats on the dirt. No ball to throw or book to read. Three teenage girls, who can’t afford the $70 or so it costs to go to school, help stir and serve the boiled cabbage for lunch and hold the little ones. One 15-yearold girl named Nontobeku Sigandze isn’t an orphan, but her parents have both died — most likely of AIDS.

“I had to drop out of school,” she shyly admitted in perfect English. “My grandmother doesn’t have the money to send me. I want to go to school. I want clothes to wear.”
School offers hope. Yet only 50 percent of the kids there can go. School may keep Nontobeku from becoming a prostitute, which so many young girls turn to in order to survive. However, school isn’t always a safe haven. Many of the children in school are orphans so sometimes their teacher helps — for a price.

Until recent exposure, many male teachers forced sex on their students, even as young as 9 or 10, for the promise of grades, a uniform or tuition. An entire faculty of male teachers was fired by Swaziland’s Education Department after frightened children testified. The government newspaper still doesn’t call it what it is: rape. It’s referred to as sexual harassment. What’s worse, the second highest infectors of HIV/AIDS are schoolteachers. (The first is men who go to find work in South Africa, where they have sex with HIV infected prostitutes, most just starving children made homeless by parents infected. The infected men return home and infect their wives — and sometimes their daughters, a culturally accepted practice.)

The cycle of infection is now spiraling toward a crisis — a pandemic — unlike any in modern time. Misinformation, wild rumor and denial about AIDS fuel its escalation. AIDS in Africa is not predominately a homosexual disease as it is in the U.S. It’s not cured by having intercourse with an infant or a virgin. It is not a curse put upon a family by the dead ancestors. It is an infectious disease spread by having sex and by poverty, hunger, orphans, ignorance and lack of selfrestraint.

Here’s a quiz:
How many people died in the tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004 in Southeast Asia?
Answer: More than 225,000.

Approximately 356 people die every hour of HIV/AIDS in Africa. How many is that per day?
Answer: 8,544 people.

Every 26 days, 225,000 people die of AIDS in Africa — a tsunami- sized disaster. As of Aug. 1, 1,871,136 people have died of AIDS since the tsunami.

Fifteen million young children are living on the streets today, orphaned because of AIDS. World Health Organization (WHO) predicts there will be 43 million by 2010.

Once we know the truth, can we turn a blind eye? But what can we do? Support and/or participate in (Go there!) organizations like Christian-based Dream for Africa, which offer practical solutions for fighting hunger, AIDS education (highly successful “Beat the Drum” program in Swaziland and South African schools) and orphanage building. Write your representatives to take seriously this unprecedented disaster. Don’t lose hope. Pray for Africa.

Next week: How the pandemic in Africa affects our safety in America