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Kenya_______________________________________________________________________
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The Element of Threat
A Catholic bishop announces that the
Church will not change her stance on contraception
“even if one were to be killed for opposing condom use”
By John-Henry Westen
Even before the 1994 Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the United Nations and international organizations like the World Bank had targeted Kenya, among other sub-Saharan African nations, for aggressive population control campaigns.
Speaking at the Cairo conference, Dr. Margaret Ogola—the executive Director of the Family Life Counseling Association of Kenya, and medical director of the Cottolenga Hospice for HIV-positive orphans—charged that the “cultural imperialism” of population control had devastated her nation.
Indeed, when the first UN-subsidized “reproductive health kits”—complete with abortifacient contraceptives and condoms—were made available in refugee camps, the site was not in Kosovo in 1999, but Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda in 1996.
The attempt by the West to depopulate Kenya is painfully apparent, argued Dr. Ogola in her memorable address at the 1994 Cairo conference. While poor mothers in Kenya have to make tremendous sacrifices in order to obtain medicines such as penicillin and even aspirin, she observed that when they “walk out of the emergency ward of my hospital, there is a family welfare center [family planning clinic] a few meters away where we have never lacked for each and every contraceptive, including IUDs, Norplant, and condoms.”
Despite the easy availability of these anti-natal devices, along with the propaganda that came alongside them, many Kenyans retain a healthy respect for traditional principles of sexual morality. Both Catholics and Muslims maintain their staunch opposition to the distribution of contraceptives.
Nevertheless the increase in sexual promiscuity among young people has fueled the AIDS epidemic. In fact, international organizations have learned to use the fight against AIDS as the latest propaganda tool for the promotion of population control.
Overcoming local resistance
Over a period of years, international organizations have found that propaganda campaigns in favor of population control are a necessity, because the people of many developing countries are averse to the acceptance of population-reduction schemes imposed from abroad. An internal evaluation of World Bank efforts, written in 1992, found:
Political sensitivities about population-control policies of foreigners made it difficult for Bank staff to broach the topic with governments.
. . . The Bank’s current approach in Latin America is to focus on reproductive health and safe motherhood as the rationale for family planning.
The report continued:
If the Bank wants to work in countries that do not accept population control as the rationale, it must base its population program on a broader and more flexible set of principles. This could start from a recognition that the overall objective is promotion of sustainable development in living standards.
But by 1999, having apparently exhausted the effectiveness of rhetorical talismans such as “reproductive health” and “safe motherhood” to justify campaigns for population control, international organizations began using AIDS as their principal theme for justifying the distribution of condoms.
On November 29, 1999 Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi surprised his audience at the University of Nairobi when he advocated the distribution of condoms as a measure to fight the spread of AIDS. “The threat of AIDS has reached alarming proportions and must not be treated casually; in today’s world, condoms are a must,” he said during his remarks at the school’s graduation ceremony. The Nairobi Daily Nation noted that Moi’s remarks represented a complete reversal from the public stand he had maintained just a week earlier, when he was quoted by the press as saying that it would be morally wrong for the government to advocate the use of condoms as a method of controlling AIDS.
During the same week in which he delivered that speech at the University of Nairobi, the president also established a new National Council on AIDS, and ordered schools to offer special sexual education courses on the topic, beginning in January.
Feeling betrayed
Muslim and Catholic leaders reacted with dismay to the president’s departure from his previous moral stance. Sheikh Ali Shee, a spokesman for the Council of Imams in Mombasa, said that the best hope for controlling the spread of AIDS lay in chastity and in a ban on immoral publications and TV program. Bishop Nicodemus Kirima of Nyeri said that chastity, not the use of contraceptives, is “the surest way of keeping the killer virus at bay.”
Speaking in November 1999 at the World Congress of Families in Geneva, Kenya’s Dr. Ogola translated those moral principles into practical applications. She said the distribution of millions of condoms—which, she reported, have a failure rate of “about 30 percent” —has not only failed to stem the spread of disease but also broken down delicate tribal taboos against promiscuous sexual behavior.
Ogola also noted that Western propaganda efforts have convinced millions of young Africans that sex with condoms is “safe sex”—with devastating effects. In an interview with Mary Moster of the internet publication Original Sources, she reported: “The disbelief and shock in the reaction of young people when I tell them they have AIDS is heart-breaking. ‘But it was SAFE sex!’, they tell me.”
The Catholic bishops of Kenya warned in August 1999 that the UN Population Fund was exerting pressure on the country, attempting to impose a popular acceptance of abortion, contraception, and sex education. Bishop Kirima underlined the intensity of the international pressure on November 28 when he declared that the Church’s stand on contraception would never change “even if one was to be killed for opposing condom use.”
Sheikh Ali attributed President Moi’s reversal in his public stance to “pressure from donors to support the use of condoms.” And as if to confirm the sheikh’s suspicions, on December 1—just two days after the president’s speech promoting condoms—the governor of the Central Bank of Kenya announced that Kenya had fulfilled all conditions demanded by the International Monetary Fund for a mission to negotiate poverty-reduction loans. Three days later, the Canadian International Development Agency announced that it would provide $240,000 to “educate community leaders in Kenya on issues related to HIV/AIDS.”
The litmus test
While it might seem outlandish to suggest that development loans and international aid would be so blatantly tied to population-control policies, the internal documentation that is available from the international banks would seem to support that analysis.
A 1992 evaluation paper by the World Bank discussed “Population and the World Bank” in Senegal. The report described a “rural health project” in the country “signed in 1982 which focused on the provision of buildings and equipment for expansion of basic health services.” The study notes that the agreement to provide the buildings and equipment was contingent on acceptance of “family planning” measures. And the document also reveals that “failure to implement this [family planning] element” resulted in a suspension of the project. The report goes on to note that in 1985-86, the Bank concentrated “on helping the government develop a comprehensive population policy.” As a direct result of the acceptance of the population policy (a “condition of release”) the Bank released the money (identified as a “structural adjustment” loan) needed to complete the project. The World Bank document spells out the sequence of cause and effect: “This recommendation—’comprehensive population policy’—was accepted and eventually implemented by making the development of such a policy statement a condition for release of the second installment of the third structural adjustment loan.”
When millions of dollars in desperately needed loans are made contingent upon acceptance of “family planning,” and when the president of an important nation appears to cave in to international pressure on the issue, it is not difficult to discern the element of threat behind the population control propaganda. And in that light it is important to recognize that Bishop Kirima is not making a purely hypothetical declaration when he says that the Church’s stand on contraception will never change “even if one was to be killed for opposing condom use.”
John-Henry Westen is the editor of the LifeSite News (www.LSN.ca), an internet news daily sponsored by the Interim, Canada’s pro-life newspaper.
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