VICE (2013) s03e10 Episode Script

This week on Vice, the war on being gay in Uganda.
Thank you, Jesus.
What would you do if you saw a gay man? And then, buying black market kidneys in Bangladesh.
People look at their body as capital.
Are they just spare parts? The choices are getting sent to jail, getting raped, getting beaten up.
We're hoping to find out where we can get a kidney transplant illegally.
In 2013, the Ugandan Parliament passed the "Anti-Homosexuality Bill," which became widely known in western media as the "Kill the Gays" bill.
A new law passed in Uganda.
The "Kill the Gays" bill.
Many in Uganda's gay community say they are now living in fear.
Although homosexuality was already illegal in Uganda, the bill raised the penalty for being gay to life imprisonment, or, in some cases, even the death penalty.
President Obama called on all American agencies to hold back assistance from foreign governments that punish homosexuality.
Now, after an international uproar, Uganda's courts overturned the law.
But the climate of homophobia is as strong as ever.
Today, as lawmakers in Uganda work to pass a new version of the bill, we sent Isobel Yeung to see what's happening and who is behind this new war against homosexuality.
May the Lord bless you.
As you get saved.
This is Isobel.
I'm here in Uganda, where Christian fundamentalists are waging a war against homosexuality.
At the Victory Church of Christ Ministries International, we sat in as Pastor George Oduch delivered a sermon on homosexuality.
Harsh sermons like these did not originate in Uganda.
They're actually a result of American influence.
American missionaries have been active in the country for years, some of them bringing harshly anti-gay preachings of their own, like Pastor Scott Lively.
This message that homosexuals should be viewed as pedophiles was then reiterated by Ugandan preachers to the rest of the country.
Reverend Dr.
Kapya Kaoma was actually the one who filmed Scott Lively's presentation and watched first-hand as Americans influenced his peers.
Now the homophobic messaging Ugandan preachers learned isn't just being passed on at churches, but it's actually being taught at government-funded public schools.
After the speech, a Christian drama group acted out a play explaining how American organizations supposedly fund efforts to recruit children into homosexuality.
This scene has a lesbian student who has just received a U.
S.
scholarship pay her female classmate to have sex with her.
This same story repeats with male students.
In the last scene, we see those four students in excruciating pain having had gay sex.
On talking with these kids, it's clear the message is getting through.
Do you know what homosexuals are? It destroys your life? How does it destroy your life? Do you believe everything the pastor tells you? We followed Pastor Oduch to a nearby high school, where his lessons seemed even more explicit.
The result of lessons like these are a population which is being trained to view homosexuals as if they were suspected terrorists.
Unfortunately, this sentiment only seems to intensify with adults, like these men we spoke to in this working class neighborhood in Kampala.
Tell me something about Ugandan culture.
You do what? Have you ever raped a lesbian? - Serious raping.
- Mm-hmm.
So what would you do if you saw a gay man? Just kill! Kill! I feel completely repulsed and sick to my stomach.
It seems like this is so, so deeply engrained, just pure hatred towards homosexuals.
The next day, we found that what we were hearing was not just talk.
We spoke to a gay woman who agreed to be interviewed if we withheld her identity about how her life has changed since the anti-gay bill was initially passed.
How did your life change when that bill came in? Will you tell your child when he grows up? Stories like these are becoming more and more common in Uganda.
Because homophobic sermons don't just influence the public, but also the government.
David Bahati, the author of the original "Kill the Gays" bill, is close with not only Martin Ssempa, who has strong ties to Scott Lively, but is also connected to Pastor George Oduch.
Bahati is now attempting to pass an altered version of his bill.
We spoke to him about the effects of the legislation.
Since the bill came in, a lot of gay people are saying they're experiencing a lot of trauma, um, people are threatening them with their lives and with rape, et cetera.
Is that acceptable? Who? So not the people who are threatening them, but the homosexuals should abandon their activities? 'Cause there's a lot of hatred.
I'm just worried because there's so much hatred towards homosexuals, whether you want to hate them or not.
There's a lot of there's a lot of anti-homosexual sentiment here in Uganda, - which could lead to threats.
- Hm So that's a good sentiment to have? While these words sound eerily similar to the teachings of American preachers, what's more disturbing are Bahati's allegations that U.
S.
politicians are supporting his war on homosexuality.
In fact, Bahati told The New York Times in 2012 that conservative American Christians and politicians provided technical support for the Bill.
But he refuses to name them.
How many senators are you close to? I'm not asking for names.
I just want to know how many you're close to.
To find out more about these political Christian organizations, we spoke to Jeff Sharlet, a Dartmouth professor who spent years tracking their outreach to countries like Uganda.
Probably the key guy there now is Senator Jim Inhofe, from Oklahoma, who is the congressman who has invested the most in Africa, spent the most time in Africa.
A long-time member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Inhofe has traveled to African countries at least 137 times, more than any other senator in history, logging at least five official trips to Uganda.
So here we have a senator who is really key to a lot of our relationships in Africa, relationships around defense, the struggle with militant Islam, issues over oil, all of which Senator Inhofe has a big and influential hand in.
And he's absolutely upfront.
The first thing he says when he meets these leaders is I want to talk to you about Jesus.
And he's telling them, that if you want to have this relationship with the United States, that relationship goes through our Christ.
He says I'm going over to share with African leaders my Jesus thing.
And it's all scripturally based.
Acts 9:15.
You know, what did Jesus say to Paul on the road to Damascus? He said, "Take my name, Jesus, to the kings.
" And, of course, if you're a member of the United States Senate, in Africa they think you're important.
So you always get in to see the kings.
We wanted to ask Senator Inhofe whether he has a relationship with Bahati and whether his work in Africa may have encouraged the adoption of these policies.
His office declined an interview, saying by email that Senator Inhofe has publicly condemned the bill and that there are no official records of him meeting David Bahati.
What's your relationship like with Senator James Inhofe? Um Um Wherever Bahati's getting his support from, his new legislation is picking up steam in Parliament.
Uganda's prime minister acknowledged the influence the West is having in his country.
Do you think that if they hadn't come into Uganda, then this topic would have never been raised? As this issue of contention continues to plague the country, Reverend Kaoma had an ominous warning about what could happen if things don't change.
Medical tourism is on the rise around the world.
More and more Americans are turning to the international market where procedures are less expensive and easier to arrange.
But the allure isn't just that these treatments are cheaper.
Because in the case of organ transplants, traveling to the developing world allows you to skip the long waiting list here in America and buy an organ directly.
So we sent Vikram Gandhi to investigate this growing black market in human organs.
We're here in El Paso, Texas, to meet the Mirage family, who are in desperate search for a kidney for their daughter Natalie.
At first glance, Natalie looks like a normal healthy kid, but she is actually in the final stages of kidney failure.
I have a tube that's connected to my body, right here in my stomach, and it goes in and connects to my peritoneal cavity, which is right here.
And then the big, dark line is all the fluid that flushes out, and it goes from that to my machine.
Natalie must undergo a rigorous procedure known as peritoneal dialysis.
You ready? This is basically a kidney in a machine.
Kidney in a machine, yeah.
This happens twice a day, every day.
I know, baby.
It takes the work of her entire family to keep Natalie alive.
So what are you doing right now? This big bag right here is - pretty much all urine.
- Wow.
- And so you do this every night? - I do this every night.
And then she gets hooked up again? Then she gets hooked up again and the whole process - over and over again.
- Yeah.
It can take up to ten years to get a kidney in the United States.
To understand the options for people like Natalie, we spoke to anthropologist and author Scott Carney, who has spent years investigating the organ transplant industry.
The cost of a kidney transplant varies between $50,000 and about $250,000.
If you just know that there's a certain amount of money you need to purchase a kidney, you may start looking around the States and there's a ten-year waiting list.
And that's really hard to sit through.
You might die on that waiting list.
And you might just decide, "Well, what if I look outside the borders of this country?" And that's where you enter the illegal market.
Demand for kidneys in the U.
S.
has nearly tripled over the last 20 years, fueling an illicit trade in organs supplied by the desperately poor.
Selling an organ for cash has become so common in some places, that entire towns are now called "Kidneyvilles.
" It's pretty easy to go to a place like the Philippines or India or Bangladesh and drop $50,000 and get yourself a brand-new kidney, slightly used.
But, no matter where you are, there's one rule that binds together organ markets, which is that human flesh, no matter what, goes upwards and never downwards through the social hierarchy.
This upward trajectory means that, on the black market, it's the rich people who are the buyers and the poor people who are the sellers.
So to see how this illegal trade works, we traveled to one of the most impoverished countries in the world: Bangladesh.
Once we arrived in Dhaka, it wasn't long before we found a woman named Mishu who had successfully arranged for a kidney transplant.
You started looking for a donor a long time ago.
Um, what is the process like of finding a donor? How did you find a donor? You didn't need to be fluent in Bengali to know that there was something that Mishu wasn't telling us.
Oh, okay.
So so it's somebody that you found somebody.
That's very generous of that person.
The reason she hesitated to answer is because these black market transplants are so prevalent in Bangladesh that they actually created a law banning organ transfers between people who aren't related.
Five, three one, three Conveniently, Mishu's father had the phone number for an agent, who forges documents that allow buyers and sellers to claim that they are relatives.
We headed across town to meet the agent and see exactly how he operates.
So the agent is on his way over.
He'll be here any minute now.
We've rigged up the entire room so we can record the conversation.
We're hoping to find out where we can get a kidney transplant illegally.
For the test, we do it in Dhaka? Yeah.
If we go there, you will create fake paperwork that shows that the donor and and the recipient are related? So you'll say they're cousins or distant cousins.
Okay.
How much does it cost for your services, to arrange the hospital, to arrange the doctors, to arrange the paperwork? $2,500? To set it up? To arrange a kidney for ourselves, the agent directed us to a Kidneyville: the small village of Kalai.
So we're in the town of Kalai.
Um, some towns in Bangladesh are known for having steel, some for making rice.
Kalai is known for producing kidneys.
Every person we met seemed to say the same thing.
Are you the only person in your family who's sold your kidney? And not surprisingly, these black market surgeries have severe, often debilitating health consequences for the donors.
We weren't surprised to find out that people regretted giving up their kidneys.
But we were shocked to hear many say it was to pay off serious debts from microfinance loans, which were given to them by local non-profit organizations.
What's strange is that in the western world these loans have been hailed as the solution to global poverty.
But while they've been said to be effective in some cases, articles and studies from top universities have found that there is little evidence that these loans actually help people.
Some officials have even called microfinance a "death trap" for Bangladesh's poor.
We spoke to Professor Monir Moniruzzaman, who's spent more than a decade studying the organ trade in Bangladesh and saw firsthand the effects of these loans.
We wanted to know how a practice designed to help the poor could end with them selling their body parts.
So we spoke to Mohammed Akram Hossain, the local field officer for one of the largest microfinance banks in Bangladesh, and a debt collector here in Kalai.
But when you see people selling their organs, you have to say something is wrong with the system.
Whatever the reason was for the debts, it was crippling poverty that was driving these people to sell their kidneys.
Poverty so great that the people exploiting the poor were actually poor themselves.
When we finally found an organ broker, he told us that he too had once sold his kidney.
You have a scar? You have that? Oh! After asking our preferred blood type, our broker made one phone call.
And within an hour, a man walked in willing to sell his kidney.
So Sattar has told you that I'm looking for a kidney? So you want to give a kidney? You're okay with this? Nobody's forcing you to do it? Do you understand the risks? So how much how much money do you want for your kidney? But the broker didn't just find us a seller, he actively encouraged us to negotiate the price down to ensure the sale went through.
I know that it can't go over six.
Because that's the most that anyone's getting paid.
Okay.
Just like that, we bought a man's kidney, for $6,000.
When we told him we'd be in touch, the donor began to cry.
And the true cost of these black market transactions hit home.
This problem isn't isolated to Bangladesh.
The waiting lists for patients like Natalie are getting longer, creating even more demand and even more Kidneyvilles.
The international medical tourism industry, which is now valued up to $55 billion per year, is making these illicit surgeries easier and more accessible.
So it's not surprising that the illegal organ trade has been traced across the globe from China to Egypt to Colombia, and even the United States.
At what social cost do we get these kidneys? Is money the ethical determinant of what someone's life is? The reality is that you start creating slums of kidney sellers, this is just where this ends up.
Powerful people get the organs of poor people, and it's happening over and over again.
Why should people in Bangladesh look at their body as capital? I mean, are they just spare parts?