a beacon of light in the darkness of despair. (Alice Nkom)

[William769]

Alice Nkom is accustomed to polarized public opinion about her civil rights work on behalf of Cameroon’s marginalized LGBT community. The defense attorney is highly praised by international human rights groups yet vociferously denounced by many in her own country. She ignores the latter with aplomb as she visits dilapidated prisons where her clients face bleak prospects.

Nkom is one of only a few lawyers in the west central African nation of 19 million people bold enough to represent those arrested and imprisoned on charges of same-sex sexual conduct, which can carry jail sentences of up to five years for both men and women. She describes their treatment in prison as inhuman, horrid, violent. "I must help them live,” Nkom, 66, says in a recent phone interview from the capital city of Yaoundé. “I must give them the strength to say, ‘Yes, I am this way.’ And I want to help people understand that being gay is OK.”

In the past year, Nkom’s pro bono work has become more extensive — and dangerous. Cameroon, like many of its neighbors in the region, has struck defiant tones against growing calls from the international community for LGBT rights, and Nkom herself has been threatened with arrest by an election-rigging autocracy and its supporters. Her clients have become scapegoats for a government seeking to provoke populist homophobia as a distraction from pervasive corruption and economic woes.

One man whom Nkom represents, Jean-Claude Roger Mbede, is serving a three-year sentence after sending “gay text messages” to another man and has experienced malnourishment and sexual assault while in prison. Nkom worries that another client, who has HIV, will suffer the same fate. Some are apprehended on the streets of Yaoundé or the port city of Douala for “looking feminine” and are victims of police entrapment and extortion. Once behind bars, they may be subjected to humiliating anal examinations lacking any legitimate medical purpose. About a dozen arrests have been reported in the past six months, with three young men recently convicted and given the maximum sentence. Nkom called the judge’s decision in those cases shocking and “an embarrassment for Cameroon.”

http://www.advocate.com/Politics/A_Lone_Activist_Crusades_for_Change_in_Cameroon/

[Bluenorthwest]

1. Alice is like a member of the resistance, and the African

Governments are much like the Third Reich, genocidal, using hate to gain power, pure evil which we in the West must not support.

[Rowdyboy]

2. Where these heroes find the courage to do what they do in some of the most

repressive countries on earth is far beyond me.