Jakarta Globe – AFP, February 11, 2014
A Raelian
gathering in South Korea in 2007. (Wikimedia Commons)
|
The Raelian
sect believes that humans were created by extraterrestrials to experience joy.
It promotes world peace, democracy and sexual satisfaction.
This
mission has led them to actively campaign against female genital mutilation
(FGM), and to back a clinic in San Francisco offering a controversial reconstructive
surgery for victims.
Its
surgeons claim they can restore sexual feeling and orgasms to victims, although
the results remain contested by some doctors.
Now the
movement is bringing their work to Burkina Faso, with a new center in the
southern town of Bobo-Dioulasso due to open on March 7.
The centre
is called the Kamkazo, or “the house for women,” but is nicknamed “the Pleasure
Hospital.”
It has been
built by Clitoraid, an NGO set up by Raelians to campaign for an end to FGM. It
says it has financed the hospital with donations from private individuals. The
total cost has not been revealed.
“The idea
comes from the Raelian movement, but they are not the financiers. Clitoraid is
a non-profit association in which both Raelians and non-Raelians work,” Abibata
Sanon, who is part of the project team, told AFP.
Nadine
Gary, communications director at Clitoraid, as well as being a Raelian and a surgeon
at the San Francisco clinic, said the operations “will restore their dignity as
women as well as their ability to experience physical pleasure, which was taken
from them against their will.”
The
operations, which last about 45 minutes, will be free of charge.
There are
already 300 women on the waiting list, coming from Kenya, Mozambique, Ethiopia,
Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast — “everywhere that female genital mutilation is
practised,” Sanon said.
The Raelian
movement was founded in the 1970s by Claude Vorilhon following what he said was
an encounter with extraterrestrials.
The
movement found a number of followers in Canada, and made headlines in 2002 when
it claimed to have cloned a human being.
The World
Health Organization estimates that between 100 million and 140 million women
have been victims of genital mutilation worldwide.
It is most
prevalent in northeast and west Africa, particularly “excision,” in which the
clitoris and labia are removed.
The number
of victims has fallen in Burkina Faso since genital mutilation was banned in
1996, but a study in 2010 found that 58 percent are girls have suffered from
the practice.
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