When in October 2009 the Ugandan MP David Bahati tabled a draft bill proposing a harshening of the country’s already severely punitive anti-homosexuality legislation, the international community was outraged. Or so the media said. Sure enough, official communications from Europe and North America spoke clearly in terms of alienation and disgust - at the November Commonwealth Summit in Trinidad and Tobago, Canada’s and the UK’s respective heads of state, Stephen Harper and Gordon Brown, were so scathingly critical that the Ugandan MP Kassiano Wadri told a Guardian journalist that “if Uganda is to be expelled from the British Commonwealth, then let us go”. On the same note, Sweden, then holder of the EU presidency, threatened to cut off development aid should the bill be passed. It can be debated, however, whether this Western response can really be titled an international outcry. In fact, a closer look at legislated - and, more importantly, implemented - gay rights world-wide presents a rather bleak view from a humanitarian angle.

See also:

Reports on LGBT rights (Human Rights Watch), State Sponsored Homophobia (ILGA), LGBT rights by country or territory (Wikipedia)

Up to date, only seven of the worlds 195 independent states have what might be referred to as “full gay rights” - including rights to same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption, the right to serve in the armed forces, and the right to press charges against harassment and/or discrimination. These seven states are Canada, Spain, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and, at least on paper, South Africa. Strangely enough, their number corresponds exactly to the number of states where homosexual acts are most severely penalized: that is, countries where gay intercourse is by law punishable by death. These are Mauritania, Sudan and Somalia in Africa, and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Iran in South and Western Asia. In Nigeria, the death penalty is used in areas under Sharia legislation.

World LGBT legislation - in the dark red zones, homosexual acts are punishable by death; dark blue indicates full civic rights

In between these two extremes, one can discern an international grey scale. It ranges from broad tolerance to broad intolerance, and must in fairness have two parameters: the judicial stance and the public stance. In the last fifteen or twenty years, many states - not least in South America, Asia and Eastern Europe - have felt and complied with the Western pressure to legalize homosexuality. Among these can be numbered some of the world’s most populous nations, for instance China (since 1997) and India (since 2009). But it remains to be debated whether this liberalization took place on paper only. In China, the government recently clamped down on the nation’s first ever official gay pageant, and cancelled it with only hours of notice; in India, state sanctioned LGBT-discrimination is still in evidence not least in the educational system; in South America, where all states but Guyana - that is, fourteen out of fifteen - have legalized homosexuality, strong Catholicism and a traditional macho-culture still pose a very real threat to the LGBT-community. Tales of unrecorded arrests and unpunished hate crimes abound in for instance Peru, and when in December an Argentinian couple became the first gay lovers to walk down the aisle in Latin America, the local bishop responded by calling the action “an attack against the survival of the human species”. In Eastern Europe, the difference between legislated rights and public acceptance became all too clear when, ten years after the official legalization of homosexuality, a UNICEF survey was conducted in Moldova, yielding that only 3 % of respondents found male homosexuality acceptable.

While there are plenty of examples of countries where legislation is more liberal than practice, there are also some examples of the reverse. Sri Lanka has, for instance, never implemented the British-enacted anti-sodomy law that is part of the national legislation. Embarrassingly enough for old Britannia, this is an item of colonial heritage that has survived in many an Asian and African country. It derives from a law on homosexual conduct imposed by the British on India in 1860, which stipulated that “unnatural sexual practices” should be punishable by with up to ten years in prison. The law survived in section 377 of the Indian penal code up until last year, and is still widely implemented in other former colonies.

This little historical twist makes it appear almost ironic that the Ugandans are now charging Britain with neo-colonialism for opposing the new anti-homosexuality bill. Granted, it is very difficult to make out which strands of African homophobia are indigenous and which have been imported with the Abrahamic religions and Victorian ideals. As it stands, the Christian community is the bill’s staunchest supporter; on December 10, an ecumenical grouping of Ugandan churches gave it their official blessing, while Ugandan preacher Pastor Martin Ssempa is currently trying to organize a “million-man march” for February 17 to enable the common man to show his support. Interestingly, both Pastor Ssempa and his colleague Pastor Steven Langa has close ties to the US evangelicals. It has been discussed whether the origin of the new bill can be traced to a seminar arranged by Langa in Kampala last March, where three notable American evangelists were invited to lecture on the dangers of homosexuality, and the possibility of rehabilitating those afflicted. The seminar yielded a petition signed by thousands of concerned parents, which was relayed to parliament in April.

These currents and tensions between erstwhile colonies and colonizers, between the first world and the third, are obviously as central to the issue of homophobia as to any other. Uganda’s President, Yoweri Museveni, is not alone in liking to brand homosexuality as a Western disease, imported to Africa by the Caucasians - his theory is supported by, among others, Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe. Museveni has gone so far as to claim that gay Europeans offering money to recruit African school children is a wide-spread problem - a brand of propaganda that has proved very efficient with the Ugandan public. Pastor Langa claimed to quote a parent when he told the press that “We would rather live in grass huts with our morality than in skyscrapers among homosexuals”.

Polarization on this scale makes it in practice irrelevant where the homophobic ideas first originated. Regardless of history, the Western powers have made it clear to Uganda where they position themselves on the topic today, and the response has been formed accordingly. At grass root level, first world interference has in some ways cemented the public’s homophobic stance. It has become a question of what MP Kassiano Wadri calls “democratic spirit” - the Ugandans do not want homosexuals, much less if they are forced upon them by the old white masters. “These are our social values”, he says, “these are our beliefs”. Be that as it may, Musveni addressed a party conference in mid-January, saying that “It’s a foreign policy issue, and we must handle it in a way that does not compromise our principles but also takes into account our foreign policy interests”.

How is that to be done? Is it at all possible? Time will tell. If Musveni comes up with a good answer, there are plenty of world leaders that will want in on it - because in this particular field, there is no such thing as international unity.

SARA LARSSON

The author would appreciate it if the comments to this article were made in English.