Tag: Marco Vernaschi

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Photographer Marco Vernaschi has gotten himself into quicksand, and taken the otherwise respectable Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting with him. And all I can think about are the forces, commercial and personal, that compel individuals to transgress boundaries of common decency, and institutions that celebrate these by publishing them.

Uganda: Response to Critics

Merco Vernaschi, for the Pulitzer Center (Editor’s note at end of post) During the past week a few blogs have unleashed a wave of criticism on my work about child sacrifice in Uganda, questioning my ethics and values and the Pulitzer Center’s guidelines.

via Pulitzer Center: http://untoldstories.pulitzercenter.org/2010/04/uganda-response-to-critics.html

On January 25th 2010 a 10 years old girl named Babirye Margret was found killed by the police in the Katugwe village, with a part of the right leg and the whole left arm cut off. Three suspects including the caretaker, his wife and a traditional healer have been arrested to help in the investigations and later charged with murder. The investigations were conducted by Mr. Moses Binoga, head of the Anti Human Sacrifice and Trafficking task force and after the police closed the investigations the little girl´s body was returned to the family for burial.

The members of the NGO RACHO (the same organisation that was helping Mr. Vernaschi in Uganda) told me that Mr. Vernaschi was not present at the day the police found the body, neither he was present at her burial ceremony.

So I asked how could he than have taken the pictures of that case. They informed me that Mr. Vernaschi and his crew decided to go to the village where the body was buried and by means of payment and promises of help from the international community, Mr Vernaschi convinced the family to let him to violate the grave exposing the mutilated cadaver for him to photograph and film it.

Link: Illegal exhumation – A debate about Marco Vernaschi´s methods
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