Ten men were arrested Saturday on suspicion of being gay while they were in attendance at a same-sex marriage ceremony on Tanzania’s semi-autonomous Zanibar island on Saturday, according to Amnesty International.
The incident happened after a top government official called for the public to report people they believed to be gay, and has prompted the European Union to recall the head of its delegation to Tanzania, condemning what it called a “deterioration of the human rights and rule of law.”
Local police in the east African country told Amnesty International they received a tip from the public that a same-sex marriage was being officiated on Pongwe Beach. When police arrived, they raided the event and found men sitting in pairs of “two by two” and took them in to the Chakwal police station in Unguja. Six other people fled the party and were not arrested.
Charges had not been filed as of late Tuesday.
Amnesty International’s deputy director for east Africa, the horn, and great lakes regions, Seif Magango, called the incident a “shocking blow.”
“This appalling attack on Tanzanian people simply exercising their human rights shows the danger of inflammatory and discriminatory rhetoric at senior levels of government,” Magango said in a statement. “We now fear these men may be subjected to forced anal examination, the government’s method of choice for ‘proving’ same-sex sexual activity among men.”
Paul Makonda, the regional director of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s former capital city, said in late October he was creating a task force to go after lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people. He had said the operation would start Tuesday, but the arrests Saturday happened three days before that date.
The city has a total population of 4.3 million residents.
Tanzania’s federal government has not formally condemned the city official’s operation or ordered it to stop.
