Mbeki under fire for AIDS speech
Reuters News Agency
Durban, South Africa — South African President Thabo Mbeki came under fresh criticism from AIDS activists on Monday after he ducked an opportunity to end a damaging debate over the causes of the disease. Mr. Mbeki, attacked by activists and health experts for appearing to give credence to so-called AIDS dissidents who deny that the HIV virus causes AIDS, was back in the firing line after his opening speech to the international AIDS conference here on Sunday. The eagerly awaited speech gave no insight into whether Mr. Mbeki, who succeeded former president Nelson Mandela last year, believes that HIV leads inevitably to AIDS. Similarly, Mr. Mbeki made no direct reference to his controversial decision to deny the antiretroviral drug AZT in the country's public-health system to pregnant mothers and to rape victims on cost grounds. Denouncing his critics, Mr. Mbeki instead launched a broadside against those who questioned his right to appoint "dissidents" to his own advisory panel on the disease and focused on the devastating impact of poverty on the continent. The speech repeated much of his government's commitment to fight the HIV-AIDS epidemic, which has already claimed 4.2 million South African lives and is on course to infect a total of nearly eight million by the end of the decade. "I was hoping and praying that he would find a way to gracefully back out of this madness," Phill Wilson of the African-American AIDS Initiative told Reuters. "The house is on fire and Mbeki is sitting around trying to decide whether it was started by a lighter or a match," Mr. Wilson said. "He talks about a plan. He doesn't talk about action. This should have been a call to action." The chief organizer of the 13th International Aids Conference, Hoosen Coovadia, said the speech disappointed a lot of people. "What I'm sensing from people is an absolute sense of disappointment. ... Many people believed that the President would use the occasion to try to quell some of the disquiet around government's position on HIV-AIDS," Mr. Coovadia said. Mr. Mbeki's own Health Minister sprang to his defence. "The President of this country has never denied either the existence of AIDS nor this causal connection between HIV and AIDS," Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said. U.S. officials in Durban welcomed the Health Minister's statement as a way forward to prevent the conference from becoming a public clash between Mr. Mbeki and AIDS activists. They said it was vital to put the focus firmly on ways to try to combat the epidemic. Sandra Thurman, head of the White House AIDS unit, said: "We have a brief window of opportunity to turn the tide here in South Africa and elsewhere, but that window is closing fast." Although many aid organizations welcomed Mr. Mbeki's commitment to fight the disease through preventive measures and the search for a reliable vaccine, activists felt let down by a lost opportunity to put a final stop to a debate over what causes AIDS. Virtually every scientist, including the 5,000 experts who gave their backing to the Durban Declaration that there was "clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous" proof of the link, believes AIDS is caused by HIV infection. Mr. Justice Edwin Cameron, a South African homosexual high court judge who has openly declared he is HIV-positive, criticized Mr. Mbeki's government for failing to act to beat the disease. "In my own country, a government that in its commitment to human rights and democracy has been a shining example to Africa and the world has at almost every conceivable turn mismanaged the epidemic," Judge Cameron said. "So grievous has governmental ineptitude been that South Africa has since 1998 had the fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world." Roy Anderson, a renowned AIDS expert at Oxford University, said he too saw the speech as a lost opportunity. "I was disappointed, to put it bluntly. It was an opportunity to concentrate on the main issue which in South Africa is an acute problem," Mr. Anderson said. Others said the activists were expecting too much of Mbeki.
Dr. Helene Gayle, head of HIV programs at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said some
people would be disappointed that Mr. Mbeki did not go further. "But he is not going to come out and say ‘I
was wrong,' " she told Reuters.
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