African AIDS activists tell U.S. official:
'Less talk, more funds!'
By Leslie Feinberg
Close to 100 African HIV-positive activists
shouted down a U.S. official at a conference in Kenya Sept. 26.
She was trying to defend Washington's role in the fight against
the AIDS epidemic.
This was the second protest at the week-long conference by
the Pan-African AIDS Treatment Access Movement. PATAM members
disrupted a Sept. 24 World Bank news conference to demand "less
talk and more drugs."
At the closing ceremony of the conference two days later, as
Leslie Rowe, a diplomat from the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, took
the dais to boast about U.S. funding efforts, demonstrators
strode toward the podium waving placards, shouting and jeering.
The conference organizers were reportedly visibly panicked and
police were ordered on standby. However, no arrests
resulted.
Activists' signs read "AIDS treatment now!" and "Generic
drugs now!" They drowned out Rowe with songs and chants that
demanded the United States provide adequate funds to meet the
public health emergency affecting tens of millions on the
poorest continent in the world. Centuries of colonial plunder
have drained, devastated and impoverished Africa and its people
while enriching the imperial powers, including the United
States.
Today, of the 42 million people with AIDS worldwide, 29.4
million live in Africa, according to the United Nations AIDS
agency. Yet only 1 percent of the some 4 million Africans who
need antiretroviral drugs receive them, according to Doctors
without Borders in a report issued at the conference.
It's no secret that Washington--Republican and Democrat
alike--is spending tens of billions of dollars in "aid" for the
Middle East and Africa. But it's earmarked for troop deployment
and the occupation and theft of land, labor and resources for
the benefit of big capital. By comparison, Bush's aid to Africa
is a drop in the bucket.
Reprinted from the Oct. 23, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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