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HIV/AIDS: Once Marginalised Issues Now in the Forefront
Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Jul 17 (IPS) - While the lack of major medical
breakthroughs might have been the hallmark of the just
concluded
15th International AIDS Conference, a radical shift that has
occurred
on another front, however, is hard to ignore.
Language used by AIDS activists, which once had been on the
margins has, now, been embraced by the mainstream.
This shift has gained in significance, given that the language
was
echoed by establishment figures present at the world's largest
AIDS
conference held here from Jul. 11 to 16.
The tone was set during the opening ceremony of the
conference
by Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. He promised to end
discrimination against injecting drug-users (IDUs), a vulnerable
group through which HIV is spreading in Thailand, and
implement a
harm-reduction programme for them.
That was a dramatic turn in attitude for an administration that
had
shown little mercy to drug users in this South-east Asian country.
Last year, over 2,400 people were murdered - many victims of
extra-judicial killings, during a nine-month long 'war on drugs'
launched by the government.
The conference also afforded a chance for sex workers -
another
group whose work is also criminalized. They made their
presence
felt by openly engaging with the mix of scientists and policy
makers -
among the over 17,000 people who attended the global
conference.
The previously hushed issue of men who have sex with men or
MSM was also discussed openly. Delegates talked about how
AIDS
vaccine trials were conducted with the MSM community.
The mainstream conference discussions, previously centered
on
science and medical issues, took on a more human approach
by
talking about preventive behaviour and treating and caring for
people
infected with HIV or already afflicted with the killer disease.
What was palpable in the messages coming through was how
AIDS was no respecter of governments who deny the human
rights
of people with HIV or those who could be easily infected, such
as
IDUs, sex workers and MSM.
As Dr. Joep Lange, co-chairman of the IAC, put it on the last
day,
countries that stigmatise, discriminate or force people
underground
with HIV or those vulnerable to it will not win, since ''silence
equals
death.''
This call for an open human rights centred approach to combat
AIDS was at the heart of the Jonathan Mann Memorial Lecture
delivered midway through the conference by Dennis Altman,
president of the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific.
''Access to prevention is as significant as access to
treatments,
and an equally political demand, for it is about our right as
healthy
citizens rather than unhealthy dependents,'' said Altman.
Mann was the first head of the World Health Organisation's
(WHO)
global programme on AIDS, launched in 1986. He has been
credited for beginning the debate to look at the AIDS issue as a
pandemic that needs a broader human rights approach than,
simply, looking at it from a public health perspective.
Eighteen years later, AIDS activists and grassroots groups
who
have been confronting governments and other dominant players
to
change their attitude towards combating HIV - including the
need
for policies that recognises the significance of human rights in
the
equation - feel vindicated.
''There has been a revolt of public opinion in our favour,'' Paul
Davis of Health GAP, a New York-based health rights lobby
group,
said at the closing press conference given by AIDS activists at
the
global meeting.
Zackie Achmat of the Treatment Action Campaign in South
Africa,
too ,agrees.
''They have conceded that a range of people have to become
part
of the programmes for AIDS, including sex workers, MSMs and
IDUs,'' he added.
One of the significant features of this conference was the
delegates' sharp rebuke of the administration of U.S. President
George Bush.
Many hit out at the fundamentalist religious ideology that has
influenced Washington's policies in its efforts to contain the
spread
of AIDS and protect people in the developing world from
contracting
HIV.
''The Bush administration is demonising sex workers and we
are
now told that the (U.S.) Congress is considering a measure by
which any organisation that does not condemn sex work will not
be
able to receive U.S. support,'' said Joanne Csete, director of HIV/
AIDS at the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Washington's current policies that preach abstinence and
fidelity
as part of its global AIDS programme are ''an insult to women
and
girls and an assault on women's rights,'' Csete added during an
interview with IPS.
The victories that were won around the protection of people
with
AIDS in the United States in the 1980s through a human rights
approach also stand to be undermined if religious ideology
triumphs over rights to contain AIDS, she said.
Activists also expressed their anger at the painful reality that
life
enhancing antiretroviral drugs, for people living with HIV,
continue to
be produced in the rich industrialised world but not made
accessible where they needed most - namely poor communities
in
the developing world.
Though expectations might have fallen short at the global
conference, the space, however, provided for sex workers, MSM
and
IDUs to highlight their roles as fundamental players in the
frontlines
of the AIDS debate is with reason - given their position in
fuelling
the spread of the pandemic.
For that, Asian countries may have to be thankful since the
continent is being viewed as the next epicentre of HIV, following
its
destructive path through Africa.
Last year, one in four new HIV cases were reported from Asia,
with
main form of transmission being through IDUs, MSM and sex
workers.
There are currently an estimated 38 million people living with
HIV,
the virus that causes AIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme
on
HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) states in its latest report.
Of that number, 25 million live in Sub-Saharan Africa and 6.5
million live in South and South-east Asia.
The pandemic killed 2.9 million people in 2003, bringing to 20
million the people who have died due to AIDS since it was first
detected in the early
1980s.
And even the recent increase in funding commitments to halt
the
killer disease will fail as an antidote if HIV programmes are
dismissive of human rights, Irene Khan, secretary general of the
global rights lobby Amnesty International said during the
conference's closing session.
However, it is a message that many governments have still not
absorbed, she added. ''Human rights are still far from becoming
a
vital component of AIDS programmes in many countries.'' (END/2004)
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