Press Briefing by envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa

 

His recent trips to Uganda and Lesotho had illustrated the continuing struggle in Africa to survive “the force and carnage” of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and countries’ “increasing and obsessive” focus on the “3 by 5” plan, Stephen Lewis, the Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told correspondents this afternoon at Headquarters.

He said both countries were making strenuous and energetic accommodations to achieve the targets of the 3 by 5” plan, which was articulated by the World Health Organization (WHO) and aims to put three million people into treatment by the end of the year 2005.

In Uganda, with an HIV prevalence rate (the percentage of a certain population at risk who have the disease) of 4 per cent, the Ministry of Health was making antiretroviral treatment available free, despite a lack of resources, he said.  TASO, the sophisticated AIDS Service Organization, was engaged in treatment, benefiting from the PEPFAR, the initiative of the United States President George W. Bush.  Médecins Sans Frontières is treating 1,100 people.  There was a “single-minded” determination to “pull it off”, he said.  “Anybody would be carried away to see so many people surviving when death was at the door.”  Treatment transformed everything, and there was a certain genius in the establishment of the 3 by 5 formula because it had ignited such a powerful response.

Noting that, in northern Uganda, 90 per cent of the population was in camps because of the activities of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), he found it sad that parents did not consider their children safe, no matter what government assurances they got.  It had resulted in the “night commute”.  Every night, in a ritual that smacks of science fiction, 40,000 children walk several kilometres to make-shift shelters in Gulu town.  “Little kids, children of four, five, six, seven and eight, straggling in single file at dusk along the side of the road, ghost-like apparitions emerging from the darkness.  Family life is dismembered: camp, shelter, school... camp, shelter, school... what is this madness the war has wrought?”  He said during Organization of African Unity (OAU) summits he had unsuccessfully pled with high government officials of the Sudan not to support the LRA.

In Lesotho, with a prevalence rate of 30 per cent, the highest in any least developed country, a rare combination of factors was at work, he said.  A talented and gifted Cabinet of Ministers had absorbed itself in the battle against the pandemic.  They had constructed a combination of internal and external factors, involving the whole “apparatus of response”, everyone from the Clinton Foundation to the World Bank, to keep the country going.  Treatment would be initiated during the next couple of weeks.  However, there was an industrial complex in the country, amounting to a kind of “sweatshop” environment, where some 54,000 women workers were paid very low wages in the garment industry.  It was seen as a conveyor of the virus, because many of the women were driven to transactional sex.

Mr. Lewis said every government was involved in embracing treatment.  There “is an almost Pavlovian reflex” to get pervasive treatment under way.  It was inconsolably painful, however, that it had to happen so slowly.  What was happening now should have happened, and could have happened, several years ago.  “History will be entirely unforgiving, particularly of those who could have freed the resources, but locked them away in impenetrable vaults”, he said.

The 3 by 5 initiative had barely more than 15 months left, he continued.  It must succeed, as “it is the best thing we have going for us”.  The Global Fund on AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria must be funded, as that would pay for the  3 by 5.  The vital work around capacity-building must be given the highest priority, as the countries, largely because of the toll of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, were shorn of capacity.

In answer to a correspondent’s question, Mr. Lewis said that, despite many detractors and sceptics of the 3 by 5 initiative, he thought the initiative was taking off.  The target was in sight.

He took issue with another correspondent’s remark that he was the first United Nations official who had spoken about the LRA in the political context of the Sudan and Uganda Governments, saying that he had merely indicated what parents felt.  He had mentioned exactly what he had done when he was with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), all in the public view.  “For my money”, he continued, the LRA was the central culprit, and had been sustained for many years by its relationship with the Government of the Sudan, something nobody had denied.

He said as recently as three to four months ago, there had been a terrible attack in the displaced persons camp of Pagak, Uganda, when 30 people had been murdered.  That had spawned the “night commuter” phenomenon.  All of that had been described by Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF, in an Op-Ed in the Herald Tribune.  The Governments of Sudan and Uganda had come to some agreement as to the right of Uganda to go into the territory of the Sudan in an effort to hunt down the LRA, as had recently happened.

* *** *